OK, this isn't about T2, but this all happened kind of without warning.
About two weeks or so, I was on RGP and there was a post complaining about the Stern Pinball web site search function. Well, when I went to look at it, it was none other than the good ol' Pinball Locator. I defended it as best as I could, then fired off my semi-annual letter to Ken at PinballRebel.com offering to fix some glaring issues. To my shock and awe he responded positively. This time I took a different tact: Rather than honestly conveying my skill set (I don't know PHP because we use Javascript and JSP at my work), I just told him I know PHP. This was apparently what he was looking for, and after a brief negotiation he sent me the Pinball Locator source files.
Well, yay for our team! It took me a couple of hours of monkeyin' around to get everything up to the point where I could run the site on my computer. Mac OS X comes with the Apache Web Server, but you have to turn it on and activate PHP. Then I had to install MySQL and a program to monitor and query MySQL. Then I had to figure out what the heck PHP was doing (honestly, it's nothing surprising... after 34 years of programming in a dozen or so languages there really isn't a lot that can shock me in a programming language). The biggest problem ended up being that I can't seem to access the database from PHP... it doesn't give me an error message when I run a query, but it doesn't do anything either.
Anyway, I fixed the glaring issues and sent the files back for review. I'm really anxious to see how it works out... just in the past week I've come up with about 10 neat new features, and I'm sure Ken's got a bunch as well. Fun!
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