Taciturn

I've begun coding a little project for work. It's coming along quite nicely - the plan is to have a nicer method of tracking repair requests we send in for all the dying hardware, as well as coming a fraction closer to the elusive paperless office. The reason I started it was because I was sick of typing the same info into our supplier's web form (which incidentally uses an open form mailer — I'll be reporting it to the appropriate blacklists).

Anyway it feels really good to get back into coding after a few weeks off. I didn't plan to have a break... it just happened. Being busy and all. The software is GPLed, but is probably so application-specific to not warrant being listed on anything like freshmeat.

Today another coding project came up at work, a request for a web-accessible system for students to vote for their future leaders (school leaders, that is). It didn't take long for me to realise that this was a tiny (and achievable!) project, so long as someone else has already written an MS Active Directory interface for PHP. Fortunately "Wiggum" has - adLDAP. Hopefully I'll win the tender and get to write a free (as in beer and speech) election system.

The last project worth mentioning is CyberTester by Alexander Yap. It runs on JBoss on Java (which takes 5 minutes to start on a 200 MHz machine — don't try this at home!) and I'm in the process of setting it up on a box at work for evaluation. If we could get Active Directory integration for authentication, it'd probably be the hands down winner. MS AD integration seems to be the selling point for software at work at the moment. Completely understandable, of course. Anyway CyberTester looks really good (though I dislike its name), I'm looking forward to showing off some more great free software.