I don't know, but I know who knows. And that's the same?

I enjoyed watching the final part of the BBC's Virtual Revolution series this week. Lots about it made me argue - which is of course good, as I have plenty of opinions on the topic of social networking, information sharing etc, but delighted to see the BBC making a serious documentary on the subject.

The bit that fascinated me was the stuff about how the brain works with associative links, not linearly. Much like the web - jumping about between thoughts and ideas. This led on to their experiment to try and see how the web is affecting our brains (Web Behaviour Experiment), and classifying users based on how they acquire knowledge through the Internet - are you fast or slow, do you read everything - or just enough to make the next jump?

I, apparently, am a Web Fox: fast-moving, sociable and adaptable. This is what most teenagers seem to be these days. And I'm happy with this result.

I like to think that I acquire enough knowledge on my travels to know who, or where, to go next time I need to know something around that topic - without actually having to know it myself. This is the relating to the connectivism theory of learning, it's all about building your networks. And it usually stands me in very good stead.

Today however, I spent far longer than was necessary trying to write a few lines of code to display an image file from a database BLOB (sorry, the technical bits don't really matter to the thread of the story here!). The thing is, I'm now so reliant on my ability to access php.net, Google etc, that I don't even try and recall any knowledge I may already have and write code myself. So I spent ages googling for code examples of the thing I wanted to do - assuming, as usual, that it was out there for the taking. In this case it wasn't. I'd made a fundamental mistake (doing the wrong type of Oracle query) so the bits of code I did find didn't work. I needed someone to spell out the whole darn thing for me...and Google couldn't help.

Eventually of course I started from scratch and built up the code again from bits I properly understood and then it all worked. For those that do want to pull image blobs from an Oracle database and display them in PHP I'll put the code below anyway (so Google will hopefully help the next person).

So lesson learned, start with what I know and understand - and then use my network and Google to build on that. Don't expect them to do all the work for me.

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Technical stuff

Images need to be seen as separate files with the right file types, so create a file called photo.php like this:

--open php--

header("Content-type: image/jpeg");

$id= $_REQUEST['id'];

include ('connect_to_your_database_stuff.php');

$sql = "select * from your_table where photo_field_id = '$id'";

$stmt = oci_parse($conn, $sql);

oci_execute($stmt)

or die ("Unable to execute query\n");

while ( $row = oci_fetch_assoc($stmt) ) {

print $row['IMAGE']->load()."\n";

}

include ('close_your_database_connection.php');

exit;

--close php--

Then you need to call this as if you were loading the jpg directly, ie:

in the page where you want to display your photo.