Zagadka's Site

The last of my four days of relaxation! I played some WoW and vegetated for the day.

Today we went to my Nana and Grandpa's house for an Easter Lunch. Liam had great fun. My Sister Jen and her Boyfriend Chris were there, Mum and Dad and of course Grandpa and Nana.

I played a lot of World of Warcraft today. More grinding of skills, but this time mainly with an alt and Enchanting.

Lots and lots of World of Warcraft. Mainly Cooking and Leatherworking grinding. I then logged on my alt and played that for a while, a lvl 16 enchanter. I was grouped with Azen's (A guildie) alt character which is 23 and quested in darkshire. I died quite a few times because 16 is just too low for that area. I ended up logging on Zag and taking Azen's Alt though one of the harder quests (Killing lots of Plague Spreaders). I also caught up on some more Stargate Atlantis.

I didn't get as much coding done as I would have liked today. I had to re-install windows on a customers laptop as well as serve customers on the sales floor for a large chunk of the day. I did manage to create a tool I think will be usefull and reusable in other jobs. Its a simple report on categories for OSCommerce/CRELoaded that lists each of the categories and it's sub-categories with a count of them and it's active products. This will come in handy when debugging for me, but may also be handy for the product content maintainers. You can clearly and easilly see the tree structure of categories of the entire site.

I managed to get a little WoW time in tonight. I levelled up cooking a fair way with a big grind of Cooked Mightfish. I had like 80 of them that I cooked up and raised my skill to nearly 300! I had run out of money by that point and had to stop grinding. I had some leather and thread in the bank so I also made some Fine Leather Pants to grind up my Leather Working skill a bit.

Worked on the price changes and $4/$9 rounding for most of today. It's inter-woven into everything! Because of the nature of our custom system builder the shopping cart doesn't store the contents of the system, so the discount price must be pulled out and calculated on the fly per-section. Probably about 20 files needed changing! But, I've done it and It appears to test OK. I'm going to get a few people to try it out now and check everything with a calculator.

I also went through my phone and found this join that I made on a CAT-5 cable in the ceiling cavity. That was a feat =)

The joys of OSCommerce. I'm getting a lot better at working with it. It's a lot more familiar to me now. I have been working on a system builder for a customer and a discount must be applied when the condition of a full system is met. Easy right? Well, not really =) It is very difficult to manipulate the price of a product under a certain set of conditions. It works now at least!

Vegetated at home. Not really much got done at all.

It's on now! 3 days to write a slew of features for an OSCommerce installation. Should be fun. I worked on a package discount today which OSCommerce doesn't do. I nearly finished it and stayed back a little bit longer. Oh well, tomorrow. I also visited Josh today. We took home the boxes of cable and Patch Panel for his LAN. I'm going to build him a structured LAN for his house.

Poor Liam is upset because Bambaloo is not on. At least he has good taste! It's a Jim Henson production.

Today I played with Liam most of the day because I don't see him much during the week. He's usually already in bed. I caught up on my Battle Star Galactica Season 3 viewing too. That was indispersed with some Stargate Atlantis. I cooked Kel and I a nice lunch of some Toast, Grilled Tomatos, Bacon and Egg on the barbecue after I cleaned it today.

I got tired of the server noise so I decided, now that it's getting cooler, to cram the second RAID array and brackets back into the case and put the side on. We shall see how it goes. There was a heap of updates that needed a reboot anyway, so the down-time didn't hurt. The thing is just too noisy! That's 11 drives. It's chewing power, 8 of them are 10K RPM SCSI drives so they will by design. After all they aren't meant to be quiet or power friendly. It's only the 2 x 320GB SATA and 200GB IDE drives that even have power saving abilities!

The end of the week! I am so damn tired. I've been doing 8:30AM starts at work and Liam's had a terrible week with his teeth! I'm feeling pretty zombified at the moment.

I've taken over on the OSCommerce job. The source needed separating from the "work in progress". There are lots of full-res product shots and old code snapshots mixed in with the production code. So, in Technogeek style I came to the rescue. Cleaned the source out, documented everything, checked the production code into SubVersion ready for work and documented all the scribblings I could find on the desk and submitted problems with the site. There was a need also to streamline backups, so I wrote a script to do that for me. We will see how it pans out, I may just stick it in a cron job. I also ended up moving my workstation on-site too. The dual-head setup is drawing quite a bit of attention. Something like "This is how the pros do it" comes to mind

We may soon be involved in another SugarCRM project too - this time tieing it to Asterisk which will be bloody awesome to play with!

It looks like I've inherited this OSCommerce project for a computer retailer. It needs a little work on some of the back-end processes like creating products and categories and the such, most of the lower-level work is done though.

Liam has been having terrible nights! He's got 2 more teeth coming through.

More retail work. I'm also mixing it with some online retail in the way of OSCommerce work.

Very little programming done today. I worked on the email thing again. For another company I am now working on a supplier pricelist automatic download and update for a CRELoaded web shop. That should be good, I am helping the existing programmer along who is more familiar with the lower level languages and driver-level type stuff. PHP is not really his Forte.
Back on the sales floor I go for a few weeks!

Today I worked on the mass emailer again building a page for generating criteria to select the customers we want to send an email to.

I also did some retail work. It was a good day, sold lots of stuff - didn't have to close/open/manage staff =) Much better!

Lots of mixed work today! Routing puzzles for travel agens and all sorts! We're trying to work with compulsary software (wingate) which is required for some other Travel Agent software. We want to route around the wingate but keep it in use for the Travel Agent Softwares traffic only.

Lots of graphics work today too. Product shots and thumbnails for them for one of our customers. I'm getting pretty handy with 'The GIMP' (An open source image manipulation program - GNU Image Manipulation Program...)

Once again, vegetated at home. Didn't really feel like doing anything productive - or even anything un-productive like WoW =)

More backup script work today. I wrote in some contingencies for no connection, can't contact the backup server and also if there is no route to the server.

I also worked on a heap of product shots for one of our customers.

Today I visited Josh in his new house! It's an awesome little house with a massive backyard. We managed to cobble together his PC and a small LAN from all his still-packed gear so we could play some CS. It was a great night!

Today I am working on a mass mailer - don't worry, not un-solicited. I wrote the front end today, for the templating part. It allows you to pull up your html email templates and then edit them. This is all done over the internal intranet. So, TinyMCE (A GUI editor for web browsers) to the rescue again!

Once again, we're using AJAX and Javascript to make it feel like a standalone app without too much submit-and-reload type behaviour.

Kel and Liam came home from their visit down the coast today!

With notes in hand I can now work on the backup script again. Brad gave me a few python pointers too. The class I wrote called BackupSource was not a complete waste! Which is good. I made a few quick modifications to it so that It ran "the other way around" (see yesterdays blog) and it runs nicely. I also modified a number of functions so they ran on the windows platform. I am now using os.popen to do the work. The main modifications was the initial setup, instead of making a list of machines to back up it now determines it's own hostname and then looks in the database to see if there are any entries for it to back up.

Today I built a few POS systems. They are little mini ITX form factor machines. Very cool. They have two hard disks in RAID (which means a little case modding to mount the second - which is good fun). Then you have to play oragami with the two IDE leads to fit them in the case and route them so they don't get severed or anything. I've got building these things down to a fine art now! The reason I was able to build, install an OS, update and patch the OS and configure a couple of necessary tweaks on two machines in a day in parallel with my normal work was because of a small script that I wrote and an internal repository that I built. The script is simple, it downloads the repository config files (.repo) and the keys for the repositories from our webserver that are configured for our internal mirrors. It then copies them to where they are needed, imports the keys (it's FC3 so you have to do it) and then starts a yum update to get all the goodies off Livna, KDE-Redhat and Fedora-Extras repositories for me. It's very quick on a LAN. Blindingly so in comparison to over-the-net updates.

Brad and I worked a little on the backup script together - It turns out I was writing the thing from entirely the wrong perspective! I had little info as to requirements so I guessed a lot of the requirements. I was writing from the perspective of this script running on cron on the backup server and it fetching the files from the source machines - Brad was thinking around the other way - which makes more sense. Multiple machines at once, only one key to share for ssh etc etc. There is a small list now that I have properly considered both ways of doing it. The thing must be decentralised.

Did nothing at all at home. Just vegetated, got a Kebab on the way home =) Yum!