Latest Projects
I’ve had a bunch of projects going on at once for a while now, mostly computer related with some exceptions. This is just a “what I’ve been working on lately” kind of post. The whole family has been sick on and off and its been so wintery for so long, I haven’t had much social interaction outside of work and home. I look forward to the thaw! Look for a post of my trip to the Suffolk Farm with Emily soon.
- I’ve been learning SQL syntax on our Oracle 9i database (running on Redhat ES2.1) in the hope that I can someday figure out how to present the results of these SELECTs on our company intranet possibly using php. I’ve been investigating the Oracle oci connector, PSP pages (and JSP pages). I’ve been using sqltalk and finding it really fast and easy to grab any and all data out of the ERP system (now that its finally running right).
- Work continues to create a totally database driven corporate website - by hand this time, not using Geeklog or Wordpress or any of the other pre-written sets of scripts. It’s really simple, but it is designed to harness the work already done standardizing our sales database (a huge database of all models and associated data about them used to publish price lists and to integrate into other databases within our industry). A page will be built on demand for each of about 100 products grabbing text in appropriately named text files, placing images and icons (again based on the filename/product code) as needed, links to literature and manuals and building a model number table for associated parts. I hope to get it up and running in about 2 weeks.
- Planning the connection of our existing building to a newly aquired (but adjacent) building was fun - work to string cabling through the conduit and connect up the fiber line between the two new Cisco switches, all the phones, horns, and timeclock begins next week. I won’t be doing the actual work (we contracted it out) but it should be fun to be involved anyway.
- I found a great way to organize the huge amount of ascii text files that seem to clutter my hard drive - all those notes and scraps I accumulate while investigating or working on projects. I installed Blosxom and some associated plugins which create a dynamic website to display those disparate scraps. A big breakthrough came when I ran across rsync which allows me to keep the version running on my laptop in sync with a live copy on the internet.
- All of these projects have benefitted from the use of CVS (concurrent version systems) which I was woefully unfamiliar with at the onset. After using it for several weeks for all of my development work, I find it an incredibly elegant and useful tool. I can recover from disaster for all projects, see what was changed between versions at any time in case I get lost and it doesn’t get in my way at all using the GUI client.
- Cathy bought me a carpet knife which I imagine is a hint to finish ripping out the carpets which is a project I have been avoiding since I got sick after the last attempt. I fear I can not escape it much longer.
- Occassional updates continue to be made to the several websites I maintain (besides the 4 personal ones), again CVS is proving to be a big help there.
- The weather is warming up, so soon I’ll have to start dealing with the outside cleanup. This winter was brutal and the huge amount of snow broke lots of branches and damaged bushes which were not protected as they typically are upstate. Such weather is not common winter fare here.
- I gave up on looking for a media PC for now, since I may need to replace the iBook which is my main machine. The hard drive is starting to make an occasional metallic sound (distinct and in addition to the normal iBook hard drive “whine” that developed after several months of use). I’m keeping watch on the “SMART” drive indicator and if I see *any* indication of drive errors, I’m placing an order! But what to buy? I almost certainly will get another iBook, though I would like a powerbook this time around if finances are available.
Comment posted on 5-30-2005
CVS has been a huge boon. Fred and I have been working on re-writing
the company website
using php and mysql, in order to pull information out of a database
which we had created for other publishing purposes as well (price lists,
for interface to a quoting system used in our industry, etc.). In order to
work together at different times (I sometimes work from home, and he
sometimes stays late) and not step on each other’s toes - we settled on
some “good-use” procedures for CVS and have been using it ever since.
It’s awesome to be able to check the history on a file, or see it
annotated by line. We very rarely have conflicts that need to be
resolved, in fact I don’t know if Fred even has had that experience.
The main purpose of the re-write was that the ‘old’ version of the site
was entirely static html, and was comprised of about 130+ pages of
stuff, a lot of it redundant, like headers. Every time we wanted to update
a page, we had to spend an inordinate amount of time “fixing” the
table-based Dream-weaver code. We had a firm re-lay out the site for us
in 2001 and found, upon getting it back that it had been done in
Dreamweaver and the code was a mess. There were little roll-over
images for navigation, which I hated and gobbled up most of our
allotted bandwidth since there were a zillion of them and they were on
every page. Both Fred and I use 1stpage2.shtml" class="external">FirstPage 2000 (no, not FrontPage) which is now
a somewhat dated (Windows) program that does syntactical
highlighting (though not php aware, unless we have an old version), or
Adobe GoLive (at work - nice for CSS maintenance), http://www.tacosw.com/“>I use Taco at home on the Mac. These
programs allow us to code “by hand” *not* through a WYSIWYG
interface which we both have problems with (it’s against our religion).
We decided to control the graphical feel of the new site entirely using
CSS which makes it unreadable on some really old browsers, until we
make some special allowance for them in the future, but looking at our
logs, as long as it works in IE and Netscape > 4.7/Mozilla > 1.0 we’ve
got 99.8% of everyone covered (more pure than Ivory soap! - but pure
what?). We decided that we would approach the new design with a
religious devotion to standards - w3c as well as CSS standards.
However, as we approached our first release point (we call it css5) we
were rushing to get something up on the site and may have to revisit
that. The number of pages that contain html formatting has been
reduced to about 30, though the multitude of “included” text files have
some small amount of formatting in them - they are now easier to
manage. Most of the components of any page are ‘pieces’ that get put
together by a script - so to change a menu item system wide you only
need to change one file.
The project has been a boat-load of fun, we learned alot about CVS, http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/“>CSS, and
PHP and I have to say it has been
the most fun thing I’ve done at work
to date!