Archives Aug. 5, 2007

Sunday 5th August 2007 - 10:59:44

Chip

It's been quite a while since I've written anything!

Our large SugarCRM project is nearing it's end. We've cut up SugarCRM up in heaps of places and even added extra modules that we created in-house. It's a great system now. We get a pre-approval into sugar in our custom module passed from the website, after the customer has entered their details and borrowing info. They get a yay or nay. From there the consultants pick up these Pre-Approvals from the list view in our module. We then move through the project (cut up + rebuilt by us) for the rest of the application then into the contact module for the rest. (also cut up and rebuilt).

It's been great. We've implemented lots of great technologies that are really meshing well. We've got SOAP, JSON and YUI. Some other cool tools we're using are Jasper Reports and PDFTK.

One form in particular has roughly 300 fields. It's a monster! About 150 of those are visible. We have so many hidden fields because the modified contact edit view allows you to edit all four related contacts on the one form using a drop down.

The cool bit (which I wrote =P ) is the part where we gather a collection of static PDFs dependent on the data in the application, run a few reports that make PDFs and then glue them all together. We then attach it to a templated email and send it off to the customer. It ends up about 20 pages and 700KB.

I finally had time (and it wasn't raining) to mow the lawn and gardens. Yes, you read correctly. Mow the garden. Two reasons. One the gardens are full of grass and needed to be trimmed/removed. I gave up in the end. They're only bare gardens with grass in them. The last tenant must have removed their plants. So... I mowed them. That way they are still green at least =P The second is in the back yard, one third of the backyard used to be a garden bed for fruit or veggies or something. There was a small rain forest growing on this garden bed because it's such good soil and has obviously improved because it's nice dark loam, whereas the rest of the backyard under the grass is a terrible mix of part sand part clay. The grass was about 1ft high! I nearly stalled the lawnmower in a few places it was that thick! I had to actually run the mower without the catcher to get through it. Otherwise I was emptying it every few meters!

Mum and Dad gave me their old mower and whipper snipper. They worked well. I found out why the fuel hose kept splitting on the whipper snipper too. It was (I theorize) because I cut the hose, when I was re-joining it the last few times it broke, with side cutters, thereby crimping one side of the hose at a very sharp angle. This last cut-and-re-join I did, I used a sharp Stanley knife to cut the hose. It's holding up fine now. All of the white smoke that the whipper snipper was making is now gone too, I guess it was just rubbish in the fuel system from not being run for so long that caused that.

Kel had the idea of using the back beds as a garden for veggies. I reckon it's a great idea and we'll probably go ahead with that. Kel is keen for the usuals carrots, silver beat broccoli and cauliflower etc as well as maybe some tomatoes. We'll have to go down the hardware and see what gear we need. We already have gardening equipment (Thanks Mum and Dad!). So we just need to, I guess, check the soil ph and see what we need to do. Then plant stuff after it's OK. The bed already has walls around it. So all I need to do is pull up the grass and turn over the soil a bit.

It's nearly my birthday. I spent my Ezydvd gift card from last birthday finally. I got Hot Fuzz, Tomb Raider (1 and 2 set), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, A Discovery Channel doco on the C-130 Hercules (One of my favorite planes) and an Elmo video for Liam.