Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Eaten by my job

Apr302004

Yeah, yeah — I haven’t written much this week. We have a big huge system conversion going on at work, and the project has eaten the entire IT department. We’re changing our primary business platform from a mainframe to an iSeries.

Since we have web applications which communicate with the mainframe, these must be modified to work with the new system. We also decided that this would be a good time to upgrade our web server, since our current site has been running on the same hardware and OS for about five years now. Of course, we should have known better than to try changing the hardware and software on both ends of the system at the same time…

We first tried to go all the way, and upgrade our old WinNT4-based web server to Windows Server 2003. I got pretty far with it, but I was having trouble getting the ISAPI programs for our shipment tracking system to work. Since that’s pretty much the core of our web site, this was a Bad Thing.

After fiddling with that for far too long, we decided to fall back to Windows 2000. I had previously done a little bit of work on moving our web site to a Win2K server, and had it mostly working. All we had to do was convert all the user accounts from the other server. “All we had to do, ” ha! As you may guess, that didn’t go so smoothly, either. For some reason, when they set up Active Directory and imported the users, one crucial portion of our application began failing. The portion that lets registered users perform advanced shipment tracking functions. Doh.

Sooooo, with deadlines looming, we decided to fall back a little more. We’re going to keep using our original web server, and just modify the applications to point to the new backend system. For now. With deadline pressure off, we’ll be able to go back and study the other systems to figure out how to get them working, and eventually migrate our web site to the new, beefier platform.

The final switchover occurs this weekend. They’ll spend all day Saturday moving data from the mainframe to the iSeries. I will have to come in late Saturday night to make the necessary changes on our web server. I’ll probably come in around 11pm, though (according to the schedule) I probably won’t be needed until closer to 1am. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get my changes in place and tested within a couple of hours. Maybe I’ll actually get back home before 4am. Ugh.

So anyhow, if you’ve wondered why I haven’t posted much this week, or why I haven’t done much work on WordPress or Ping-O-Matic, that’s why.

Help the Hunter Become the Hunted

Apr212004

Since I expect I’m getting a lot of new visitors here due to the recent launch of Ping-O-Matic, and the associated linkage thereof, I guess this would be a good time to ask for some help.

For various reasons, too complicated to detail here at this time, I am relocating my family. Specifically, we are moving to Woodstock, Georgia (in the northwest Atlanta area). This is not just an “I’m thinking about relocating” kind of thing. This is an “I’ve already signed a lease” kind of thing. This is an “I need a new job ASAP” kind of thing.

I’ve been submitting resumes to Atlanta area companies, but I haven’t even had so much as a nibble yet. The nice lady at the Georgia Department of Labor seemed pretty impressed by my resume (.doc, .pdf, and I’ve got a profile on LinkedIn), and though I’m obviously biased, I think it looks pretty good, too. So I’m a little disappointed that I haven’t even had a single call for an interview yet.

So, if you are an employer (or know of one) who needs a web developer / programmer / system admin / network admin / database admin with quite a broad range of skills and a knack for coercing disparate systems into talking to each other, I’d love to hear from you!

And in case you’re wondering, there’s nothing wrong with my current employer, really. I really expected to be here for many years to come. But my family comes first, and we are moving to serve our family’s needs. So, we’re moving, even if I have to get a McJob and live off of ramen noodles. But I’d much rather have a job that involves blinkenlights and programming reference books. 🙂

Time for a new laptop

Apr202004

A few years ago, I got a laptop for Susan. It was pretty low-powered, even for its time — a 133MHz Pentium system. But even though it wasn’t terribly powerful, we got some use out of it, mainly for the kids go play games on, or for us to do some late-night web surfing from the comfort of our bedroom. That’s what we were going to do this weekend. I was going to do some lightweight web surfing on the laptop while Susan did some work on our desktop system. But the display died.

Pingomatic!

Apr192004

Announcing… Ping-o-matic!

Now, my Blog Service Pinger has its own domain name. Together with Matt Mullenweg, I’ll be adding new features to the pinger over time. Major enhancements in the current version:

  • Your blog name and uri are stored in cookies, and automagically filled in for you when you return.
  • The pinger output dynamically appears in your browser as each ping completes. You no longer have to wait for all of the pings to complete before your browser loads the page.
  • Fixed the RubHub ping so that it actually works now.
  • Improved some of the error output.

We have lots of other plans for development. Soon, we will have our own ping API, and ping-o-matic will be the only site you ever need to ping.

GAO Uses PHP

Apr162004

Just ran across some good press for PHP and MySQL. The GAO needed a way to upgrade a lot of their surveys and move them on the web. They chose PHP as the main technology.

“Java had some security issues for us, so that was off the table. PHP was just a better fit for us because of its ability to embed things with HTML pages,” says Kevin Dooley, senior IT specialist at the GAO and mastermind behind its survey application. “And of course it was free to try out, which makes a big difference.”

The part that I found interesting was that they developed their own language, QPL (Questionnaire Programming Language), implemented in C, which generates PHP code. Oh, and you can download the source.

via: PHP Everywhere

More Linkage

Apr152004

I just noticed that Tantek Çelik found my pinger, and had some nice comments about it. Maybe he’ll come back and see the new updates next week 🙂

Nifty how he’s using Technorati as a sort of outsourced trackback. I’ve seen a couple of people doing that lately, and I’ve been thinking about doing something similar. But I’ll probably wait until after we release WordPress 1.2, and I upgrade this site to the new code.