[H-GEN] Challange for you

[Harry Phillips]

[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
[ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]

> The idea that there are these hordes of programmers out there eager and
> willing to write your program for you, if only you can find them, is
> laughably far from the truth.

I don't know why but I sort of had the as a fuzzy notion, hence my
question to the list. When I thought about the above comments I realised
how wrong I was.

> That's a bit of a pity, as a large part of unix is designed around the
> proven fact that any reasonably intelligent person is able to develop
and
> use simple programming skills.  Now I'm not suggesting that you aren't
> intelligent, on the contary I'm suggesting that you are underestimating
> your own capacity to develop small applications.

Ok, you caught me out, in the last few days I taught myself about sed,
tr, diff, .netrc and using ftp inside a script. I now have a bash script
that checks my directory against a public ftp directory, it will delete
files on my server that no longer exist on the ftp server and download
any new ones. It then alters an NT login script on my samba server so
that when the workstation logs it copies any new files on the local
server down to the workstation.

If anyone wants to see it or have a laugh at how primitive it is or maybe
even check out what I did to give me a more elegant script writen in perl
so I can use variables then I would be glad to have some help.

> Now granted the development of a 100,000 line, all singing, all
dancing,
> request tracker is probably beyond your available time commitment, but
> I suggest you take a look at the url you posted recently,
>
>
http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/Programming/Text_Processing_Pipelines.html
>
> Which discusses one form of programming everyone can learn with only
> incremental effort.

Ok I'll give it a read instead of a sideways glance.

> In the case of the request tracker, I downloaded RT, and took a look at
the
> db schema.  I've included the definition of the Users table[1].  You'll
> notice that the rt application supports alot more than a simple email
> address.  So there is no need to attempt to write an entire request
tracker
> on your own, just find a way to expose the full capabilities of the
Users
> table through whatever interface interests you (I suspect web).  This
is a
> simpler problem, and one you may be able to handle.  If not, then that
you
> are offering to cover some of the costs is signifigant, hopefully
you'll be
> able to find someone to assist.

Is that RT1 or RT2? I was able to get RT1 up and running in one night
with ALOT of help from Robert who worked out why my Apache wasn't doing
what it was supposed to. (It turned out to be a setting that needed to be
inside a sub config file instead of the main apache config.)

I couldn't even get close to getting RT2 installed.

Having said all that I don't know why I didn't do it before but I just
checked sourcforge.net and found a multitude of 'Helpdesk' apps that use
perl or PHP with a mySQL database. I'll check them out.


---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.404 / Virus Database: 228 - Release Date: 15/10/02


--
* This is list (humbug) general handled by majordomo at lists.humbug.org.au .
* Postings to this list are only accepted from subscribed addresses of
* lists 'general' or 'general-post'.  See http://www.humbug.org.au/