Status Report

[Jason Pincin <chardros@linuxkb.org>]

Hi guys,

In my last status report I mentioned that there would be another commit of functions.php3 coming and
I stated a week or two.  Well, that commit is currently slated to happen Tuesday, Dec. 21.

You may have noticed I've been a little quiet on the list, and this date is not as soon as I would
have liked.  Linked to the stories behind these two things is good news... and bad news.

Bad news is - I've done VERY little over the past 3 or 4 days.  Almost nothing.  I've been in a
reactive support mode.  Anything you guys need I'll try to tend to, such as I'll be updating the URL
format as Aaron mentioned in one of his last emails.  This trend will continuet for me until this
coming Monday.  I've been swamped by a very big project deadline that will come to a head that day.
This deadline has sucked just about all my time from the KB.  Now... thats the bad news.

The good news (and I think it's wonderful news)... is that as of the 21st (or Monday evening on the
20th) I will be less one HUGE weight (the project I speak of)... and I will be able to focus just
about all of my time on the LKB.  This includes my working hours.  Which means I'll be able to easily
get 10 - 14 hrs a day in on this thing in the final weeks before Alpha go-live.  I can get a lot of
work done in 14 hrs.  

I landed this sweet deal with my employer by agreeing to the upcoming deadline... so although it has
sucked all my time for the last week and the coming week... I have traded that week and a half of
part time LKB development for 3 - 4 weeks of full time LKB development :).  Sweet I think.  So...
provided my employer keeps there promise... You'll be getting a LOT of status reports from me next
week, and I'm sorry I don't have more to report in this one.

A lot of other people are doing some really great work though.  Aaron has been working very hard to
provide us with an awsome array of features for one of the most important features of the site...
searching.  Make sure to take a look at what he's doing.  It's very cool stuff.  Thanks Aaron!  And
Thanks Marc for the HT://Dig enhancments!

And Dan is working hard to make sure we have all article submission forms, etc in place by Alpha
go-live, because alpha go-live is going to be a very critical point in the attraction of
article-writers.  It's very important that these tools are ready for that day, so look at that stuff
and give Dan any feedback you can think of as he shows us more and more of what he's been up to.

I don't think I've introduced myself to HUGO... Hi Hugo!  I'm liking what your doing!  It'll be cool
to eventually have applets and tie-ins to desktops to allow ever easier access to the information
we'll be housing.  Hugo's already taking the initiative to get the fundamentals together to allow
this.

Thanks go out to everyoe helping!  These are just areas I've seen a lot of talk on lately.

Whats coming in my next functions commit (before I start helping flesh out forms to make this site
useful)...  Object/User security.  I've been talkin about that one for a while.  It's gonna happen
this time.  In addition to that, a host of other functions to make working with objects far easier.
Functions for sorting and returning arrays of children... even recursively.  This may help with the
Application stuff you've seen Aaron talkin about... which I just got done talking with him about on
IRC.  Functions for makeing URL's MUCH easier to deal with.  It will be much simpler to embed links
in yur pages when you want to change actions or whatever... with a print_url().  It'll take the
object, action, etc as parameters and output the correct URL.  By using this you'll become immune to
any future URL changes like the ones about to happen because of HT://dig stuff.

And stuff like that :).  By no means should anyone hold off for this.  Keep pluggin.  Anything you do
now will continue to work... :).

Thats all for now.  


-- 
Jason
Linux Knowledge Base Project Leader
http://vodka.linuxkb.org/~chardros