http://techlog.p2061.org Blogging from Project 2061 technology group Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:38:19 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I needed to do a mass resampling of around 280,000 images. There are a number of ways to do this, but I settled on doing it via PHP because the images are stored on our web server, the total size of the images is large (~10GB), and I didn't want ... http://techlog.p2061.org/2008/08/14/playing-nice-with-cpu-usage/ After creating a new structure for the current year's piloting data there has been a bit of disconnect in development between the two data sets. There's just not enough time to ensure that everything works across both data sets. There were basically two choices to moving forward: 1) construct a ... http://techlog.p2061.org/2008/07/25/items-utility-data-conversion-ready/ I was tasked with creating a demonstration of a dynamically generated graph for one of the grant proposals being worked on at present. This isn't something we've really done before in PHP, but I had a feeling it would not be a unique requirement. A quick search revealed that a ... http://techlog.p2061.org/2008/06/19/creating-graphs-in-php/ Piloting packets for this year are starting to come in and the data from these packets needs to be entered into the items utility. Because the questions in the packet have changed from previous years, and due to the rigid structure of the piloting data entry form and data tables, ... http://techlog.p2061.org/2008/06/18/items-utility-piloting-data-entry-updates/ I'm currently cleaning up the items utility so that it can be brought into subversion. I've already deleted unused files and done some reorganization of the site files. Next up I'm going to work on some interface modifications that I hope will simplify the it as well as create some ... http://techlog.p2061.org/2008/06/17/subversion-repository-for-items/ I recently wanted to update our install of WordPress to the latest version. WordPress is a fairly easy install, and we could learn a thing or two about application set-up by examining their code. But I recently switched to using subversion to deploy and maintain our install. In just the ... http://techlog.p2061.org/2008/05/21/using-svn-for-application-deployment/ While working on the Benchmarks search I wanted to try and provide a feature I find useful on Google and other search engines: word form expansion (lemmatisation). A little research showed to me that this would require more work than we really should be spending on search functionality. Especially considering ... http://techlog.p2061.org/2008/05/14/expanding-search-terms-for-more-inclusive-results/ I made a few updates to the school reports at the request of the researchers. Added a save feature so that packet/item selections for a report can be retrieved at a later date. Added the ability to set thresholds that must be met before the script will include statistics in the report. Updated ... http://techlog.p2061.org/2008/05/13/items-utility-school-reports-update/ Since we'll be exposing MySQL to significantly more traffic (due mainly to the transition to a database-driven version of Benchmarks Online [dbBOL]) I decided to spend some time optimizing the server's settings. There are a number of settings that can be tweaked to improve performance. I based my decisions on ... http://techlog.p2061.org/2008/05/07/optimizing-mysql-server-runtime-parameters/ In order to enable easier checking of Benchmarks Online against the print (aka 1993) version, I implemented a switch that allows you to specify the 1993 version as the default tab displayed. To enable to switch you have to visit the utility with the querystring bmtabver=1993 appended. So the ... http://techlog.p2061.org/2008/04/02/bol-tricks/