Friday, December 21, 2007

Data transfer tool

The tool is coming along, working with our content queen to setup an interface that will be easy for her to use.
I've ditched the ajax idea, in favor of a simple "checkbox" system. I've also thrown out the idea that I should move _all_ the data associated with each title at that moment. Instead I'm opting for just moving the title/product data. After all the titles are moved, I'll write another script which goes through the title data, and copies awards, talent, characters, images, collections, franchise and anything else left in the old structure.

As each title is moved, I'm marking it in the original table as is_moved, or is_removed based on if they wanted to move it, or throw it out altogether (mistakes that weren't deleted in the past).

We will see how it goes, but I'm fairly confident it will work. We have some new stuff going up on Stargate, something from the third party vendor. It's cute.. but not great. Luckily I'm OFF.. until the 2nd.. so I probably won't get time to post, as I'll be drinking heavily with my mate who's staying with me from Austin (oh and playing video games of course).

Woot! BFN

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Running

As many of my friends know.. I've taken up running in the past few months. Today (actually yesterday) I reached my 100 mile mark!
Nike Plus

Woot!

BFN

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Dates, Times bane of my existence

Seriously tired of trying to work out why my time and date stuff isn't working. It's not working.. and I can't work out how, unless I go to the site at the time it's broken. Herein lies the problem.. I then _break_ what's going to happen the next day.. at a different time.

Woe is me!

I've decided to take all the variables governing dates and times and stick them at the top.. then try and populate them with a variety of numbers, to see if I can replicate the error.

Anyone have any good ideas for dealing with this? Some sort of "fake time" tool?

OK.. wistful thinking I know...

BFN

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Winding down

Finally things are starting to wind down towards the Holidays. Stargate is off until 4th Jan. MGM HD is.. well.. my part is done. Unfortunately there are some snafu's keeping us from going live.
This means I get back to the main site! Woot! Actually I'm quite excited to get the whole thing kicking again.

Writing a tool, for our content people to use. It basically does this:
Shows an alphabetical list (limited on the page to say.. 50?) on the left, with all the current "property" titles. In the old DB this meant everything that was a product. Not a good way to arrange stuff. On the right is two blank lists. First column you choose to add one title from the left, second column you can add to from anything else on the left list.
What this does is define a "master" title, it's data is copied to the new table structure as a title, and it's merchandise (if any) is added as a product. Then the subsequent titles have their data added to the product of that main title.
Simple eh? I am thinking of doing it ajax style, so less page reloading (except when you run out).
It will need another tool to pick up loose ends.. titles with names that vary so much they weren't near each other on the original list. A way to take them, and move them to the new structure.
Once all this data is moved, we can finally start looking to recoding the tools, and the front end. JOY!

BFN

Monday, December 10, 2007

Move uploaded file.. where? not there!!!

A plan we'd had for integrating tools from all the different sites together has come awry.

It is entirely possible that I am doing something wrong, so if anyone has insight, do please feel free to show me to way!

I was creating pages where content folks can edit some basic things on the page for mgmhd, and upload images.

The problem I ran into was that our main tools has it's own domain. The folder where these files lives happens to not be in the same path as the folder where I want to put the images. I can't work out how (using move_uploaded_file) to put the image where I want it to go.. it keeps trying to put it under /tools/foldername/image.jpg. Oh well.. mgmhd gets it's own tools! Yayz0rs.

BFN

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

A spec? No WAY?!?!

Yes way. Today.. I wrote a spec. I'm dragging my poor coworkers kicking and screaming into the right direction. No one specifically has a problem with specs, they just believe there is no time to write them. I disagree. Strongly! I have wasted an inordinate amount of time working on projects that because they have no spec, we've constantly been asking questions, and making plain old guesses as to how they are supposed to work. Sadly my guesses (although often well informed) are only correct about 50% of the time (this is not a statistical number, just a .. well.. a guess).

To be honest I enjoy writing specs. I know.. weird huh? I find as I start the document, I start to see the pages and the code grow in my head. I can work through things I just know are not going to work right then and there as I type. Writing the technical spec is usually where I work through most of the thornier problems, and I get it down to pseudo code, it just appears in my head! I like to have everyone in the team review the spec once it's completed (I send it out pretty much as is, without any real proofing) and those who actually read it give me all the feedback I need (typo here, rename this thing, what is this?).

Today I wrote a spec, and those that read it (the important people) worked out we were seeing the problem completely differently.. and the design was going to be wildly different from the back end. What a relief to work this out now!! I know I'd saved at least a small amount of time, and that made the fact my fingers hurt from typing, totally worthwhile.

BFN