Week 6 Thoughts and Experiences

Work

This week was mostly productive, though, as does any week in the life of a developer, it contained several snafus that made projects take longer than they should have. I suppose that I am more prone to this than the more seasoned employees here at Sentry, but I also learn a lot when solving these issues. I will now give a brief summary of this week's work.

On Monday I began by finishing up my first unit test. I had a couple issues left over from Friday that I had questions about, and Joe Heth proved quite helpful in dealing with them. Finishing the unit test FINALLY allowed me to commit the changes that I had made to the Search/Audit Tool. I also did some blogging.

The rest of my week involved three more "commits" and almost a fourth:

• VPN Setup Tool -- I edited this tool to allow Implementation to have read-only access. This involved disabling all of the fields and hiding all of the links for Implementation users.

• FTP Account Tool -- This tool was edited so that Implementation could not modify an existing entry's Account Name, SFTP toggle switch, or affiliated VPN Tunnel. This seems easy, but it proved quite difficult, as I could not just disable each of these fields. Disabling the fields resulted in the values in those fields not being passed when the form was submitted. Joe and TVR helped me find a tricky javaScript solution to this problem.

• Pyxis Feed Editor -- I added a 'Paranoia Alert' radio button and 'Paranoia Alert Comment' text field. This involved adding support for the two new fields to the SourceFeedDAO.php object.

• Sentinel home page widgets -- There are a number of widgets that link to different parts of the system. Thereare several "Manage" buttons that are directly linked to pages andignore any permissions. I am working to allow those buttons to be visible only to users that the buttons will actually work for. (Previously we just sent the frustrated users back to the Datanex home page when they did not have permissions to click the button) This is proving to be a little harder than it should be, as I had to add some functionality to the smartURL function and am having trouble finding users to possess so that I can properly test if my changes are functioning correctly.

Fun

The past couple weeks, I had three visitors! My brother Zach and his wife Megan visited for a week, and then my sister Rachel also visited for a week. Needless to say, our one-bedroom apartment was pushed to its limits, but, thanks to our pullout couch, a newly purchased air-mattress, and accommodating roommates, the visit was a success. We went to several awesome restaurants, including Old Key Lime House, which is supposedly Florida's oldest waterfront restaurant. I got a Mahi-sandwich, which was quite tasty! Zach and I went golfing at Palm Aire Country Club's "The Oaks" golf course where I didn't play particularly well, but shot a 92 and still managed to beat my big bro who was using unfamiliar, borrowed clubs. We did lots of other fun stuff, but I am going to stop here, as I would like to begin Week 7's work.