Category archives: Knight Errant

Happened across a reference that says the GST reduction (from 7% to 6%) happens on July 1st. I'd thought it already happened (i.e. on June 1st), so my last invoice was off in the calculation. Annoying that I'll have to eat the 1% difference, that's only $24, but still...

Couldn't get to sleep until past 2 or 3 in the afternoon and only slept fitfully from then until 7. Wound up only get 2.75 hours of work in. I was all set to worry about it, then I looked at the invoice for the week (I enter each day's work on the invoice at ...

Too much coffee at the bar this evening, so couldn't even think about sleeping. Spent the entire night (well, other than a couple of emails and a blog post) doing paper tests for approaches to the Open Source billing system.

The idea being that I'm trying out ideas for how to structure the system (and ...

Went to Unix Unanimous this evening. Spent most of the post-meeting-post-dinner drinks talking with Dave and his partner (Andrew? Didn't get a card) about their upcoming Open Source accounting package (Python + PostgreSQL) and the potential of integrating my planned Open Source billing/provisioning system for Cable TV, Internet and VoIP into that.

Also scored a ...

Turns out there were a few problems in the MTA provisioning, but the one that killed me was that I didn't restart the compilation services (SOAP servers) when I updated their code. Combined with a UI issue with the MTA's web front-end, it took quite a bit of time to track down the problem. There's ...

In any project you'll have areas that are under-tested. Today has been mostly about finding those areas and fixing them. Nothing enormous until about 5pm this evening when I asked a friend who's acting as a guinea pig for us to reboot his router in order to go live on the new system... and nothing ...

Looks like the launch is finished. No hiccups in the final deployment, everything smooth as silk, just flipped the switch and the new system started controlling the backend. Testing runs working without difficulty, so I'm going to consider the day finished. Nowhere near as long a process as I'd planned for (yay on that!)

About 3/4 of the way through the launch now. All of the preparation is done that can be done pre-cutover, so just need to wait 4 hours to do the actual switch and make the live system the driver for the back-end.

The new system is running happily with the tagged code. A few minor ...

I've got an upcoming project to do some coding/customisation on an Open Source billing system, so figured I would spend the evening exploring how it's put together. It is far less involved than even the VoIP plug-in to the billing system I just finished, let alone the system I'm contemplating building. It has no dependency ...

Spent the day in minor bug fixes and presentation tweaks. Nothing that makes one particularly proud at the end of the day, just stuff that has to be done if the product is going to launch. I didn't wind up compensating for yesterday's missing 1.5 hours, so I'm about 2 hours short of my goal ...