Wow, it's May.

Yesterday I realized a silly old include from day 1 of my PHP/MySQL education was missing from the WhoNose tarball. So I added that a minute ago. I don't think anyone noticed. ;)

In other news... Work with GOVIA is proceeding, albeit slowly. Next on the agenda is refining the submission process handled by what we're calling 'heralds.' As a part of that, we're looking at classification schemes for the media types, which is a task in itself.

Still, it behooves us to rough out some classification before we get the herald process worked out.

I'm also now beginning work on a project for my employer. Employees are to complete weekly reports detailing their activities. The reports then are compiled by department and posted on the company intranet. Currently, this is done with MS Word documents -- each employee has the template and at the end of each week, we email the finished document to our team leader so they can address anything that needs addressing. They merge the team reports and send them to my manager, who's responsible for getting the reports on the intranet.

Trouble is that my manager wastes oodles of time just making stuff look decent -- standardizing fonts and bullets and such (as folks are always changing what's in their document). He wanted a way to streamline that process, so for a while I was looking at utilities that I could work into a Perl script or something to convert *.doc to plain text, add HTML tags and concatenate the reports as necessary.

But a better solution, which he secured some kind of approval for (not sure what 'approval' even means around here sometimes), is a nifty web interface to the whole process.

Originally thinking in the simplest terms, I told him I could get something together in probably 30 minutes that would do what we needed. But the more I thought about, the more useful I realized it could be, so I can't do a quick & dirty job on it.

Current questions revolve around the best way to store the reports and what the pipeline will be like for reports to make it to the official listing on the intranet (including a trip up the chain of command for problems to be resolved).

All I heard was of an 'approval,' so I'm using the tools with which I'm comfortable: the AMP of LAMP, just running on NetBSD instead of Linux. I hope it will be a good way to demonstrate the value of some free software here. I also hope that whenever it's presentable the company might allow me to put it under a public license. It would be a waste to treat it as proprietary, methinks, and it would be good for us, mealsothinks, to acknowledge and contribute to the community as a corporate body.

Anyway... peas.