Many Pies

Many Pies

Thursday, November 24, 2005

This really is the stuff of science fiction:
I want to know which version of SQL server I'm running. I type into Google
"find out sql server version"
and the top result tells me what to do.

You could imagine an SF novel:
"He opened his terminal to the global megabrain and typed in his question. The answer came back in a split second."

I've been doing some PHP coding and Google is my online documentation. Compared to when I last did some serious coding - 6 years ago, things have moved on so much.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

I've dipped my toes into Google maps gplotter.

We've got a commercial product from AFD to do postcode to national grid mapping, but I also tried this hack, though it was slow.

I converted national grid to latitude and longitude as required by gplotter using a spreadsheet and a hand-written macro to do it on a list in a spreadsheet.

The results look good, but I can't show you them.

Edit: postcodes to grid reference data is now available for free. See my post about getting postcodes in a constituency for the source.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

I finally got my answer about versioning. Or at least an explanation as to why it doesn't just do it out of the box. It makes me realise that you can't "just" add version control to a product - what about staging, branching, diffs, etc. etc.
I have a simple question - Does Plone support version control of documents? I would have thought it does, as it's a pretty basic requirement of any CMS I would have thought. Can I find the answer quickly though? No. There's a project for Zope version control which hasn't got anywhere since 2001 it appears (though some page were changed this year). It says it's going to be in Zope3, yet Zope3 doesn't appear to support it.

So I'm still searching.