Big Blog in the Sky

Bud's availability

Bud, last week you said you'd be out of town for the greater part of this week.  I was wondering what your office hours-type availability is going to be like for the week.  Thanks.

Slashdot | Is RSS Doomed by Popularity?

Are you so sure you still want to try and implement that RSS feed? ;) This Slashdot post provides some commentary that will make Dave Winer (and maybe Bud Gibson) squirm.

Autonumber difficulties?

We have successfully implemented an autonumber for a form but are experiencing difficulty inserting the record into the database. On this page we insert a new contact person, but we run into the following error and no data posted to our database:

"ORA-06550: line 2, column 16:PL/SQL: ORA-00947: not enough values
ORA-06550: line 2, column 4: PL/SQL: SQL Statement ignored"

The "not enough values" part makes me think there's a problem with passing the parameter, but I'm not sure where or how. I've checked the ordering in the SQL statement and it appears fine. I'm guessing the problem is somewhere on the XML side. Has anyone else experienced something similar to this? What steps did you have to take in order for your parameters to pass through properly as queries?

Blogonaut: Big Blog in the Sky: Filling a dropdown list

Link: Blogonaut: Big Blog in the Sky: Filling a dropdown list.

Correct, there is no mission id, just mission.

Filling a dropdown list

To most this data entry page probably looks like a piece of cake, but for our group it was a headache.  We couldn't figure out why the dropdown list wouldn't populate: our SQL statement looked fine; the source showed the XML results; and all other page elements appeared correctly.  Why wouldn't the field populate?  Mind you that this specific dropdown list is not dependent on the sequencing concept demonstrated using "customerid" in the example code. 

The SQL statement to fill the dropdown list only involved getting data from one field (select mission "mission" from org_missions) so I thought, "what if I repeated the mission part?"  Sure enough, select mission "mission", mission "mission from org_missions did the trick.  Why is this?  I tried this based on trial and error/dumb luck.  I imagine it has something to do with dropDown.xsl and relative locations/XPath therein, but I'm not completely sure.  The answer to this question isn't pressing but just a bit of a wonder.

Hello world

This is my first post.