October 2006

As another month draws to a close, I draw a line through the things I’ve managed to complete, scribble over the ones I’ve decided not to complete and start a new post-it note with the things I didn’t manage to complete.

Thankfully, the new post-it note only contains a few items.

I’ve spent the last week or so working on stuff behind-the-scenes. This involved writing a download manager module for our CRM, IPS.Nexus and working on a perl script to actually build our product zips.

I’m quite pleased with the build script. It works via command line and has product specific modules for product specific build options. One can optionally encode the files with either Zend or IonCube before it creates the zip. It simply takes the latest revision from the product’s SVN trunk (or optionally from a branch) and cleans it up, performs some variable replacements (version numbers, etc) and then zips it up.

Now that’s complete (and will be used for IPB 2.2.0 RC 2) I’m back cleaning up IP.Converge ready for it’s first public outing. I’m really excited about this as it’s a new direction for IPS and will really open up some neat social networks between websites. Once that’s been released, I’ll complete the developer documentation and have that available for download before the final version is released.

Brandon continues to do an excellent job on IPB 2.2.0 and is virtually done cleaning out the IPB bug tracker ready for the RC 2 release.

Outside of work, I’ve been to the cinema a few times: “Little Miss Sunshine” (Excellent). “Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning” (Pointless); I’ve bought a few CDs: “In a Safe Place” and “Into the Blue Again” both by The Album Leaf and I finished reading Peter James’ “Dead Simple” (excellent)

I can’t believe it’s almost a month since my last blog entry.

It’s been, as the title suggests, post beta release crazy which usually means that I’m running around trying to fix stuff as quickly as possible. Added to the mix, we’ve been under DDoS attack for the past week or so and the only reason the server is still up is thanks to Lindy’s magic powers. He did explain to me what he did but, like most server related things, it went sailing over my head.

Progress on IPB 2.2.0 is going extremely well. The bugs reports are coming in and they’re relatively minor things apart from a few non UTF-8 character set / character encoding issues when using AJAX and IE in the same sentence.

I have a handful of potential blog entries I want to get out of my system, including a few film reviews (World Trade Center: Excellent and Children Of Men: Mind bogglingly good) as well as some commentry on some new web developments (Google Code Search, that’s you).