Web Development Woes
At work the plan was to launch the new site after Easter. Following a hardware failure over Easter, last week we ordered a new motherboard for the web server only to find out it was the CPU that was faulty.
On Monday I learnt lots of things about why design-by-committee doesn’t work, which lead to my first real conflicts with anyone in my job so far. It was comforting to find that some developers I met in Birmingham last night had just had a very similar problem, wasting 4 months work.
Last night the hard disk in the web server died and I spent a large portion of the day today transferring the entire Debian installation and data to another hard disk. Now I find out that an entire extra database and front end needs writing before the launch, which is supposed to be this week.
This project is cursed.
OpenAdvantage Seminar
Last night I took a train to Birmingham for a free seminar on Open Source Content Management Systems which was really very good. The work OpenAdvantage are doing in the West Midlands is brilliant and there was lots of interesting discussion going on.
I find the intricate process of geek mingling at these types of events very amusing.
Private wiki as a brain extension
After installing a wiki for LLUG, In a kind of paradoxal move I’ve installed a private wiki on my home web server which I’ve been using as a kind of open canvas project management tool. It’s been especially useful for putting some structure into my personal research which has otherwise been rapidly filling a dead tree notebook in a very messy fashion. Wikis seem to be good for situations where a more formal structure for data is too restrictive and prohibits the flow of ideas.