Little Progress

No updates for over two months because I've been tied up with work and family. I haven't made the kind of progress I'd been hoping for, but a few little things have progressed.

I've gotten my Tyan server setup. This (loud!) machine is primarily tasked with file sharing and backup tasks for my little network at home. Sometime in the next month my Exocortex will be setup to dump tarred & encrypted backups of its database and configuration files to the Tyan.

I've spent a little time (not enough yet) trying to get setup with eclipse and subversion, with the subversion repository hosted on the Tyan. Hopefully a few more hours here and there will get me running, finally.

Although I haven't made much progress on the great AJAX-ification, I have made a few improvements (including the ability to change my password without manually editing the database!) which will be pushed out by updating the live copy on my Exocortex from SVN, once it actually works.

The Tyan will also handle OpenVPN and local DNS (home.dom), hopefully by the end of the year, if I can find the time.

My Exocortex needs a larger hard drive. That will need to be done sometime in the next few months. When that goes down, I'll have my first shot at migrating LVM volumes.

Back to work...

Software Update...

It has been about a month since I updated my Exocortex with the improvements in my development tree, so I did that tonight.

This update brought a bunch of little bug fixes and some major code refactoring, including the "final" version of the bare HTML viewer for newsfeeds and a major clean-up of the people module code which should make it much easier to AJAX-ify.)

It also included a few feature enhancements to several modules.

I'm taking it slow with the Ajax-ification of the newsfeeds module. I don't want to make the kinds of coding miss-steps I made early on this project, so I'm doing plenty of studying and research on best practices.

Ok, back to everything else on the to-do list...

More changes...

I've come to see that I really need to make some more changes to my development methods than I previously believed. I'm going to start doing all my development inside an IDE (most likely Eclipse with PHP and Javascript additions) and start keeping all my code in a version control system like Subversion or whatever.

So, yet more serious work added to the todo list but in the end it should increase my efficiency.

Rethinking...

My schedule has already more or less fallen by the wayside.

Adding the features I wanted to the People module basically required a major re-factoring of the code base for that module, which required more time than I had originally planned.

Also, I've increasingly come to the conclusion that I really need to drop the Web 1.0 style of development and adopt Web 2.0 AJAX development.

So, my revised plan is to do the following:

1. Re-write the Newsfeeds Module with an AJAX interface (Because it has one of the simplest interfaces.)


2. Finish the improvements to the People Module with AJAX (Because it has one of the most complex interfaces.)


3. Design and implement Core Knowledge


4. Re-write Calendar in a more AJAX fashion, correcting outstanding issues.


5. Design and implement Memory Browser (which has always required AJAX.)


6. Finish the improvements to search

Actually, other than finishing the improvements to newsfeeds first, the order is still mostly intact. The big thing is that I now expect this to take at least a month or two longer than I originally anticipated. Of course, the web interface will also be much better than I originally anticipated as well.

My feelings about this are mixed, of course. On the one hand, it's added delay, preventing me from moving on to bigger and better things. On the other, my web interface will be more complete and my programming skills will continue to mature.

As long as I can complete this new plan by the end of the year, I'll be happy...

Schedule

I worked up a schedule to complete the six short-term goals I listed last time which has me completing them all by October 24. I'd say the schedule is ambitious but realistically achievable.

I also made some progress on the People module today. Yay!

Software Development...

The software for my exocortex is by far the largest software project I've ever undertaken, currently spanning approximately 130 files of source code. As such, I am learning quite a bit about the software development process, including the frustrations.

My ToDo list for the web interface is expanding exponentially.

The only modules I'm using every day so far are the newfeeds and notes modules. I need to start using People, but I've come to see that the current design is missing features needed to make it the most useful. Not to mention that the UI really sucks as it is.

I guess I'm going to have to prioritize a bit:

1. Fix People module
   
2. Implement Core Knowledge
   
3. Improve newsfeeds module
   
4. Fix Calendar
   
5. Implement Memory Browser
   
6. Fix Search
   

If I do all those things, I will be able to blaze ahead with my Agent related work.

Time to get back to work...

Exocortex & Newsfeeds

Today is the first day I'm using my exocortex as my newsfeed reader. So far I'm pretty pleased, although I have a couple of tweaks I want to make to the software. Already this is proving to be an improvement.

The biggest advantage is that I can access my feeds from work and home and spread the time I spend reading them out more evenly over the day.

Additionally, the exocortex keeps all my feeds, indefinitely, allowing me to search back to find articles I read in the past.

I need to make some changes to have it display each feed item's source and to allow variable time increments between feed updates on a per-feed basis. (Google news updates its stories too frequently and needs to be checked less often to keep the volume manageable.)

I'm really looking forward to Monday morning when I will no longer be greeted with 400+ unread feed items.