Site Archaeology

We've abandoned this formal release strategy thing. But this site is maintained on a month-to-month basis, that's when new stuff is added. Links are checked and maintained at this point too. Here's release info from a million Internet-years ago.

Not So Soon Now

Former news, originally on Site News, but now old News or simply abandoned. Laugh and point at the pointless ambition.

Home and Ash Disappear (24 April 2010)

The ZOIS ancillary web-sites (home and ash.zois.co.uk) as well as the FTP server, ftp.zois.co.uk, were off-air from morning until late afternoon, UK time. The fault seems to have been upstream from our site, there was nothing we could do about it.

ZOIS FTP Site (13 April 2010)

The ZOIS FTP site has been down for a while. The problem largely was due to some bad firewall rules on the server itself. These have now been fixed and you can ftp-away to your hearts' content. The FTP site has the raw data for the JCP National Scrape on it. I apologise for the hiatus, I used to teach this stuff for a living, I can do better.

Hero Rooted (10 April 2010)

As the proud owner of a HTC Hero, I decided to 'root' this device, to gain extra God-like Powers of Installation and Fiddling. It sounds scary, but it wasn't. There are a number of self-help guides out there and I may publish my experiences as a TN at some point too. Can emacs, or indeed scheme, be that far behind?

The 'Pilot' Dies (24 March 2010)

Many of you may remember the Author as a keen Palm Pilot, and successors, fan. Although coming late to this proprietary platform he quite enjoyed using it. Particularly as it could be equipped with a neat little IR keyboard. It is thus sad to report that the last 'proper' Pilot he has just gave up the ghost. It has a surface mounted on-off switch, mounted at a right-angle directly on the main circuit board. This has broken after a number of years of normal use. It's beyond the skills of the Author to repair it but if there's anybody out there who wants the remains for bits let him know (ms10@zois.co.uk).

National Unofficial JCP Site (7 March 2010)

It was inevitable that after the FTP national feed was presumed stable that some code would be hacked up to allow you to find your very own local UK Jobcentre Plus Office and thence to find out what's been posted there (in an arbitrary 48 hour period). There's more national explanation too.

Unofficial Cockermouth JCP Site Updates (17 February 2010)

The current Jobcenter Plus (JCP) search-site is to close shortly (next month). It has been replaced by a new search-site, called Jobseekers Direct. You'll no-doubt be interested to read that it's as abysmal in finding jobs as the old one. This means that we've had to do some programming to scrape the new site and that's all working now. Along the way I've found time to add a 'Twitter' and 'Facebook' share links. You can now note and recommend an individual vacancy on these social web-sites. There's a new link that allows you to view the original posting on the Jobseekers Direct web-site too.

To all you aspiring Lynne Truss-types out there, 'Jobseekers Direct' seems to be the official spelling. No apostrophes.

A National Jobcentreplus Feed (21 February 2010)

We scrape so you don't have to. As may have been observed on a sister-site, a demonstration involving scraping the Jobcentreplus web-site, cleaning out the irrelevant and presenting a list of real jobs on a somewhat retro-looking page seems to have garnered some positive feed-back. We've thought about enhancing this to be useful to others outside Cockermouth. To this end we've started scraping nationally, trying to get all the postings in a day. We're happy that its stable and working so we've start putting the days scrapings on our FTP site as a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file for your nightly anonymous ftping pleasure. We'll also be happy to e-mail all or chunks of this to you on a nightly basis too. E-mail me, Martin Sullivan (ms10@zois.co.uk) to set that up.

The job-postings are geographically tied to a Local Office, signified by their three-letter code. This seems to be significantly more accurate than Post Code in identifying a job's particular locality. We're still trying to identify all the real offices and their addresses against this code, but we've publish what we've got now. We'd encourage others to produce their own unofficial Jobcentre mirrors. We'll help with code, assistance, Technical Notes and encouragement in variable amounts. These files, together with attended README files can be found on the JCP part of the ZOIS FTP site.

In time, we'll almost certainly accumulate a sizeable amount of historic data. We've only just started (2010-01-25) so all you budding SPSS-ers out there will need to bear with us for a little while. Incidentally, the author knows some hitherto undisclosed GNU-R and may be able to help in that department too.

Finally, to prove I'm not a dinosaur, I've put a Facebook Fan Page up on this, as an experiment but also to allow discussion and feedback. It has all of one fan, me.

From the ancient times when we still had a formal release strategy.

rel_12 (10th June 2002)

Started to add a directory of Technical Notes. These as their name suggests are of a technical nature reflecting real work. Their name reflects the date they were written.

rel_11 (1st December 1999)

Ok, it's here, finally all that Object stuff we've been promising. There's a new revamped executive summary; more stuff on WWW Servers; a page on Object Transactions Services (OTS) which are used by Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) and a critique of EJBs. If some of the words used are a little unfamiliar then there is some Object terminology for beginners. Finally, a little has been written on the XML and, gulp, a Java Applet (but we'll let you hunt for that one).

rel_10 (4th July 1999)

A renewed look at Microsoft, with a new page on MTS. Elsewhere reviewed keywords, to allow a more close match with content.

rel_9 (1st June 1999)

A new simpler introduction to OLTP for non-cognoscente such as Brain Surgeons and Rocket Scientists has been introduced.

rel_8 (1st February 1999)

A Table of Contents page has been added as well as well as pages of representative Feedback.

rel_7 (10th October 1998)

Minor corrections (various TPM having changed hands) and link fixing.

rel_6 (22nd August 1998)

The Search page has been amended. Searches no longer include HTML tags (so no false hits from `code') and has been made case insensitive as a default (like so many other search mechanisms on the Web). Maintenance of links has taken place too.

rel_5 (12th July 1998)

A Search page and a Comment Form added as well as general maintenance.

rel_4 (31st May 1998)

A new page for Open OLTP News has been added as has yet more of Mr. OLTP's answers.

rel_3 (2nd May 1998)

A maintenance release with some fixed links and more of Mr. OLTP's answers.

rel_2 (25th March 1998)

The page on the groves of Academia is finally done, some other pages are slightly reorganised and some get pictures! Which ones is left as an exercise for the reader.

rel_1 (27th February 1998)

This site has only been launched relatively recent (publicly seen for the first time on 27th February), so there's bound to bugs to iron out.

$Date: 2010/07/11 07:19:10 $