Episode 8 - A better stopwatch, character encoding

A better Windows 7 Stopwatch - Stopwatch7

To celebrate Easter, my trusty XNote Stopwatch decided to malfunction (no, I didn't actually take 1193 hours to write this blog post). Instant panic! I absolute need some sort of time measurement at home, because with all the interruptions in a day (kids, kids, wife, chores, kids, more kids) my sense of time goes all funny, and I start to feel like accomplishing nothing at all.

My demands for such a tool are simple: it should be simple, trivial to start, trivial to stop, and should always be visible, yet not in an immensely intrusive way. I dare you to look for such a timer on the internet, I bet you won't find it. I know I haven't.

So I happily jumped into the most alluring of developer pitfalls, and rolled my own. Against all Windows guidelines I write the time progress straight onto the taskbar (heck, my taskbar icon is prime screen estate!) At a later phase I'll probably add a better peek thumbnail, including some nice thumbbuttons and global hotkeys... but for now this solves my problem.

If you want to play around with it, you can download it here. The lovely icon is by Oliver Scholtz .


Character encoding - always a worry

Some of the questions in the Team Trivia database contained evil Word-style quotes. Those questions would be displayed at the client as a lovely "null"... which makes providing the proper answer rather difficult.

After a quick scavenging hunt across the different application layers I learned how PHP's json_decode will silently and happily replace a string of text with null if it contains anything other than UTF-8 characters. As MySQL defaults to latin1 (ISO 8859-1), this explained the troubles.

Adding a mysql_query('SET CHARACTER SET utf8') at a tactical location fixed things up nicely.


Misc

- Registered ShinyHammerGames.com, registered myself as a Google Play Developer .
- This blog is now hosted on blog.shinyhammergames.com .
- NetBeans has integrated MySQL management ... but it refused to show me the table data of some of my tables, was horrible for proper editing of text data, and is rather short on functionality anyway. I've fallen back onto my trusted friend SQLyog Community Edition .
- Got bitten by the backticks-versus-single-quote semantics of PHP/MySQL, referring to random columns in a WHERE clause. That's what you get for developing on a tiny 13" laptop screen.