IceSamurai.net

While working at Student Support Services, I noticed that we spent an awful amount of man hours compiling statistics to report to the Dept. of Education. This I saw was at least twice a year, and created a large amount of stress for the director and associate directors. Coming from a computer background, I figured I could whip something up that would help out.

Spring 2006 — Now my goal is to revitalize it and make it into a desktop or web based program with a full fledged RDBMS to back it. A few things I’m planning on for this implementation: Java, Java and more Java. I recently started at a new company which allows me to finally get into Java development full time, so I figured I’d start putting it to good use. Besides, I need a hobby/project for when I’m at home.

Back in 2002, I messed around with the idea of building this thing in Visual Basic (a horrible language as I found out), but still, Visual Studio .NET gave me a few ideas.

The best part of this project is it can use any number of technologies very well, Java technologies of course!

• Java Web Services — allows me to build other client applications that allow for distributed access to the main server application.
• RDBMS (database) — Apache Derby (default database, other DBMSs may be plugged in)
• Web presentation layer — Apache Struts / Tiles. Using it now at work, loving it. But perhaps I’ll look at Java Server Faces (JSF), or if I’m feeling really up to it, OpenLaszlo (XML-based markup that can be compiled out to Flash or DHTML).
• Object-to-Relational Mapping — I’m looking at Hibernate (from JBoss [now RedHat]) and Apache Torque right now, I just want to stay away from an ORM that relies heavily on Java Reflection (it’s quite a dawg from what I hear).
• Project Management tools: Apache Maven. Heard great things about it, integrated library repository, Ant, the works!

At this rate, maybe this project will be entirely made up of and created by Apache projects. Later on I’ll probably look at developing an actual desktop client, I’ll definitely have to build a Mac-based client (I use OS X, and I know a lot of schools still use a lot of Apple hardware, particularly now with OS X being Unix-based.

Summer 1998 — My first try was an application built with Perl w/ the CGI.pm module, it was a web based form for tutors to enter in attendance records. It had it’s flaws, first off, it was using Perl. Don’t get me wrong, I love Perl, but I have since fallen in love with other programming languages that are better suited to web development, of course I may give mod_perl a try just for the fun of it and see if I can recreate this application from memory… lost all my source code. It proved quite useful, well, until the server it was on went kaput!  The “server” was actually just an old computer running Linux, I actually had to replace the motherboard on it because it wasn’t Y2k compliant.

Part of my Mobile E-Mail Setup HOWTO, I wrote script to convert my Evolution mboxes over to Maildir format

I created a PERL script to run thru and parse Ximian Evolution’s mboxes and convert them into Maildir format. It’s a derived work from Bruce Guenter and Russ Nelson’s mbox2maildir scripts. Supports:

• Directory recursion
• X-Evolution header parsing (message status and flags)
• Normal hierarchal directory or Courier-IMAP directory naming
• By default both X-Evolution and [X-]Status header used, but options provided to override one or the other
• Convert mail marked “old” (X-Status) as read
• Skip or convert unexpunged deleted messages
• Convert Drafts, Outbox, Sent and Trash folders
• A documented manual (man page) – quite detailed

Download version: 1.0.2