Today's Work

I spent most of the day working on the leave update script. I found a Perl script in the current leave system that uses the DBI interface and used it as a model for my script. I searched for documentation on DBI on the web and found several articles, which I studied. Then I worked at modifying the leave script to use DBI. The revised script reads information from the current leave table and combines it with information from LDAP to write a new leave table. The new script is also more modular and configurable. The code is about two thirds done. I still have to write the code that updates the leave table with the new values.

During the afternoon our web site search in Zope stopped working. So we all looked for the cause of the problem, which turned out to be a change in the Apache cinfiguration file.

Thursday and Fridays are holidays. Happy Thanksgiving.

Today's Work

I read the documentation Glenn forwarded to me on the vacation leave system. Then I mapped the LDAP fields to those used by the leave database tables. And then I wrote a script to extract content from the LDAP server and write sql statements to update the database. The script still needs code to execute the sql statements generated, plus there are some issues that need to be addressed.

Today's Work

I wrapped up the phone book changes by finishing the page size and margin formatting. Then I worked a couple of Zope problems. Glenn reported he couldn't see some site navigation. This was a permissions and not a software problem. John Isaacs reported the phone lookup sometimes crashed. I figured out the lookup crashes when a user is returned who does not have a phone number. So I put a check in the code and asked for the fix to be moved to production.

Today's Work

I spent most of the day fooling with the Latex code for the phone book. I finished formatting the office number table and then figured out how to format the Notes pages at the end of the phone book. The problem here is that there are a variable numbe of Notes pages. They are added to make the length of the phone book an even multiple of four. So I had to figure out how to do conditionals and arithmetic with Tex. I also helped restore the SSB web pages on the integration which got trashed when we back ported production to test. And I fixed the problems with the small project Wiki that Sandy found in testing.

Today's Work

In the morning I prepared Greg's fix for localNews to move to test. I ran into problems when checking out on integration the fix in the stsci directory, which consumed several hours. In the end I was not able to resolve them, so I copied the file from production back to integration and only requested to move the change to localNews in the center folder to test. I wrote up a test plan and submitted the call to move to the fix. I then tested out Jim's fix to the project wiki, which passed. Then I struggled with some Latex macros for the phone book. With Harry's help I was eventually able to get them to work.

Today's Work

I spent much of the day figuring out how to format the "back of the book" of the phone book in Latex and then actually adding the table format. The first pass is done, but I still need to fix the division and branch titles. To my shock and dismay I also discovered there is a mid-book section, which I will have to format by myself. The rest of the day was spent on small stuff in Zope that's not worth describing now.

Today's Work

In the morning I tested Jim's base tag fix and ran into problems while using the edit news form. They will have to be resolved before testing can finish. Then I wrestled with getting the table footer in the phone book to format properly, which is harder than it sounds. I finally succeeded and the next step is incorporating the back of the book.

The world is divided into two camps. One thinks flash is evil and the other thinks it's wonderful. I side with the camp that thinks flash is evil.

Today's Work

I continued working on the phonebook creation problem. The script that downloads the user information to a latex include file is now finished. The remainder of the problem is to format the rest of the material, such as the header and footer and back end material as part of the latex file. I experimented with page size and margin formatting and came up with something fairly acceptable. I got the back of the book material from Karyn Keidel and with Sharon Toolan's help converted it to Latex. And I asked Harry the best way to mark up the complicated footer. I also wrote a test plan for the privilege problem fix and asked Sandy to test the small projects wiki.

Today's Work

In the morning I finished the change to the isViewable method and then coded up a fix for the viewable method. I told Leigh about the changes so that she could look at them before I moved them to test. Then I started working on the phonebook again. I coded a minimal Latex file to format the results. The Latex uses the longtable package, which allows tables to span pages. I modified the ext.pl script to generate phonebook.pl. Since all the formatting is done by Latex, the script is very simple, less than a hundred lines. There were some problems with inactive users, but for now I am filtering them out. I also need to escape characters special to Latex. But the script works and I am able to generate a phone list.

Today's Work

Today I wrote up a test plan for the small project wiki and delivered it, after fixing a problem with the camelBack function. I tested Harry's orgchart method, and coded a fix to isViewable, which unfortunately doesn't yet work.