ramblings on PHP, SQL, the web, politics, ultimate frisbee and what else is on in my life
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Business as usual

I am still working on making the current LiveUser release cycles bug free. The bugs that are being spotted are getting increasingly rare and harder to encounter. Unfortunately no work on the caching has start as of yet. A bunch of people have expressed interest in helping. As always nothing has materialized to date. Aside from a minor php doc comment contribution there has also been no assistance on the documentation front. This includes MDB2. Oh well, I guess I need to be content with people finding bugs and reporting them. Anything beyond is too much to ask ... *sigh*

Aside from that I am working hard on finishing up my slides for php|works. Looks like I will also be giving a talk on LiveUser. I need to update the slides a bit more. I have already added some things that popup during the last talk in Cancun. I have not yet started in the PEAR talk yet. But I have already spend several days on the SQL talk. This is not suprising at all, since I am doing this talk from scratch and I want to cover quite a large range of topics. The work has been very educational for me already, hope it will be equally useful to the audience.

In terms of work, the paying type, we are slowly getting to the point where we will start adding a bit of dynamics into the GUI design of a little AJAX application we are developing at the moment. The job of the application is to display some information read from an Oracle database. We will be using Apache2 with PHP5 and unfortunately Windows Server 2003 on the server. The display is to refresh on its own at regular intervals and since some people will use this tool on the go, we are to cut down on data traffic and client ressources as much as possible.

Not sure yet if we are going to let the application talk to Oracle directly or not. We will be using SQLite anyways to store all the application specifc data since we want as few services running on the machine as possible. I am considering replicating the necessary data from the Oracle database, applying some necessary computations and caching that information in SQLite as well. That way we only need a little shell script to hit the Oracle database at regular intervals. Might make the application more robust and performant (especially since we still know little about the actualy Oracle server).

We are also ready to start the next phase of developmet for the plan- & reportgenerator advanced prototype we developed. Essentially this application enables people in the pharmacutical industry to keep a datapool of validation criterias and prodecures which they can use to build up validation plans and protocol forms in word (using Openoffice from the shell with a faked x server). The cool aspect of the application notifies the maintainer of every validation plan of any relevant changes made to the datapool and helps in merging those changes in if needed.

The next phase will feature a complete overhaul of the GUI. We have invested a good bit of time to find better ways to do write in combo boxes, fixed headers in tables and inline scrollbars. Should make things alot more pleasent to work with. Additionally we are adding workflow management, risk analysis and reporting. We might also make the integration of new word templates possible without any manual steps between Openoffice and uploading into the system.

With a little vacation playing beach frisbee in mallorca end of october, the international php conference in early november, holding a 4 week online workshop on php5 starting mid november and a possible book project (more on it when the contracts are signed) it looks like the rest of the year is quite planned out for me. In order to finally finish up my computer science degree I will also take the last 2 courses I have to complete on "operating systems" and "creation and executing of surveys", I will have even more on my plate though.