For those of you that have not heard, my grandfather is very ill and in the hospital.  I’ve been back and forth to LA several times this last week to try and help out the family as much as I can.  Even better, I picked up a really nasty cold somewhere along the way.  All in all, I’ve missed a bunch of classes, a few assignments, and a midterm.  I’m playing catchup, first and foremost on Open Past Midnight.  It’s one thing to get behind on my own work, but to set back my whole group is not acceptable.

That said, we’re transitioning the Open Past Midnight project to Rails since we’ll need to be dealing with our own database.  I’ve already got Evan set up with the dev environment.  Then again, he’s running Leopard, so it took all of 5 minutes.  The other teammates all use Winblows, so it might take some extra time.  Either way, I am eternally grateful that Rails 2.0 now uses SQLite as the default DB.  No longer will I need to take time to explain MySQL privilege tables to my classmates when all they want to do is some basic development.

More to come in later posts, but we’re still going to try and deploy this project on Dreamhost.  Since it’s hardly a commercial endeavor, I’m not as worried about DH’s poor Rails support.  It will be interesting though to see how far they have (or have not) come.

Due to some slight difficulties in acquiring the needed domain name, our COGS group has changed its name to Open Past Midnight.  We’ve been working on some paper-prototypes for the site layout.  Vivien found a very cool possible technology for generating heatmaps called gheat.  Given the implementation, I don’t think it will be directly usable for our project, but it does lend some great ideas.  There might be parts that we can yank out and use.  We’ll see.

I’ve also been working a lot on the server-side systems we need to make this project run smoothly, both in development and production. Just as with Rails, Capistrano is my friend.  I’ve almost got it working for this project, even though we’re likely to do any back-end code in PHP.

Also, it turns out that Google will pay you to submit verified listings of local businesses.  They call it their Business Referral Representative program.  If we’re lucky, we can get into the program and get paid for doing all the data gathering we would anyway.  More to come.