Today I spent a fair amount of time on the Catalyst application. I decided to take another whack at that "count" function. I found that an arrow -> had somehow become a dash - , which was causing the new error message I saw yesterday. Fixed that, so it was back to the old error message. (Closer to not broken, right?) Also, I moved the command into another function, and simplified it, so part of it works now.

I was having a really hard time finding anything on this count() function. I finally decided to not worry about where it came from, and try looking through the documentation from the angle of, "How does the documentation imply that I should accomplish the task of counting records?" rather than "Where's the syntax for that stupid count() function?"

At that point, I quickly decided that a really great thing to do would be to get the app (well, my practice copy) running on these database model plugins rather than calling straight to the database via SQL queries, since I knew that was our eventual goal. (Pardon my ignorance of the proper terminology. I'm still pretty fuzzy on just what it is I'm doing.) At that point, I could probably do my "counting" very easily. I think this would be a great thing to have done when Nate gets back, so that is where I am focusing my efforts right now.

Andy generously offered to let me use a database he had set up for testing, so that I wouldn't have to experiment like this using the live one. I set up some tables there and invented a little sample data for them. We were going to try to dump the live database straight to the test one, but it's huge, and we realized there could be privacy issues associated with the transfer of real data.

I just realized that after all that, I forgot to point my code to the test database instead of the live one. It should be all right, though; I've only tried to do reading-type commands, nothing that should write to the database. Just the same, I'll try to hook it up to the test db (database) tomorrow.

I dug through some documentation and mailing list archives, and got the code put in that I think should let the plugins talk to the database. I tried a sample command, and can't get it working. I'm really stuck, so I've sent out a request for help to the wonderful Catalyst mailing list.

Also today, I updated my list of favorite Firefox extensions. There are a couple of new ones, and there are descriptions of the extensions now, so that the page could possibly be useful to somebody besides the author. 

Oh, and I learned about syncing the portage tree and updating emerge and its config files! 

So, notes for tomorrow:

• Check on Tuesday's schedule
• Handy command: "su -" instead of "su" -- it's safer
• Change over to call to the test db instead of the live one
• Once I get replies from mailing list, keep working on getting plugins/models implemented
• Look at "todo" list doc
• Could the count() be a perl thing, not a Catalyst thing? Not that it matters at this point, or solves it.