What's it all about, Alfie?

I finally got the search and scan features working on the page. It's interesting that it's all being done with a single PHP script - doing different things based on the different user-supplied inputs. It's nice to see that I still have the chops. Small, fast, solid code that works with a variety of inputs to reach a single goal. Nice indeed.

On an historical note, I've decided not to import the diary entries from the previous incarnation of my on-line journal. There's a lot of good information in that diary, but it's almost all in relation to the projects I worked on at BankOne. And while I don't think there's a thing that's really business critical I think I'll put it off for at least a while. It's always possible to import it later, if I really feel the need.

This is interesting... I'm looking at pgaccess and seeing that it's a lot more like Microsoft's Access than I originally thought. It might be the perfect tool to build a simple little form for inputting these journal entries. I haven't worked a lot with it, but tomorrow I'll certainly play with it and see what the possibilities are. My goal is not to have a professionally done tool yet, I'm just looking to get something that automatically handles the CURRENT_TIMESTAMP so I don't have to worry about the time I enter these entries, and something where I can do a little bit of editing.

Today I finally started the second-generation of my daily journal system. I have wanted to come up with a better way to do it, and this morning it seemed like a natural to simply keep the contents of the journal in a PostgreSQL database and update it as necessary. With this structure I now have to ability to search the database, as well as not having to worry about the format of the viewing page. It's all in PHP. Excellent work.

In the future I want to create a simplified way for entering the journal entries - as opposed to using pgaccess, as well as adding search and scan capabilities to this page. For searching, I'll probably just use a character string with date limits, and for scanning I think I'll allow the user to enter date ranges and see what's in the journal between them.

I've been looking for a new position as BankOne just isn't doing it for me anymore, and I had some really good talks this afternoon. I hope they turn out to be positions similar to what First Chicago was when I joined here. That was a wonderful place spoiled by BankOne.