Older blog entries for pap (starting at number 2)

Sotonians Actually done some open source work since my last diary entry. Been working on the database structure for Sotonians - a locally-themed site for the city of Southampton, England.

I know what you're thinking - it's another of those sad sites which is replete with local (flower shops|restaurants|brothels) advertising their (chrysanthenums|reconstituted dog|cheap Thai imports) in wholly unappropriate colours. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The main idea of the site is to give a voice to the disenfranchised denizens of our fair city. The site is frequently rude, covers all areas of conversation from monkey-spanking to primate-punishing - and is something we're looking to scale up.

The current implementation is somewhat dodgy. Most of the stuff is statically delivered, making maintenance a bit of a bitch. TheCorruptor and I are fed up with this headache, so we're doing something about it.

Essentially, we're moving almost all of the content into a PostgreSQL database. The DB design is now complete - I've just got to nip it on over. The API for DB updates will be coming next. Incidentally, we chose postgres because I have a personal thing for clean databases. It has stuff like referential integrity and transactions (not sure we'll need transactions for a lot of our stuff). postgres will help us keep the DB clean without excessive logic, hence its adoption as the DB of choice.

TheCorruptor is going to use the APIs to yank stuff outta the database, transform it using XSLT and deliver it to end users.

The DB design and API are actually very generic, which will allow it to be used for a wide range of dynamic content websites.

The new version of Sotonians will launch in early 2001.

27 Nov 2000 (updated 27 Nov 2000 at 13:37 UTC) »

Been awhile since my last diary entry. Haven't had a great deal of time to be involved with stuff, due to the slings and arrows of outrageous relationship fortune. Need a kick up the arse at the moment to get my developer head back on.

Projects are slowly starting to kick in. The main thing I'm involved with at the moment is the complete re-write of our fair web-site, Sotonians. I'm working on this with TheCorru ptor - he's handling client-side delivery while I'm doing all of the backend stuff I know and (love|hate).

Been a reasonably interesting couple of months work-wise. I've become the custodian of a Perl-based GPS project, which isn't open source, but is interesting all the same. I've done the analysis on the entire codebase and sussed out where and why things are going wrong. Did some real SE for a change and weighed the project in at about 100 days. Only problem is, I am the team. Not having a long- haired associate to (rubbish|validate) my ideas is really starting to bake my brains.

We've procured a dedicated server for Sotonians and a number of other sites that we run, including southampton.pm.org - so I've been busy working on that. Unfortunately, access at my place of work is a bit crap - but there are always HTTP tunnels for that sort of thing.

TheCorru ptor and I are going into business together very shortly. I'm already contracting - he will be too, and we're looking to develop even more projects for the good of the business. Not exactly Marxism - but hey - we all have to eat and pay for the nights out. It should be pretty neat - we're quite up for it now, and figure that our vast collection of bullshit coupled with our sporadic sampling of talent should enable us to at least put Linux dev boxes on the table for awhile.

So, to summarise then. A lot of projects, a lot of business and life as we know it isn't going to be the same in a months time.

Situation normal, then.

Another first post from a newbie muppet!

Where are we at? Been looking at possible projects to get involved with but am frustrated when I find that someone has already done the very thing I thought would be useful.

I was recently mortified to see someone charging a $10 registration fee for a Windows-based file-splitter, so my first project will be a simple Windows-app to do precisely that, but for nowt, and make it open-source. If you know of someone who has already done this, let me know.

The app is mostly intended to help the diminishing population of Amiga owners transfer large files from their PCs to Amiga on several 720K disks.

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