Category archives: Knight Errant

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, ...

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 ...

Decided today was the day to learn TurboGears, so I sat down and started working out a model for the BetterBilling project. This is basically a generic provisioning system for ISPs or VoIP providers that I'm wanting to build.

The version I'm looking at right now is less generic than the envisioned one; that's just ...

Pleasant day in my corner under a plant at Linux Caffe. 7-1/4 hours here, with 6-1/4 hours billable. It's good not to have any temptation to lie down when you're tired/sore. It's also nice having half a dozen different types of drinks available and good food and pleasant conversations here and there. Still don't know ...

Didn't get much past 4 hours yesterday due to hand troubles. Oh well. 4.25 hours is okay, it's just not ideal. Today (if I ever get my posterior in gear) I'm planning to walk down to Linux Caffe and work from there. Mostly I figure I need the exercise.

Sacha was mentioning that a certain large corporation's consultants aim for something like 92% utilisation (I may have the number slightly wrong, but it was in that area), that is, in an 8 hour day they want 7 hours and 22 minutes of that billable.

I would think at that point you have to have ...

We've been stalled on a (trivial) deployment issue for the configs on the VoIP hardware since launching a week ago. Can't for love or money get the stupid things to update automatically. Spent the whole day trying to coax them into doing the update (and eventually just laying out the pathology in the hopes of ...