Monday, April 12, 2010

Catching up.... and a link

As any code monkey and/or geek can tell you, work can certainly cause you to not have time for much else.  Having gone back to the company I was at almost 3 years ago (which I love working for, but had to leave to realize that), I find that I am incredibly busy, but its a good thing.

When I was here before, I was doing client implementations work.   I was one of the two original members of the team who ended up staying around the longest and became the expert on the system and the solutions we provided.  When I came back this past October (after 7 1/2 months unemployed), I came back on the other side of the wall and am now doing Production support for the platform I was implementing on before.  

Don't get me wrong, things have changed a fair amount (while some things remained the same or had gotten worse).  To say that I really like my new position would be a complete understatement.... I LOVE IT!!!  It is always amazing to be able to walk into a job and already know the platform (for the most part).  I just had to learn the intricacies of how my new group works.  

Recently, after having a talk with my boss, it was determined that we needed a database of our own with a web interface to it so that we can all access it, and our boss can run his metrics. Far too often do we have to look in a plethora of different databases and sites to try and find all the information that we need. Then, even when we do find it, it is not always easy to get that information in one general place where it can be referenced again later.  This project will change that.  It will be one place where we can put all the information we gather and have, so that we can reference it and even update it as needed.  

That said, the project that I mentioned back in my last post has been modified to be this project.  So far, I have gotten a second machine out of it (nice quad processing machine with 4 gig ram and a third flat screen monitor for my desk.  (the first two are attached to my dock for my laptop).  I have the machine installed with Ubuntu and configured with Amache2, MySQL, Subversion, and Bugzilla.  

The initial data that will be populated into the database table(s) is coming from a couple of spreadsheets that I was sent.  I am right now writing some Perl code to not only parse the Excel spreadsheets (that wasn't too aweful to do, especially using the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel module), but also populate it into the table(s).   I am being careful about this code because I want to be able to use it to produce a script for periodic updates.  It will need to check for data already existing so as not to duplicate entries.

Ok, the link I promised.  I stumbled across this earlier tonight.  Its an interesting page where you can look up functions for PHP and JavaScript.  It is quite the language reference.  It even has a reference for CSS and MySQL.  So far, I am really glad to have found it.

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