Time at the desk has been limited this week. The extreme cold has listed Pittsburgh as one of the 20 coldest cities hit by the arctic polar vortex. As a result, My 7 yr old has been out of school both Tuesday and Wednesday and my over/under guess is that he will also be out on Thursday. We are due for another sub-zero with windchill morning. My time in the office has been limited. I have however, had time to finish doing some cleaning to my work desk. I’ve been trying to do a full clean and organise over the past month due to the fact that this is now my 24/7 work place. (If only I were getting paid)
But onto the progress. Software design is often an experience of two steps forwards one step back. Sadly, the one step back also usually consists of several O’Reilly manuals, a bunch of gSearchs, and of course documentation and answers found on StackOverflow. Today was no exception. Finally back on my desktop app for entering data I realised that I wasn’t just doing SQL puts to the database. I was also uploading graphic resources. These however were going into a directory with references being added to the database. Sigh, back down to the API level.
So today, I had to learn in Java (and to some extent on the Client level) how to compose programmatically an upload post and then correctly save it to my server. Now, I (as always) realise that there are probably simple libraries to do this and experienced Java, JSP, and LAMP folks will scoff at the likely banal process this is. I however hadn’t done it before so I had to teach myself. Happily, info was available in the form of a few StackOverflow questions, a couple of nice online tutorials, and a few hours later; my Poster test app is sending the requisite info and it’s causing a file to be saved. This isn’t finished. I haven’t actually put in some of the path and file directives and I’m not sure that the file is storing up in clean shape. But considering the fact that I have only gotten about an hour at the desk today; and that before that hour I didn’t know how to do this at all; I’m kind of happy about the results so far.
Tomorrow, I hope to have more time at the desk (even though the child is home again) and I hope to finally be done on the API level… for a while. Also, I will be having a conference with one of my “volunteers for credit counting.” What this means is that they’ve agreed to volunteer time in exchange for tracking hours and converting it to value once we see more funding. I’m incredibly excited to have this person working on the team because they have great business depth, incredible sense of organization, and a great working relationship with me to call me on stupidity when needed without taking a response of NO personally.
Things trudge, but I think we’re on track to keep moving forwards.
As always, if people are interested on helping out.. I’ve got plenty of work to go around.
This weak (sic) has been full of excitement. Thanks to the surgery which left me doped pretty much all week, I’ve gotten far less done than I wanted to. This is right down to having to push off an appointment from Friday to Monday as well as completely missing important mail from my land lady. There have been some highlights however.
Now, I’m honestly trying to not work on the project specifics except during the work week of Monday – Friday. Granted, like everyone else; I find a project I like; I dive in with both feet. Ironically, the average diver would probably hazard trying to go in hands first. But, then again; I’m not a diver.
With the holidays, the usual entertainment segment of the blog has been on holiday. We do promise not one, but two post Sing Off wrap-ups. I’m pleased to announce that many of you really seemed to enjoy the Armchair Judge; so we’ll be bringing her on as permanently as she wishes to participate.