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December drinks, More books, Library databases, War Crimes
As the end-of-year approaches, sociability cranks up a notch. Housewarming party for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
severina_242 and _zombiemonkey was plenty of fun. Last Monday was the end of year dinner from the ALP indigenous affairs policy committe with a couple of Yorta Yorta elders in attendance. Last night two engagements; frou_frou's Circa Vintage, where everyone was dressed to the nine's of course followed by Caroline's 21st birthday gathering.
I have overspent recently on books, but that's hardly a bad thing. A good dozen books on games and network programming are on the way from the U.S. courtesy of Amazon and hot on their heels is another twenty or so gaming books. Recently I have also managed to pick up a copy of GURPS Bunnies and Burrows, which is amusing me no end.
Current interesting work project is moving a 3,000 item database (well, a flat database) to a web-based interface with PHP and MySQL. Should be easy enough and if it works I'll start doing the same for a number of other community organisations who have libraries. I'm sure however, that someone out there in the world has done this before and there must be a pre-existing template.
There's been a lot going on in the political world in recent weeks, but I'm particularly interested in the call by Harold Pinter, who has just won the Nobel Prize, that Tony Blair be tried for war crimes. We will get these bastards one day... Howard, Bush, Blair. BTW, who else has been watching The Power of Nightmares, which makes excellent ties between the stupid politics of Islamic fundamentalism and American neo-conservatism.
severina_242 and _zombiemonkey was plenty of fun. Last Monday was the end of year dinner from the ALP indigenous affairs policy committe with a couple of Yorta Yorta elders in attendance. Last night two engagements; frou_frou's Circa Vintage, where everyone was dressed to the nine's of course followed by Caroline's 21st birthday gathering.I have overspent recently on books, but that's hardly a bad thing. A good dozen books on games and network programming are on the way from the U.S. courtesy of Amazon and hot on their heels is another twenty or so gaming books. Recently I have also managed to pick up a copy of GURPS Bunnies and Burrows, which is amusing me no end.
Current interesting work project is moving a 3,000 item database (well, a flat database) to a web-based interface with PHP and MySQL. Should be easy enough and if it works I'll start doing the same for a number of other community organisations who have libraries. I'm sure however, that someone out there in the world has done this before and there must be a pre-existing template.
There's been a lot going on in the political world in recent weeks, but I'm particularly interested in the call by Harold Pinter, who has just won the Nobel Prize, that Tony Blair be tried for war crimes. We will get these bastards one day... Howard, Bush, Blair. BTW, who else has been watching The Power of Nightmares, which makes excellent ties between the stupid politics of Islamic fundamentalism and American neo-conservatism.
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I'm going to have to go and start reading up on news again, aren't I. It's just been so hard to watch lately.
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I notice from your journal you've been a little distracted from worldly events ;-)
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Although I recently installed phpBB (Bulletin Board / forum) on my website, and WebCalendar = both of which use SQL databases accessed with PHP: My favourite is still by DVD catalogue using OpenDB-
http://curufea.dreamhosters.com/phptest/opendb
User: test Password: test
Now, why the dreamhosters subdomain and not my usual www.curufea.com?
Well - because OpenDB, the opensource cataloguing database, doesn't work on PHP5, only earlier versions of PHP. And the Wikka Wiki I've converting my website too (http://www.curufea.com/Wikka), only works on the latest PHP ;-p
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That is annoying. Graceful deprecation, backwards compatibility etc etc. These should be keywords in programming websites.
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I really should just do a rewrite of the code and change the commands to the latest version.
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It's available for free download on archive.org
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Ahh, thanks for that! Very useful!
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Uh, are you going to train up members of this organisation in MySQL and PHP?
Does said organisation have the resources required to manage (add/edit/update/track changes/search/delete) the information in such a solution?
This is _still_ the fastest way to make information irrelevant. Unless they can afford a support contract.
> I'm sure however, that someone out there in the world has done this before and there must be a pre-existing template.
Exactly.
See Zope ...and possibly Plone (if they want to open this up as a portal)
Sorry about the first bit being "snakry" but this is a button of mine...
Community orgs have _much_ better ways to spend meager budgets than on IT.
Real value in IT means empowerment. This is the fight FOSS will win.
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Entries into the database will be web-based. They're already spending time and resources on maintaining the library and nobody is really using it.
Damn shame too because it's an impressive library.
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But unless you are using an already developed product that does just what you want, they can be a big time sink. Zope and plone are great choices for biggish projects, especially when you have either an existing guru and/or a big organisation wide commitment, but can be problematic for small organisations and small projects. Training people in how to administer zope/plone is no easier than MySQL and PHP.
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*nods*
Wise Dave speaks again.
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The advantage of DIY tables in MySQL is that most web hosts these days provide PHPmyadmin or similar, and ODBC to MySQL is trivial. Providing multiple ways to get at and modify the data is the best way to avoid "dead media" problems.
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Yeah, PHPmyadmin is quite nice. *nods*
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There is of course the enforcement issue. What surprises me is that no-one in the UN (I presume they are the appropriate body) has actually launched a case...
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Of course, Bush has already been tried and convicted. (Personally, I had the whole US administration tried in fiction back in 2003, with the final appeal on Harrison v Rumsfeld in 2023 regarded as the "official" end of WWIII.) As for the Dear Leader (and now that amendments to the Terror laws specify seditious intention requires organisations to advocate force or violence), internet project anyone?