HindSight Blog

Spent some time tonight trying to work on behind-the scenes details, like CVS and unit testing. I think I kind of have CVS working (using Tortoise CVS) but for some reason it won’t add my css or image files. But maybe that’s better than nothing.

On the unit testing front, I tried just running the unit tester script via a web-accessible page and dumping the output, but that didn’t do anything useful. I guess that won’t be as easy as I’d hoped.

I have the very beginnings of a report happening. You pick a cause Trackable and an effect Trackable, and it displays them chronologically, with the effects grouped with whatever causes they happened between. It still needs some tweaking (and, I’m sure, optimization) but it’s cool to have something to look at.

Tonight I “released” HindSight again, although that doesn’t mean a lot when I have no dev copy, no unit tests, and no source control. Being “live” just means I told a few people the site is back up.

Although this version is missing several things that the last version on DreamHost did, it’s not too far off from what the original v0.1 did. It’s kind of amazing how that version took me months to get up and running and this one was completed in a week. Granted, I was able to re-use some of the code and also all the thinking I did the first time around but I think it still really shows just how far Knickers has come. The appskel starts you off with a site that’s basically usable although not particularly user-friendly. After that, it’s just a matter of tweaking here and there. Pretty amazing.

Spent most of today working on HindSight. Think I’ve about got it in a state that I could start using it for real. Not sure what version number to release it as, though – what do you call it when you’ve entirely started over?

Today I:

• Added the ability to delete Trackables, Trackable Options, and Events from their SFSes
• Made the start time default to now for new Events
• Made duration required for Events where appropriate
• Figured out “Listers” so that it’s now possible to add Options via the Trackable VEC rather than separate VECs
• Added navbar links to Trackables and Events
• Added a few additional links to make navigation somewhat easier
• Started a “Proximity” report that will allow choosing a “Cause” Trackable and then display subsequent events for an “Effect” trackable. Got stalled on that because I’m not sure how to make DataSet not try to join Events to themselves

I also spent an unfortunate amount of time fighting with Knickers. Ran into something weird where I couldn’t get the raw value of a Selector option on a template no matter what I did. After a lot of digging I discovered it was an issue only for FixedLists with Messages for options. Turns out OutputGenerator opts to use objects over static values for tags if it has them. So it’s not possible for Component_Selector to override a previously-set Message object with its static value later in execution. Made a note to talk to the guys about that in a few weeks when everyone’s back. It ate up far too much of my evening.

Hopefully the Proximity Report won’t be too hard to put together. Then I just have a little more decorating to do (an About page, etc) and I can put HindSight out there again.

Tonight I added Trackable type switching to Events. I have it all in the Event Thing at the moment, which I’m not sure I like, but it was so easy to make that work just by altering the fields array with a function called by both a load callback and a set callback for the type. I expected that to work for the VEC but not the SFS, but to my surprise it worked in both places.

I was also able to very easily make Event entry a two-stage process using jQuery and skipValidateAndStore, so that you can pick your Trackable and then see the rest of the Event form. After that I cleaned up the interface a little, hiding pages that people shouldn’t see and making a cleaner create/edit account page.

The only thing I really have left is adding the ability to delete various records. Beyond that, I think a very basic version might be ready for use. It’s really amazing how much easier it is to work with Knickers than it was even a year ago. (And also interesting how weird it is to do development without CVS – I’ll need to figure out what I want to do to resolve that at some point soon.)

I’ve got all the SFSes and dropdowns filtering by current User (which required that I get logins working, which was quite easy) and all the VECs checking that you’re allowed to see the record you’re viewing.

I still need to make it so the VEC and SFS for Events handle Trackable types. After that, the site should be usable. Not fun to use, but possible to use.

Oh yeah, I should also create a VEC for new accounts, so people can actually sign up as new users. And, I suppose, edit their own accounts…

So, it seems that about two weeks ago DreamHost discontinued support for php4. They had mentioned last August that they weren’t going to set it up on any new servers but that it would continue to work “for the foreseeable future.” Well, apparently that future ended on 6/8, without any warning or notification. I only found out because someone tried to access HindSight and found it to be not working at all.

Needless to say, I dropped DreamHost as quickly as possible and moved to InMotion (jury’s still out on them). However, they also don’t really support php4. That left me with a version of HindSight that didn’t work at all on my server, wasn’t compatible with any recent version of Knickers, and wasn’t really what I wanted it to be anyway. So, I’ve started over.

Tonight I created a new DB schema and then promptly realized that without ssh access (InMotion doesn’t offer it until you get up to paying them about $40/month) I couldn’t run the appskel. So, I had to set up my DB again elsewhere, run the appskel (which asks so many questions that I got bored in the middle and started surfing the ‘net), and then copy the files over to my new account. I had a few issues getting it to run there and also realized that no ssh means no unit tests and no CVS as far as I can tell. So, it may be that if InMotion is reliable and I want to stick with them, that I need to do my development work elsewhere and just keep the production version of HindSight there.

In any event, I now have basically a fancy front-end to phpMyAdmin, but it works. In the immediate future I need to get logging in working and filter all data by user, and then figure out how to make the input for Events vary based on their type (the way I did that previously was rather difficult to work with). But once that works, it should be possible to track data again and then move forward from there.

HindSight is hosed atm. I’ve moved to InMotion. Die in a fire, DreamHost.

I downloaded “R” tonight. That counts for something, right?

(Its documentation gave me horrible flashbacks to using Mathematica in college. Hopefully I get over that.)