I should have written these posts at the time, instead of waiting nearly a week.

Blogging has destroyed my ability to remember anything, I just look in the archives here to find out what I did, and when.

Anyway.


I called the guy back, and spoke to him.

He apparently was trying to change his username again, and having issues with it.

He had contacted the support of the ISP, and they had to escalate it, apparently others were having issues.

It's probably like the problems I had at the seniors club recently, where because of dumb non fully qualified domain names, machines can't access their servers to change their details.

Anyway, he said he was going to wait for them to fix it, and apologised for wasting my time, I didn't really care.

I got back to work.

I went out to lunch with my mate, (who wants me to start the isp for him).

We went and had Thai, it was pretty good.

We went for a walk around on the way back to the building after that, and had a chat about ISP details.

I got back into the building about 1pm.

About 1.30pm, the technical guy I've been working for came over, and said we were going up to see a couple of other people.

We went up to level 5 of the building, where all the geologists are, so there are rocks, and bits of rock, and geological maps and all sorts of things all over the place.

We went into an office up there, to see the project leader for the project.

The project is the one I briefly mentioned in yesterday's blog, about the database with the TIFs in it.

The woman who looks after the database server, and a guy who does some of the technical stuff for it came in.

The 5 of us had a chat for a while, and they basically explained the whole project.

It's a database containing all the geological data/reports for any geological surveys in NSW.

The database runs on some old DEC Alpha machines, which will most likely not survive being relocated to Maitland in a few months. As a result, we have to work out how to extract all the data, get it as files, move it to a more reliable system, work out some way to tie it all back together, so that users can access all the data.

We have to:
work out how to get ~600 thousand images (and a few other files), out of a database, that has the data stored on an optical drive jukebox,
dump the contents of 2 tables, from separate databases,
sort the records into files
work out a directory structure to hold the ~2 million files
sort the files into the directory structure.

This shouldn't be too difficult, only 2 tables, and the schema is in English. I'm streets ahead of when I was doing AMP's asset management when I worked for CSC, where the schema consisted of about 35 tables, and was in German.

The other issue we have to deal with, is that the images are stored in TIF format, and a proprietry TIF format that a lot of image viewers can't handle. We have to work out how we can convert these files to a generic TIF format.

We chatted for a while, basically to work out if it was viable for us to do the work ourselves, or if we had to get the vendor in (who charge $1800/day), to do it for us.

They wanted to know within the next 24 to 48 hours if we could do it.

I said I would probably be able to work it out for them this afternoon.

We finished the meeting, and I went with the DBA back to her desk.

I was still trying to get my brain around the whole thing we were trying to work with here.

She explained it pretty well, telling me how there is a reports table, then there is a documents table linked to the reports table, and then there is an image or other file linked to each document record.

I had a look through a script they have for exporting the images from the database, and figured I could write a wrapper shell script of some description, that would generate requests for the images, and then the standard daemon would retrieve the image from the optical drive, and drop it into an export directory.

There would be some interesting logistics involved.. I won't get away with having 2 million files in a single directory, so I'm going to have to come up with some way to sort all the files, while exporting them.

I said I could probably get something scripted either tonight, or tomorrow night, and have something that runs on Thursday morning, since I am taking tomorrow off to go to a funeral.

They seemed happy with that.

I went and got my memory key, copied some files on to it, scripts, table descrptions etc, so I would have something to work with.

It looked like most of the settings of the export script were done as parameters, but I wasn't sure of the exact syntax. I tried to find the cgi scripts that the web pages call, since they would contain the proper syntax, but apparently we couldn't find anyone with access to the webserver the cgi files are on.

I said I could code up the rest of the scripts, and then just put the syntax of the request in later.

I ended up leaving about 5pm, and I headed up to my mate's place for dinner. I got there a bit before 7pm.

I noticed when I got there, that my tail light and brake light (same globe, 2 different elements) were both out.

I hung around there for a short while, and then we went across to the tennis club for dinner.

I was wanting to come home after that, but my mate reminded me I was supposed to be building a couple of PCs for him, oh yeah.

I went back to his place, dragged all the hardware out.

I went to work building the PCs, hoping to get them done pretty quickly, so I could get home, have a quick look at scripting something up.

I got a pc together, set it all up. While my mate mucked around putting winblows xp on it, I built the other machine.

When the first was done installing and setting up, I used ghost to copy the disk onto the disk from the other machine (instead of doing the install/config all over again), and then I put a cdr drive in the machine, burned a bootable cd with the ghost image on it, to act as a recovery disk for the pcs, since hopefully they will end up with about 8 of them.

After that was all done, I tested it, put the second machine together, tested it, everything worked, so the machines were put together (cases on etc), and packed away.

I ended up leaving my mate's place about 10.45pm.

I decided to pop in and see my mate (where my bike is parked) on the way home, who I'd been intending to call, to find out what the plan was for going to the funeral tomorrow, and if I could ride down in the car.

I got there about 11.15pm, went in and spoke to him briefly, he was working in the morning first, so he'd be heading down really early. I said I would get sorted in the morning (go to the hairdresser etc, so I don't look like such a bum), and then ride down.

I came home, I checked my email, got my suit out ready, and I went to bed, before midnight for once.