Module development and code questions

I would like to be able to require users to select from a certain taxonomy based on his or her user-role or user group. Would this be an easy hack of the taxonomy.module or taxonomy_access? For example, if my user name is "bomarmonk" and my role is "engineer," then when I create a node, I would be required to label it with a term from the "engineer" vocabulary. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks in advance for any help or advice.

Has anyone had experience using an online chat package that interfaced with Drupal in any way? To be specific this solution would need to be:

I've written a module that implements the functions removed in Drupal 4.6, logging each call to these deprecated functions to the watchdog. Benefits are:

I am using contact directory module, it Seems like a great module, but I want to be able to show the contacts to people who are not members of the site. So far, I can't figure out a way to do this. Is there an quick fix in the .module file?

I'm trying to understand why I want to use db_next_id instead of just letting a table with an autoincrement do its thing. Drupal docs says "for compatibility reasons" but I'm not sure what incompatibilities there might be. Granted I only know mysql, and only enough to get me by...

Here is an example from aggregator.module ( vrs 1.213.2.3)

    $edit['fid'] = db_next_id('{aggregator_feed}_fid');
    db_query('INSERT INTO {aggregator_feed} (fid, title, url, refresh, block) VALUES (%d, \'%s\', \'%s\', %d, %d)',
                  $edit['fid'],$edit['title'], $edit['url'], $edit['refresh'], $edit['block']);

The aggregator fid column is autoincrement, so why not just pass it a NULL or 0?

The reason I ask is I'm playing with some ideas for a per user RSS feeds module, and I would like to reuse some of the aggregator functions. However, trying to get at the last ID added to the aggregator table without using something like LAST_INSERT_ID() is troublesome and slow. Since LAST_INSERT_ID only stores the last id when the autoincrement is allowed to 'go off' and do it's thing, using db_next_id and inserting the returned value directly doesn't register anything with LAST_INSERT_ID...

I'm thinking this is a postgre versus mysql thing...

Looking at db_next_id it uses nextval() to get the id - i thought I might be able to use currval() to do the same thing as LAST_INSERT_ID() but that didn't work out...

I'm writing a custom module. When I change something in my module, save the changes and refresh the page on my development server, more often than not (or always even?) I can't see the changes. Not until I go to administer->menu and then poof, when I go back to the page I see the updates.

I've found similar problems with the installation of drupal-docs I've made locally.

Not fun when I'm making many changes and alt-tab, refreshing the page.