Archives 2006

One of the reasons I want to create a properly-engineered second-generation billing system is that the first-generation system I work with has a number of hacks that get around things that weren't contemplated in the initial design of various pieces.

Each of those hacks was implemented using the simplest possible design when they were discovered, ...

Finished off the day's work by working on some simple navigation widgets for the billing system. The entire system is built using directed acyclic graphs (of various types). Because of that you can readily construct generic views that let you see the parents and children of any node in the system. I'm still looking for ...

Dipping my toes in the waters of FormEncode today. Basically decided I needed a break from financial aspects, so spent some time roughing out a simple list and add view for Inventory objects (in this particular case, phone numbers/DIDs). Most of the work was:

Figuring out that All and Any values are applied in reverse ...

One of the major wish-list items for the new billing system is the ability to set up differential charging schemes using a tabular setup, so that admins can set up a default table of charges and then sets of overrides to those charges based on a rule match (e.g. you have a given token, or ...

When you run a cable company, it makes sense to have the ability to explicitly and exhaustively define the streets and street-ranges in the town so that you can never have an invalid address entered for service. I've just finished the basic implementation of that for the better billing project, along with the other major ...

Continued work on BetterBilling this evening. Particularly started working on creating stand-ins for the eventual user-driven package-setup functions. Eventually a user should be able to compose a new package (billable thing) out of technical effects (services provided by the backend) and configurations (user choices that control the operation technical effects). For now I'm just manually ...

Other than a few hours on the (largely finished) old project (so far), I've been concentrating today on TurboGears and particularly moving the BetterBilling project ahead. I've been running into (minor) SQLObject bugs here and there, probably because inheritance isn't a commonly used feature and I'm using it extensively.

I've finally got to the point ...

Okay, key tip for debugging TurboGears SQLObject problems, add ?debug=1 to the dev.cfg URL for your database. Once you have that and you try to run a query for an inherited class you'll see the problem, but so that you don't have to set it up, here's the description of the problem and the solution: ...

Did some more work on TurboGears. Found another couple of bugs in the SQLObject SQL generation code. Now failing with the inheritance stuff, seems that the documented ability to do Child.select( Parent.field==something) doesn't throw any errors but also doesn't seem to return the results. Anyway, nothing huge, just little things I'll have to track down ...

It's not that I'm not thirsty
I'm parched to dusty stone
But the timing seems all wrong
For I've just resolved to quit
The search for cups of water
In hopes forgetting hard thirst
Will let me grow to be a man
Who deserves a cup of water