Eric D. Schabell: February 2006

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

IRIS PMS release v0.8.0

I finished up the final debugging and turned of a discovered magic_quotes problem on osiris to finally get the edit function out there into circulation. I hope to get some good feedback as I continue on with the further expansion of this to allow for changing of publicaiton types.

More as it develops!

Monday, February 20, 2006

Back on the bike again!

So, waking up on Sunday morning and the sun was shining! That is the first time in over a month and a half. My first thought was to go for a bit of a ride, but today we had a birthday party in Utrecht around 1600 hrs. I decided to let my wife drive up with my daughter and I would take the bike on up to Utrecht, see if I could find it. Good chance to try out my Christmas present (a nice biking map set).

I took off around 1400 hrs and had to cross two rivers, one on a nice climb up the Zaltbommel bridge (we have to make do with this sort of thing as a 'hill' in the Netherlands as it is quite flat here) and another with a small boat (sort of ferry boat that traversed a rope stretched across the river). Was great!

Got lost in t'Goi due to the construction there involving removed all the bike signs so I had no clue where I was. Finally popped out in Houten just below Utrecht so was back on track. Entered Utrecht by the FC Utrecht stadium and watched the players exit their bus as they returned from beating AZ!

Not too familiar with Utrecht, so while looking for the Wittevrouwen area I cycled through most of east Utrecht and finally arrived at the birthday party around 1700 hours with 54.14 km on the odometer! Nice ride!

I needed heavy clothing as the temperature started around 10 degrees but the wind was blowing and it cooled off down to around 3 degrees by the time I got to the end of the ride.

Friday, February 17, 2006

IRIS PMS edit function push

The big push for the edit function is in full swing. I was able to spend three whole days on this last week and have a basic edit function that can pick up an existing publication, allow all data changes and write them back to the database!

We are still missing a few things that I consider needed for the basic first release:
  • pick up old content and source if a new one is not provided.
  • be able to replace exisiting sources with new ones.
  • update actors (editors, authors, etc).
A few things that are important for releases following the initial are:
  • add new actors.
  • change order of actors.
  • book/proceedings id's autosync data with in(proceedings/collection/book).
  • add new book from edit function.
  • type changes.
I hope to release this edit function early next week in v0.8.0.

Friday, February 10, 2006

Publication Management System update

Been a very hectic week as the last bit of functionality for PMS (edit publications) has been dropped on the floor by the developer that was working on it. I have had to start all over from scratch and hope to have it finished in the next 10 days.

I have already setup an edit form, can pull up a complete article and pump it thru a basic edit sequence and have it ready to put into the database. I have to sort out a few of the more complex workflow changes that can occur, like changing from one type of publication to another which means different data field have to be filled.

This will be keeping me busy for some time now...

Thursday, February 2, 2006

Painting the loft

Got our office in the loft painted last weekend by working really hard:

Painting loft Jan 2006

Wednesday, February 1, 2006

Some serious testing of the syncing mechanisms!

Today I spent setting up the eGWOSync tool on an extra laptop we have here at work. I hope to give a bit of a report to my bosses about the quality/usage of this sync method.

Furthermore, I installed and adjusted the setup of our test eGroupWare server to make use of the new v0.7.0 ical server as written by Jan van Lieshout. This is a very nice improvement to the eGroupWare sync suite and I hope it hits the cvs repo soon. We have many Apple users and I hope to provide the Palm syncing via this interface sometime in the future. All other available services (xmlrpc and SyncML) have either been a let down by the server side or by the clients that use them.

Jan is looking for someone to integrate this into the eGroupWare suite qua configuration settings and such, maybe I can spend some time on that if the powers that be here don't mind.