It's probably been a good few weeks since I've written a personal journal entry here on this site. If you've been paying attention to the changes since early August you would have known that I took the site down for a few weeks while I was developing code for the next generation of parser that runs behind the scenes to link everything together. My theory at the time was that it didn't make much sense to keep writing things for the old interface since I'd just have to convert everything over again, and not having the web site to write to would make me focus on the necessary code that needed to be written and motivate me to finish the task.

Unfortunately at about the same time, Suzy, Ben and I volunteered to complete the next generation ticket system for Playa del Fuego. Since we had promised to start the first schedule of tickets on August 1, 2004 we worked pretty much from a negative deadline to redesign the system from the ground up. A hacker and white-board session at Kathleen's party early in the month followed by a number of intense coding sessions at my place finally gave us a workable ticket system around August 6, 2004.

This was around the same time that the new KCI web site was getting ready for release and all the nit-picky details of rolling out a custom content management system, job requisition system and job application system on a large corporate site of several thousand pages all came to a head in a short period of time. All the while I'm hacking at KCI with what is essentially the previous generation of the code I'm using now and trying to get everything perfect, I'm thinking about what I wish I had and jotting down notes to make it happen in the next version.

The middle of the month rolls around and the new KCI page lights up, but then it's time to move every one of my servers out from our Hunt Valley home office to our racks in the Level 3 collocation facility in Lexington Market. Every detail has to be accounted for to haul every corporate resource that I administer out of the data center racks, down the elevator, the back of an SUV, down I-83, into the loading dock, up the elevator to the third level of the facility and onto the new racks after a full day of work. And oh, by the way, everything needs to be working on Monday but it would be really great if it could be done by 19:00 on Saturday, m'kay?

Well, I survived, but in the process of all this I realized that if I wanted to get the next generation of code out the door I was going to have to narrow my scope just a tad. The basic system really involves only concepts and content. They're connected to each other by a series of connections that are scored, weighted and either on or off. That's three tables. My dream was to have a user base, logins, authentication, comments, content that could only be seen by certain users, or only the author, or a group of users, bookmarks, and a ton of other stuff. This all wound up driving my algorithm up to about 1,000 lines and 16 tables. After a few days, just thinking about ACLs made me cringe, so I settled for a short while with just a single user interface and (as usual) no comments.

A few days ago I finally got it all working together and with a quick prime of the database, have a really efficient system of 3,460 content blocks containing 9,668 discrete concepts and connected by 17,585 links to each other.

More later, it's time to sleep.

No Comments | #4529

Unless noted, all content on epistolary.org is © Copyright 1999-2008 to Rob Carlson with all rights reserved. All information is verified when possible, cited as appropriate and applied in the real world at your own risk. Send all feedback to rob@vees.net.