Fixed bugs in the changing of the ios side to use TEXT instead of blob

While checking in the previous change, current Shankari was happy that previous
Shankari had checked in functions that worked with both BLOBs and strings, so
that the change from BLOB to text didn't require any new code.

Unfortunately, previous Shankari was not smart enough to unit test that part of
her code. Both the load and store from string functions had errors, and since
they were unused in the project until now, the errors were undetected.

Fortunately, previous Shankari had written unit tests cases for the database
code which caught both errors, and the blob binding error. DB test cases now pass.

Test cases rule! Test cases forever!

Fixes:
- bind the column as text instead of blob on insert as well
- fix errors while converting a tripsection to/from string instead of data

Bonus fix: reverted inadvertent checkin of hardcoded "localhost" values