I guess I'll call the new software 'datamantic' and hope that doesn't cause confusion with the site name.

I finished the main part of the installation program yesterday. It's not quite one click, but it's very easy. I still need to ssh into the account to set some directory permissions, but that's not a big deal. I guess I can make a shell script to take care of that (PHP can't do it because it doesn't run as a user and therefore doesn't have access to the file system outside the web root - and that's where I need to change some permissions.)

This morning I've tackled the last remaining big missing piece in the datamantic software. It's a little embarassing, because it's so obvious in hindsight that it needed this capability, but until now it couldn't handle floating point numbers. Items (and the metadata atoms of each item) can, in theory, be anything you want. That's the whole point of the system: flexibility. Except they couldn't be floating point numbers, only integers. Obviously for a business system we are going to often need atoms to hold monetary values. And unless we are okay with excluding cents (and of course we're not okay with that,) we need some float support.

And now it's in there, at least for adding new information. I still need to bring the edit script up to speed, but that shouldn't be too hard.

I really want to get this done today so that Monday I can shift focus away from the software and start back to dealing with the hardware side of things.
- jim 8-07-2005 9:27 pm

Everything always takes longer than I think. But anyway, the installer is done. The whole system is now in a single .zip file. The steps for installing are:

1) upload and unzip the .zip file into the directory above web root.

2) run one bash script from the command line.

3) run one PHP script through a browser.

It's amazing to think back on how hard this process used to be. I can't believe it took me this long to automate things.
- jim 8-09-2005 8:09 pm





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