MadMode

Dan Connolly's tinkering lab notebook

25 Aug 2004

I'm developing an interesting relationship with my chiropractor... Dr. M is my customer sometimes. The first time, I helped him recover his data when part of his disk went bad. I thought it was going to be as simple as mounting the VFAT partition under linux, but it wasn't... the disk was bad in some really strange way... I had to copy the raw partition to another machine before I could mount it.

The next project is...

bottles

This is database application; I think of it as a COBOL program; I wrote database apps in COBOL in high school. All the programs had add, change, and delete screens.

This is a product development project, not a research project. A program is something that works for the developer; a product works for the customer. I haven't done product development in ages.

I have a friend that does PC tech support and occasional database development. I thought maybe a MS Access thing would be more "normal" for the customer and I was getting ready to let my friend take over the project. But then he told me that deploying MS Access apps is too hard. I didn't need convincing! So we're still thinking about how to work together.

Now I'm putting together something with sqlite and twisted python's DB stuff. It's fun!

I did the database design GRDDL-style: wrote it in XHTML with Amaya, converted it to RDF/OWL with XSLT, and converted the OWL to SQL with some more XSLT.

Where's the source, you ask?

Dr. M wants to sell this thing to his peers, so I'm noodling on the license. Maybe dual license? Or just charge for support? And it's not really a w3.org thing... and I'm not sure I want to use my family website for product devleopment. Hmm... maybe webtechs?

Meanwhile, I'm trying out subversion. The docs are pretty good, so far...