Tag: projects

The sound of panting

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[Posted on April 20th because of problems accessing LJ last night.]

Whew! It was one busy day today. All week I’ve been preparing for an important training session that I was running today for software that I have been developing for one of our research divisions. Today was training day. It went well, but I’m glad it’s over. I woke up this morning with the same nervous feeling I had when I was six years old and had to attend a doctors appointment at which I knew I’d be getting a shot of some kind. Through the entire morning, I kept telling myself, before you know it, it will be 6 PM and the training will be all over.

The training began at 1 PM and by 3 PM, it was over. It went well, particularly since it involved hands-on training across multiple platforms and browsers. The feedback was positive. There were a few bugs but the software has just gone into formal testing and it is my hope that it can be released to production a week from now.

So it was with a feeling of great relief that I rode the train home last night. I had been building up more and more steam all week, working toward this and I was glad to finally be done with it. I keep a detailed log of what I do each day at work, and for those interested in just how busy I was this week, you can check out the log behind the cut below.)

Work logbook entries for the week of April 16

More database progress

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Over the weekend, and this evening, I’ve been working away at getting my book collection and reading databases converted from their old formats into a normalized MySQL database. This has been done and the database was successfully imported into my instance of MySQL with my ISP.

The next step is to write the code to allow people to access and query these databases. I started off using perl as a quick and dirty way to make sure I could programmatically access the databases over the web. Once I established this, I dumped perl and started the actual writing of code using PHP, which is much easier for this type of work. This phase will take longer as I am trying to modularize the code in a way that makes sense, but based on my progress this evening, I may have a new version of my reading list up and running in a few days.

The new versions will initially be mostly style-free: this means that no CSS or other fancy styles will be to applied to the pages; just some basic HTML formatting. Making it look pretty is secondary to functionality as far as I am concerned. But eventually, it will look pretty too.

The Project Resource Tool

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I rarely talk about work, and specifically what I do there, but I have recently been working on a small, but interesting project that I think is worthy of description. It’s a project resource tool.

You see, we have numerous project managers for the endless list of projects that have to be managed. Naturally, there is a limited supply of people to work on those projects and often there is conflicts over who get whom to work on what.

For a while, the way that this has been managed is through email and Excel spreadsheets. Here’s how it works:

Read all about it