Through my work in developing a system for entering and displaying staff resumes I have become involved in a project for capturing staff skills and capabilities across the entire organisation. My part is fairly small, basically updating the resume system, but it is giving me an insight into working as part of a larger team and experiencing proper project management.

I flew down to Canberra for a team meeting on Wednesday, then participated in a video conference yesterday. Without a close view of the other members of the team I found it difficult to read when somebody else was about to say something and found myself butting in a few times. I wonder what our telepresence team would have thought of that.

I am rewriting my resume application to run on the latest version of PHP and to replace the PEAR::MDB database abstraction library with the  newer PEAR::MDB2. There are quite a few changes, including replacing all my FetchInto's with FetchRow and altering the connection function. The biggest change for me was handling the initial loading of the database scheme. This has now been moved into the PEAR::MDB2_Scheme library.

I find it very useful to make changes to the database structure through a Metabase XML scheme, but MDB2 does offer some interesting possibilities for managing the database using the MDB2 functions. It should be possible to more easily configure the database from the application itself.

I seem to be in competition with those good folk down at CSIRO Land & Water. I have a counterpart down there who, like me, develops web applications but sits outside of IT. The difference is that he uses ASP.Net and oftens buys web components while I am a PHP person who makes do with freely available open source.

Land & Water appear to be quite good at promoting their web applications which gives our senior bosses a case of the "want me's". Today it was the ability to export events from the intranet to Microsoft Outlook. Thankfully there's an open standard for sharing calendar information between Outlook and other calendars (such as Apple's iCal). It's called iCalendar.

The iCalendar standard (RFC2445) is typically dense, but Shu-wai Chow has provided a clear guide to generating iCalendar output using PHP. Note that the CRLF hex substitution should be =0D=0A and not have a terminating =.

I had a lot of trouble getting Outlook to accept the generated ics file. I kept getting the following error:

"Microsoft Office Outlook cannot import vCalendar file. This error can appear if you have attempted to save a recurring Lunar appointment in iCalendar format. To avoid this error, set the appointment option to Gregorian instead of Lunar."

I thought that work was supposed to quieten down close to Christmas, but it just seems to be getting busier for me. I have finally released the software downloads facility on the CSIRO ICT Centre website. Note that I'm talking about the web application, not the software available at the site. Okay, the ability to register and download software online is no big deal, been done many times before. Most of the work actually went into the administration and reporting tools - the stuff you can't see.

The actual code was mostly finished a month ago, but it's taken forever for our Commercialisation and Legal people to sign off on the licensing aspects. The download facility was written in PHP and uses a MySQL database, the usual stuff. I wouldn't mind making the code itself available on the site as it would be quite easy to reuse on other websites. Need to get authorisation first!

It's almost 6am - just shut down my connection to work in preparation for "getting up". Did get some sleep last night, but dreamed of the staff CV's application, so it wasn't very restful.

Got to download the code to the laptop so that I can keep programming on the train. Done all the basic functions, now it's output. 

I really like Gallery2, PHP/MySQL web-based image gallery software, especially the ease by which you can upload photos from your desktop PC. Unfortunately, this web host only supports a shared installation of version 1. I tried installing it on the Windows IIS server last week, but only got a blank screen for my efforts. As I didn't have enough time to debug the problem, I installed it instead on an Apache server under Solaris without difficulty. Modifying the default theme to fit in with the intranet was easy. The only downside is the lack of LDAP/Active Directory Support without using the "Embedded" version, which I didn't have time to play with. In the end it's not a huge problem.

Now I have an easy way to share image albums on our work intranet. Feedback has been great so far.

It's Sunday and I don't feel like writing PHP code. Right now I'm bored of writing code that does the same old thing everytime. Check user credentials, query database, insert record, update record, delete record, list records, output stuff. I'm sure there are frameworks that make it even easier, but I don't have the time to investigate further - what I write works and can be customised without much thought. Most days I enjoy writing code, but it's difficult to write when you aren't in "the zone" and I am not in the zone.

Why am I even thinking about writing code on a Sunday? Very senior people in the organisation demanded an application to enter staff CV's for a science review. No problem, said I. I had already written the same application for a sister division. But wait, they said, we want workflow, multiple user levels, etc, etc. By the end of the week, the two weeks you are asking for is too long.

It is such a long time since Sydney received decent rains that the past few days of windy and wet weather have been quite exciting. A good excuse to stay at home on the weekend, especially as the Miranda Westfield shopping centre's carpark filled early (forced to purchase more expensive fruit and veg from the local grocer - anything but Woolies!).

Celebrated a family friend's birthday on Saturday with a dinner at Caruso's in Gymea. My gnocchi with pancetta was very good, though the quality of other dishes varied. Service was excellent.

Woke up early today to jot down some ideas for the TincaCMS, then spent about three hours this afternoon trying to get the "Linker" file management plugin of the Xinha WYSIWYG embedded HTML editing tool to work. I can't get it to scan any parent directories, maybe due to some Windows file path issues. Not certain yet. I also want to try FCKEditor, the file manager looks better, but integrating it seems to be a little bit more work than the single line of HTML/JavaScript that Xinha requires. I already had Xinha running on my older versions of TincaCMS, but without Linker running. I might attempt to use FCKEditor with my ideas for simplifying page editing under Tinca.