Wondering what it would take to get people to start posting to the Forum. I would be tempted to offer certain priviledges to frequent posters but we are lacking one very important thing, A Poster of any description 😉
Potemkin Steps
I have managed to get the original message as received at the foot of the Potemkin steps scanned and onto the PC. You can see the original here or you can browse the image directory
Tie::RDBM::Cached
I wrote a Perl module several months ago. It’s entirely based on one of Lincoln D. Stein’s modules though I doubt my code is as neat as his would have been. I have to admit I am glad he did all the heavy lifting otherwise it might never have been released ( not sure if this is a good or a bad thing ).
Anyway, I completely forgot I had wrote the damned thing until Jenny mentioned it the other night. This was partly due to me moving PC’s and having several other things that have occupied me for a while (several months). Anyway, after a whole ten seconds wondering if I had actually checked it before release I decided to upload it otherwise I would have left it another several months. There are errors in it, of that I am sure but its out there and if one person finds it useful I’ll be happy.
Building an Online Community
I have installed phpBB2 on UKlug in the vain attempt at starting an Online Community. I am pretty sure it will be as successful as UKlug 😉 but I wanted to install phpBB2 to see what it was like and I did need a message board for UKlug no matter how unused.
I suppose if I could get more RSS feeds and provide a cleaner interface to the search facility I would get a lot more hits but how do you go about advertising that the tool exists? I have tried mentioning it in a few pertinent places but so far traffic is slow
From Russia with Love
I had the pleasure of visiting the black sea when I was in the navy and one incident from that visit really stuck in my mind. We where visiting Odessa which, bar this incident was a beautiful place to be. To cut a long story short we were going out into town and to get there we had to climb the Potemkin Steps which where made famous by a Sergei Mikhailovich Eisensteinenstein’s movie
The Battleship Potemkin.
Or another review for the movie buff’s
It was at the foot of these steps where we where greeted by a young lady handing out flyers. Innocently I took one and the following was the message. I still have the original. The steps have actually been designed so that the top is narrower than the bottom to make them look even more impressive.
Everything including spelling and Grammar are as per the original.
Start
To the Sailors of the NATO Navy
Gentlemen! Continuing active visits of foreign war ships to the berths of Odessa and other Soviet ports show the dangerous tendency to direct occupation of Black Sea Northern coat and of country as whole, which is masked under the name of “partnership for peace”.
We know about existing of American plan “Drop shot” foreseeing the landing of a half-million army army to the Odessa region with the following attack against Kiev and Moscow. It isn’t a secret that exist Western plans to reduction the population of Ukraine from 52 to 15 million with the help of destroying medicine, organisation of famine and spreading of AIDS. Tensity have artificially created around Ukraine and other Slav states.
It’s resembling that Yugoslavian events of the last years have considered by USA and NATO as a range for the further split of geopolitical area of USSR. One can see a directed playing of “Chechan card” and “Crimean card”. The degree of USA intervention into our social and political life mount to defiant scopes.
We, Soviet people, shall defend our Motherland by using all possible methods and shan’t allow to neither foreigners nor traitors to play the master here.
Please bring to the notice of your President, Government, leadership of Pentagon and NATO block that further increas-ing of the West presence on the Soviet territory will oblige us to consider any military man of NATO stepped on our land as a representativve of occupation army, with all consequences arising thereof.
Go Home!
Patriotic Forces
End
Needless to say this greeting was not what I was expecting and it did put a bit of a damper on the whole trip to Odessa. We where very pleased to find out that the residents of Odessa were a very nice bunch of people and we had several really good nights there.
RSS Job feeds
I added another
RSS Job feed to the database today. I NEED more rss job feeds for the database. I have aproximately 13 rss feeds from various jobsites now which are producing approximately 20,000 jobs every two weeks. I would really like to increase this and drop the cleanup time to just under a week rather than two weeks which is what I am using at the moment.
If you know of a rss job feed that I have not already added to the database then please email me with the feed URL and I will add it to the list and then you can search the feed along with all the rest.
Additional features for XML Resume
The XML Resume builder tool is coming on quite well. I have added the facility for users to edit the way the resume will look. This is a time consuming task and I am only about one third of the way through. It is effectively a very large form that has sensible defaults and the user can select which area they want to look different and make the necessary changes. I am hoping to finish the majority of the work this week so that I can start work on Parrot again.
We have objects
Parrot has now got objects, which means the limitations we faced before in building the DBD for Parrot are no longer there.
Parrot not having objects meant we couldn’t get a usable DBD for parrot without real hackery and much jiggery pokery. This happened at just the right time for me because I started a new job and the fourth year of my degree started in February as well which meant I was very busy in February.
Tim, punctual as ever, emailed me as soon as objects and various other bits were confirmed and suggested we start work on it again.
More on XML Resume
I have managed to get a beta release of the HR-XML Resume builder working at
XML Resume Now all I need to do is move the site to using Template Toolkit and write some helper applications and we are ready for some users to try it out. If anyone reads this I would love some feedback on it.
XML Resume Builder
The XML Resume Buider is now working. I have been very busy trying to get
XML Resume wiped into shape. Jenny came up with the design and I implimented it. I like the design but the user interface is far perfect at the moment but its getting there. I have also added the HR-XML builder tool to the site. To use it you need to create an HR-XML compliant xml resume. I provide templates for this, all you need to do is fill in the blanks then upload then load them into the tool. The output can be either PDF or postscript.
There is only one stylesheet at the moment but I am dedicatiing some time this week to try and get another one knocked up. Ideally I would like users submitting styles of their own for inclusion in the list. This would make the tool much more useful.