TheGarage Tech Blog

I need to add a contact form to some blogs so a quick Google  search turns up a nice list of Wordpress Contact Form plugins. It’s a little dated but a great place to start looking. Read the comments for a couple of suggestions not on the list.

If you ever need to access the system wide schema info for a MySQL server, check out this very nice diagram of the MySQL Information_Schema.

What can you do with this information? Well, lots of stuff. For example you can get a list of tables and columns for a particular database, like

SELECT table_name, column_name, data_type [,...]
FROM information_schema.columns
WHERE table_schema = dbname;

Which could be handy for any number of reasons, such as seeing if a table or exists or if a column exists in a table, etc.

Check out this very nice Wordpress template tag reference guide. I love how the detailed reference expands when a row is clicked. Very nice work!

We kinda had a direction change at work and the business objects were put on hold.  It’s hard to write about high tech stuff when I am not actually doing any high tech stuff. Seems like business is picking up a bit though I don’t think the business objects are back on the table for now. But there has been an item or two of interest pop up from time to that I can discuss.

But right now I want to point out something that I came across that I didn’t know about and want to pass along.  I don’t do a lot of Windows API programming but when the need arises it’s nice to have some tools to ease the way along. Detours is billed as “instrumentation” and basically provides a wrapper for Win32 and Win64 API calls and for injecting custom code into existing libraries. Code injection  allows code maintenance without having to redo, or even have access to, the existing source code. I haven’t downloaded the trial version yet to look at the API but I could see this product literally saving some poor programmers life.

Coming up next I’ll show you how to replace 30 pages of custom .NET code with less than three pages of T-SQL and discuss the reasons why my way is the better way.