webMyCal

February 12, 2006

Pros and Cons of Keeping Written Records

There is a difference between ability to do something and the need to do something. Everyone should be capable of understanding of why records need to be kept.
Pros on Keeping Detailed Written Records

  • It is the only way you will keep your records.
  • If only based on memory, the records will be lost and forgotten.
  • Not keeping records leads to delays; just doesnt work. End up having to repeat the same mistakes.
  • the most important things to keep records of is of things not to do
  • Written records are incredibly valuable in terms of letting a project work effciently
  • They are desirable when there is one person involved; they are critical when having two person involved

    • Written records are a way of having people who no longer exist to provide information. It also allows replication, it allows you have the same project be done by someone else and get done again. Ex. Good open source kits have step by step instructions. This allows people to have desirable variations. Same thing on construction, people have instruction on building a colonial and a ranch. With good instructions, they can create a combination of the two.
    Cons of Keeping Written Records

  • There is a cost to creating records, time.
  • You are trying to get something done and you want to make sure that you have the knowledge, skills, etc.
  • There are tasks that don’t get documented
  • When getting something small done; people will not want to write records.
  • Must make the decision rationally, make a case for the decision you can make

    • There is a reason not to write detailed records, in business, there is something called business retention policy. Well run businesses destroy written records. There is liability for something that is done when you do not have records.

    Filed under: webMyCal — Oscar Acosta @ 11:25 pm

    February 22, 2006

    Internationalization

    Internationalization

  • Globalization, Internalization, Foreign language support
  • Not everybody works in the English language
  • Not even all English users speak/use the same English (UK English vs. US English)
  • We are use to writing left to right
  • In Arabic and Hebrew it is right to left, there are some that go top to bottom

    • Why is there a major Japanese personal computer industry?

  • Japanese were frustrated with American keyboards.
  • What the Japanese did, is to look at the PC, and looked at the question as to what was needed to type the Japanese language, software changes were made for this change.
  • Japanese were driven to making their own PCs because they need to enter in the Japanese language.
  • In order to support another language, you use the same hardware, just different keys.
  • Same number of keys, same bit patterns, but the keytop may say ‘A’ but shows something like ‘Q’. Same keytops, same machine.

    • Code Tables vs. Unicode

  • You have to be aware of both.
  • Code table is a very simple approach. When you are working in a country, you have a table of 127 characters for that language. You assign each of those characters to a code.
  • Suppose you want to take a computer and make it work in Russian. When you work with the following numeric value, you want it to go to the gliff in that language.
  • Need to work with more than 8 bits, thus Unicode.
  • There is a version of Unicode called UTF-16, the sixteen bit variant of Unicode that appears in browsers and Java.
  • UTF-8 has become popular for internationalization. Some organizations believe it is UTF-16 is best for internationalization.
  • In order to do internationalization. Must work 3 ways. With UTF-8, UTF-16, and code tables.
    • Filed under: Other — Oscar Acosta @ 9:13 pm

    February 27, 2006

    Thoughts on Testing Software

    How to test software
    Here are some notes on how to test software for the person who is to accept the handoff package.

  • Read the documentation.
  • Sometimes the system will not do what the documentation says.
  • Or the documentation will not say what the system is doing.
  • Must have an open mind.
  • When testing software, should not only do everything within the manual, but other things that you believe what users will do.
    • Filed under: Other — Oscar Acosta @ 8:03 pm

    February 28, 2006

    Bug Fixed

    OK, the problem was the following:
    in the whie loop, at the end of each event, when a hash is pushed into the array, it is done by reference. At the end of the loop we have n references in the array, where n is the number of the events. The problem is that all n references point to the same place in memory because the hash is not reallocate on every iteration.
    To solve the problem a deepcopy function was implemented. Now, insted of pushing a reference of the hash into the array, we send that reference to the function, it is deep copied (by values) into a new hash, and the new address is pushed into the array. At the end we have n different addresses in the array, which was the whole point of the game.

    Filed under: webMyCal, Backend — Georgi Todorov @ 12:41 am

    Some progress

    While I was doing listevents() I tought that i will not need to calculate the reocurrance of the events for the monthly view. I was wrong. It turns out that I do need the reocurrance in all cases. So the next thing in the todo list is to parce the RRULE line in each event (if any) and use the informatin to build the events. I thing this is the last big milestone. Once reocurrance is implemented it will alow for generation of the different views of the calendar.
    Stay tooned

    Filed under: webMyCal, Backend — Georgi Todorov @ 12:44 am

    Handoff

    The latest sources can be found @ http://sourceforge.net/projects/webmycal/
    The latest documentation is located @ http://webmycal.sourceforge.net/documentation/

    Currently webmycal.pl accepts data from stdin and generates an html calendar. Internally it fills an array AoH with references to hashes of the events.

    Filed under: webMyCal — Georgi Todorov @ 2:58 am
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