I don't think I've seen a movie poster as perfect as this one:

Movie info

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Big milestone today... finished the first feature from beginning to end on the new Tabulas control panel. The first one is always hard because it's the one that you use to develop your UI tools; I wrote all the skinning and templating stuff so that everyone gets formatted nicely.

The first feature I completed was usericons. The UI stuff is still not done, but here are the important things that I got done:

• All output messages are being drawn from a centralized language file; this allows for easy translation into other languages
• Editing/deleting/renaming/replacing icon images can be done one at a time, or you can use the checkboxes to edit multiple ones at the same time (a power user tool)
• I rewrote the communication script between the tabulas control panel and the data servers. In essence, there's a private API being used, and it needed cleaning up (in terms of method calls and such, and the horrible spaghetti code!)

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The database is starting to die, so I need to throw more stress at the hard drives, so I may start caching stuff. I didn't want to deal with this before the 2.1 templating engine rewrite, but there needs to be a stopgap measure of some sorts (and I'm pretty sure I can write the code well enough so that I can just copy it over to 2.1). I'll be writing the simplest of simplest caching engines - the system will be responsible for storing timestamps of items as they get updated (for example, the last time someone's particular tagboard was updated); everytime the server receives a request for someone's tagboard, it will first check to see if there is a cached copy that is not older than the last update of the tagboard. If the cached copy is still fresh, it will simply read the cached file. Otherwise, it will refresh the data from the database and generate a new cache file. Very simple. Should only take a few hours to build a rough prototype and throw it into Tabulas, since tagboards were shut down to stave off the death of the database server :)

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Seems like everybody around me is going through some sort of transition stage... I guess this is pretty normal when you graduate from the nice collegiate bubble and your friends get scattered all over the nation cause of jobs. Plus the whole identity thing once you get a 9-5, working for the paycheck every other Friday. Personally, I'm not unhappy with my situation because I really think I got a great situation going at my current job, but I know that eventually sometime I'm going to want something more. Already I've been having longing to have a day when I can just wake up and hack around in Tabulas; it's been so long since I've developed any features that the user's want.

But I guess that's just growing up.