Module development and code questions

I want to develop a module to handle an external db that I want to attach to the drupal site I'm working on. I have extended the user profile to gather info needed for this other db.

I posted this question on another topic called Customizing Comments but the thread die. I wonder if someone can help me.

I am trying to create a module that will allow the user to vote on a node and comment on that vote in the comment section. I have two questions.

First, how do I get the node id number while in the comment section? There is great documentation on the variables available through phptemplate in $node. Unfortunately there is not the same for comments.

Hi everybody,

after upgrading my development install from 4.7b3 to 4.7b4
I'm facing some strange mysql behaviour...

this query does not return any result:
SELECT n.nid, n.created FROM node n WHERE n.type = 'story' AND n.status = 1 ORDER BY n.created DESC;

instead this one works and return latests nodes of type story:
SELECT n.nid, n.created FROM node n WHERE n.type like 'story' AND n.status = 1 ORDER BY n.created DESC;

The only differece between the two are n.type = 'story' in the first and n.type like 'story' in the second.

I was thinking about setting up a flexinode with file-upload capability for the general public.
Then I thought about the posibility of someone uploading an infected file.
Are there any solutions that address this?

Is there no good soul who have written a good tutorial for making your own modules? I have read the Drupal handbook but there was too little information, it didn't give me enough. And I have found a lot of information needed for modulemaking on this site, but all is kind of taken out of its context.

And then I tried flexinode.module and that was very good, but can not fullfill my needs since there was no way to use taxonomy in it.

I use Aggregator2 to syndicate all the known Googlers' Blogs on my site. For livejournal feeds I get only parse errors. E.g. for http://www.livejournal.com/users/davebarr/data/rss :
"Failed to parse RSS feed Dave Barr's Journal: syntax error at line 1."
Can it be that Drupal aggregator does not comply with the livejournal bot policy and uses malformed user-agent string?