Interesting Day

Posted by stephen on Thursday, 13th October, 2005 @ 23:29

My current task at work is working with my boss Richard to redevelop Carpenters Connect, which was the original prototype for the Wired-up Communities project. Carpenters Connects runs on 13 different operating systems, including all sorts of proprietary, expensive systems. The idea of the RegenTV project is to replace this with an easy to deploy and easy to manage open source solution.

Well, that's the idea, it's been rather hard work so far, with all kinds of issue, even with IBMs help. I'm not allowed to speak my true opinion on all the issues, but the important thing is Richard and I have actually managed to get the system to a point where it's working pretty well on our alpha site.

And so now it's time upgrade Carpenters Connect to RegenTV. Which is what I've been doing this week and what I'll be doing for the next month or so, except for next week, when I'll be on holiday in Spain, so there may not been any website updates from Monday until I get back on Sunday.

I can't wait to get away and relax a bit. Especially as I got my car clamped in the work car park today as I forgot to put my permit in the windscreen. Annoyingly the clampers were closed when I rang them at 5.40pm, so I'm staying in London tonight, thanks to Richard for putting up with me.

Anyway, holidays. I loved my break in Wales last month, but there was loads of driving. It'll be nice to spend a week in the sun, sitting next to the pool, eating in a restaurant and drinking sangria in the evenings, with absolutely nothing to do. Talking of Wales, I've finally uploaded the last of my Wales pictures in the images section.

Now, back to work. We're lacking somewhat in documentation at the moment, so while we rebuild Carpenters both of us will be using our web sites to document the process where possible. Most of mine will be in the docs section and Richard has started a techie blog. The idea of RegenTV is that anyone should be able to come along, read our documentation and build a system. Obviously we'd prefer you give us a pile of cash and we'll give you the benefit of our years of experience and the bits we didn't write down ;)

In the mean time, on my site you'll find our todo list and the start of my LDAP server documentation. It's incredibly useful technology, if not as supported as it should be in the basic network services packages (DHCP and BIND spring to mind).

So you can look forward to all kinds of incredibly exciting (to me) documents about our experiences of setting things up from scratch. Today we've setup our Cisco PIX firewall, mostly, and created an LDAP directory, mostly.