Summer Heat

Last week's post generated quite a few "How is Hiromi?" responses. Hiromi is doing great, and the new baby is kicking more and more.

According to Weather.Com (and my own sweltering breath), it reached 108 degrees F last weekend... That's 42 C . The Phyllostachys Bambusoides loved it, but it was a bit much for us. That is, until Kai had a good idea. He said, "Pool... Pool... Pool... (etc.)" and this is what followed:

Cheers!

Guess who?

Guess who this is... A hint: It's not Kai.

PHP Blues Turning Rosy

PHP is pretty annoying... Especially due to the way it fails when one makes a mistake. Basically, all you get is a white screen with no information on what is wrong. But I'm muddleing through it.

The Bamboo Advisor is up and running on the main Locutius.Com site. It basically takes the information you give it about the place you want to put a bamboo plant, and returns a list of varieties that are compatible with that location.

Currently, it considers typical annual low temperature, amount of sunlight, and whether or not you are willing to take measures to contain it if it gets invasive. Soon, I hope to add consideration for how big of planting area is available, drought, and excessive water conditions.

Then, there will have to be sorting so that the most appropriate varieties rise to the top of the list... Right now they are sorted by hardiness without regard to what the gardener wants to do with the plant. Much of this coming soon...

And, for those of you who don't care about bamboo... Here is a picture of Kai preparing to take down Asashoryu in the 2006 Natsu Basho in Tokyo:

PHP? What the hell is that?

According to PHP Faqts, it is a recursive acronym that stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor... Whoever wrote the rule that said acronyms can refer to themselves should be fired.

But according to me, it is a programming language that is annoyingly different from the ones I already have a grasp of. But it is the best free web programming technology available to connect to the best free database technology, which is MySQL. So whaddayagonnado?

I wanted to make a web page to help recommend varieties of bamboo based on the climate and local conditions a gardener might have. The initial result actually works, though it is quite limited and not cleaned up much and not very useful yet. But you can actually use it by sneaking into the following (otherwise) hidden link:

EDIT: Link changed: Instead, see "Bamboo Advisor" in the left menu of my main site.

Cheers!