Niels’ Homepage

I had some frustrating experience with sitecopy. A tool I used to maintain this and other web sites. After some investigation is seemed to have a blocking read in one of its functions. Now I could have tried to fix this or contacted the developers about it, but it had to be solved the difficult way: I wrote a similar application myself in Bash :).

Why Bash? Sitecopy had two disadvantages:

1. It is written in C and had to be compiled for every platform I use. This made it hard to take an executable copy with me on, for example, a USB-stick.
2. Since it makes use of standard SSH-tools it it also possible to do site maintenance from behind a firewall using connect (although that has to be compiled).

And of course writing the thing, documenting it and packaging it was fun as well :).

Rest to say that I still like sitecopy, it is a very useful tool but in this case I prefer to eat my own dog food.

The new site maintenance utility can be found here.

Just a short entry to indicate that I am still alive. We have been on a holiday to France. The south of France to be precise although a French colleague said we are supposed to view this area as the South-West of France (I could swear it was the South-East, but I will let you decide when I am done writing a weblog about it).

So what have I been up to all this time:

• Writing a time registration system for my new employer. Since I have little time and we have a new colleague on board that is far more experienced with PHP than I am, maybe only the framework that has been created so far will ever see the light of day. Because I am really satisfied with that :).
• Re-writing a significant portion of an application for a customer in such a way that it will be ready for a future when I have moved on to another customer.
• Started creating templates of RUP documentation in the DocBook format. These templates are already available as MS-Word templates from the RUP Toolkit, but I:
  1. Do not have MS Word at home any longer. We are only running Linux here.
  2. I really like open formats. Especially when they are really easy to put in a Version Control System.

  I already made these templates in the Open Document Format (ODF) but thought it would also be nice to have them in the DocBook format. As soon as they are ready they will be published on this weblog.

• Finally started on the TAFKADR (The Application Formally Known as DocRaider). But will be called GD-Press from now on, which is short for General Document Press. This will be a system to design, create and manage automated documents like reports, invoices etc.

In the following weblog I will tell a bit more on the holiday in France.

P.S.: Kelley Law if you are reading this, I haven’t forgotten about the Gallery plug-in, so expect a log and a message on this soon as well.