log entries of timotheus

Posted by mobile phone:
So much time has passed since my last post that there is a certain amount of hesitancy to write here again.

Engaged and living with my wonderful fiance now, still in Berkeley. Our company, cog motive, is very much alive and is now the primary source of my income. Have a meeting tomorrow with Brian Tanaka about collaborating on some, hopefully many projects of a web application nature. As this is my primary passion, I have high hopes.

Nickelpinch is undergoing another database redesign. I learned about many SQL based things over the last several days that renders my current structure woefully at fault. The problem with self teaching yourself things is that some times important elements can be overlooked. In my case it was with unique keys and indexes.

What I didn’t realize is you can set up relational tables in a way that makes certain things automated. When an entry in a parent table is deleted, it can also delete any related entries in ‘child’ tables as well. (Utilizing the ‘ON DELETE CASCADE’ option during child table creation) This ability eliminates almost a 1/4th of my code for Nickelpinch.

So, work on this is going well. I’ve remade many of these functions several times over by now, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to get everything up to date with the new structure soon. Also I’m making some minor UI adjustments, to make more sense to the user. Not looking at things for almost a month gave me fresh eyes for this.

Otherwise, working on a new mobile application for Energy Operations Management; an entirely new interface and login system for their realtime SCADA information. It is really exciting to see it come together, and the graphing option really sets it apart in the field.

Well I don’t want to burn out by making a crazy long entry, so this’ll do for now.