Got Wills

New Server Setup

First of all, this blog is now running on it’s own machine, powered by Debian 5.0 aka Lenny. The installation had a few problems, of course, which will be discussed in a later post.

Google Wave

Well, I finally got my invite to Wave, and I’m loving it, although, it would be a lot better if more people I know used it. I got my wife to use it (somewhat reluctantly) but almost nobody else I know has or even wants to wave.

I’ve got 6 invites left, so if anybody wants one, let me know in the comments before any of my facebook friends or coworkers do and they’re yours. Make sure you use your correct email address. Also, the invites don’t go out right away and I’ve heard that gmail accounts generally receive them faster than other email accounts.

I’m also working on a Google Wave client for Windows Mobile. It’s still very early in the development stages, more about this later.

Navajo County Web Site Redesign

Once again, the powers that be are asking for a Web site redesign. I like a lot of their ideas and am looking forward to it. I’ve started by making the width 960 pixels, but haven’t had time to do much else. We’re going to try moving the menu to the top of the page (above the header).

The county has signed up for a facebook and twitter account, so now I need to find a way to incorporate badges or something for those into the redesigned site. I’m also creating some javascript tools to make the text bigger or smaller, show a printable or emailable version of the page (it already prints without the background, header, or sidebar).

New Site for NAYFL

I’m creating a new site for the Northeastern Arizona Youth Football League (NAYFL). I’m building a database to store scores and schedules, which I’ll use to automatically update the standings on the site. I think I’ll be writing the site in PHP, I was thinking about going with Ruby on Rails, but I don’t think there’s enough database integration to the site to warrant that. I’ll post more details about the database setup later.

Well, a couple of months ago, I made Navajo County’s Parcel Search start getting data from the new Assessor’s database. They have moved from the Arizona Department of Revenue’s CCIS to Colorado Customware Inc’s RealWare product, affectionately known as CCI. All things said and done, it wasn’t too bad of a process.

Obstacle 1

Where is the data located?

With a lot of help from Mohave County’s Systems & Database Admin, Gary Waters, this step wasn’t too bad. I realized what I needed was the DataMart schema… but I didn’t quite understand how I was supposed to populate it. Gary kept telling me about this job they have that populates it nightly, but I couldn’t even find (in Oracle Enterprise) where Oracle keeps it’s jobs. I eventually found a query that would list them for me, but we had no such job.

The next day, or thereabouts, Jeff, one of the other Navajo County programmers, noted that he had found a DataMart application and had populated the schema. As he was explaining how to install it (it’s included in the advanced RealWare install), I realized I had seen it there when I was installing RealWare on my machine, duh. Oh well, all in a day’s work, I guess.

With the help of the SQL scripts that Gary sent along, I started to piece together how the data was arranged in the database. On to… (continue reading…)