Monday - A new page for a new week
I suppose I should review my last few notes - that is one of the key points of these whimsical scribblings. So, let’s see. The first item on the first list was ‘Finish a reporting system for a client’. I think that one can be ticked. The system itself needs refining, but the reports produced so far seem to have fulfilled the client’s needs and it’s not on their list any more, so ‘tick’
8:37 Definitely time for a coffee. Now, item 2 ‘ Set-up a virtual robot to email me server information every hour or so‘. This is something I can say I’ve made made significant progress with. I chose ‘errors’ as the first thing to focus on. At the start of this mini project I could already configure systems to log errors to a database instead of spewing out warning messages for all to see. I also had a simple report that showed a list of errors, how many times they had occurred, the error, the URL requested, the script involved and the line number. What I needed was a way to look at any and all systems running on a particular machine, grab the report for each one and send this to me by email.
There were a several areas that needed work. Accessing data systems using a browser over http has some significant differences from using a timed script, which I need to consider when trying to develop a way to include the majority of the new thing the version control system and make it manageable via a browser even though it would run in the background.
Formal computer programmers might start a plan at this point, but I tend to code as I think - the plan is the development. Terrible, I know. But it works for me. Anyhoo - after a few rounds of coding and testing I had the ‘aha’ moment and saw a way of organising everything. A day later and the thing was running and I was receiving a steady flow of emails showing me errors logged in every database, or systems that were error free, or systems that were not configured correctly to send reports - usually because of a missing email address or similar.
The next requirement was for more control over what might be sent in order to calm things down. And to shorten the story, I can now flick an on/off switch for each system, and I’m no only sent an email if there are errors to report. And the really good news is that I’ve dealt with all the errors and only received email from one system yesterday, and none so far today - so a ‘tick’ and a ‘yay’.
No that the underlying emailer is ticking over in the backround, with not much to do, the next component should be notifications - the same proicess as errors, but instead of pushing out emails with details of errors, it pushes out emails with details of messages that have not been read. This is a big part of my plan to start to use web-based messaging from at least two sperate systems. The problem at the moment is that if I start to encourage people to contact me through a website, I need to know quite quickly that there’s a message to look at.
Items 3 and 4 don’t need reviewing. 5 though, well that sort of links to the messaging mentioned above. Time for more coffee…
Tickets
A ‘Ticket’ seems seems like a good idea, and might be a more practical alternative to ‘Todo’ as rather than just being a way to dump things in a list that can htne be ignored, Tickets can be very specific items attached to projects, and could be a manual version of errors whcih would allow clients to raise tickets and for the lists of tickets to be emailable.