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Archive for February, 2005

This weekend I have been putting in some enormous amount of overtime, working on a rehaul of a few of FreeMED’s features. In particular, I have been pounding away at getting the scheduler completely rewritten, since the current one was only supposed to be a temporary hack. We’re moving to a template-driven resource-based scheduler, which so far seems to out-perform the old one in terms of usability and efficency. We’ll see if it progresses far enough for me to replace the old scheduler in CVS.

I’m also working to try to set up “ticklers”, which allow the system to perform actions at specified times (even when no one is logged in, et cetera) and “notifications”, which can be set to remind providers of impending events, since even the most fastidious would forget to follow up on something that occurred six months ago with no notification.

In summary, development is steamrolling along. Everything is being documented as we’re going, so hopefully other people won’t be so bashful about contributing code …

We’ve had the great pleasure of having Bob Thurston, a terrific violinist, in the studio to lay down some tracks for Natasha. He’s not only a great musician, but a terrific all-around person, and it was a pleasure to have him here. He laid down the violin tracks for four different songs, and we’re looking into scheduling more.

If only judging by the lack of sleep this morning, last night’s recording session featuring Natasha Darius and Jacob Bachand went very well. They laid down an entire song from composition to finished track (well, I haven’t gotten around to mixing it yet … ) over a few hours last night. Hopefully I’ll have a sample of this to post to the site, which will most likely turn up on Natasha’s upcoming studio album. It features some great piano parts from Natasha, as well as guitar from Jake and great melodies and harmonies from them both. I look forward to sharing it with everyone. Now all it needs is a name …

I just added the ability to span directories in FreeMED’s module discovery routines. (Actually, they’re implemented in phpwebtools, but the idea is the same … ) This makes it much easier to seperately version portions of FreeMED, either for branding purposes or just for non-official modules, by allowing entire directories to be seperately versioned.

This probably doesn’t make anyone nearly as happy as it makes me, but it’s a step in the right direction for doing things the Right Way^TM.

Well, that and the fact that I have been putting this change off for months and finally got around to doing it … For anyone interested, it’s currently in the CVS versions of FreeMED (0.8.0) and phpwebtools (0.4.5).

Sometime this coming week I’ll have Jason Bachand in the studio, to work on his track for the upcoming progressive rock benefit compilation The Tsunami Project, which includes tracks from Nick D’Virgilio, Neal Morse, Randy George, IQ, Mark McCrite, IZZ and Jimmy Keegan. Hopefully we won’t let them down … ;)