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

It was all so simple back then

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

MSP Experiments (5 January 2011)

As I'm the proud possessor of an Android based phone I've enhanced its ability to do e-mail by installing a Mail Submission Protocol (MSP) system here at ZOIS Towers. This uses Postfix rather than our normal Sendmail, and involved a slightly convoluted configuration between it, authentication and security. It also had to play nicely with Sendmail, which remains our primary Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). Although all this is well documented on the web, it did prove a bit of a geeky fiddle. If anybody is interested in my, probably unique, experiences e-mail me and I'll share the joy.

Network Problems to home.zois.co.uk (8 January 2011)

Home.zois.co.uk is where the Jobcentre Plus Mirror lives. It is physically located in Stag House, Cockermouth.

The external IP network in use here in Stag House appears to be running particularly slowly since the New Year. We're only getting about a tenth of the expect peak-hours bandwidth, and as a result many of you are seeing rather slow connections. The code that provides the original Jobseekers Direct page (heavily used by third-parties) in particular is failing with timeouts, for it has to visit the Jobseekers Direct web-site several times to acquire session details. Our scraping efforts are impacted too, but are continuing; the database will not be as immediately up-to-date as we'd like.

So, we'd ask you for a bit of patience while we sort this out with our service providers. This web-site (www.zois.co.uk) is co-located, not at Stag House, and unaffected.

Not Only But Also (11 July 2010)

Reading this and indeed the newer bits of the Home web site, generally, you could be forgiven for thinking that scraping government web-sites is all that interests us (or rather me) at the moment. I should add that my On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) studies have not gone away and, as I've a renewed interest in Biology, I've been looking at some pattern-matching stuff useful in that arena. Nothing that I can boast about so I'll not be posting anything yet, for fear of attracting scorn, but the amateur biochemist is alive and well, and living in Cockermouth.

There's also some 'Historic' Technical Notes that have been languishing in a partially completed state for some time too. Those who know me would not be surprised by this. But I will get around to finishing them, I promise.

EURES Used as a 'Backup' Scrape (5 July 2010)

As a 'backup' the EURES system is currently being scraped, but only for UK vacancies. This allows us to ensure that we've got everything and allows the Jobseekers Direct system to drop its pants now and again and not effect us. That we're scraping EURES as well has obvious connotations for extending our data-gathering activities to neighbouring countries within the European community but we've not done anything about it, yet.

Martin Sullivan an Employee (24 June 2010)

I am the author of most, if not all, of the stuff on the ZOIS web-site and I'm now a part-time employee of a company called Meganexus. It is good, it it shows that I'm willing to return to some-kind of productive work, all be it not the short-term geographically challenged stupidly long-houred grief-fests that I was involved with before I fell ill.

I have still a number of other not-quite commercial things going on with this JCP stuff too, and it's worth commenting on them. A number of sites are taking the FTP feed at least, and some have written to me to say so. Which is nice. And there's STAFFBOOK, who inspired me to convert the limited Cockermouth effort into a national scrape and have been extremely helpful with suggestions and encouragement. Kudos to them and their principal, Paul Esherwood.

Northern Irish Vaccancies Now on FTP Site Too (24 May 2010)

The current 'national' JCP scrape (see the explanation) concerns itself only with the Jobseekers Direct supplied jobs. This means that this 'UK National' system did not have anything from Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland has its own separate system with a not-unreasonable web-site, as these systems go. For the sake of completeness there is now a scrape running on this too, and we're accumulating data and publishing it on the JCP FTP site. For now, the Northern Irish data is kept separate from the rest and is in files prefaced with 'DELNI' (Department of Employment and Learning, Northern Ireland). There's a README and so-forth there and unlike the Jobseekers Direct inspired scrape there's no web-interface for it.

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?

Gratuitous Pluggery (1 April 2010)

Many of the pages had, for the last month, a little side-box plastered on them with an appeal for pro-bono work. It's been up for a month and attracted mostly spam. So, we'll stop now. The original text was:

The Author is currently on health sabbatical, but is interested in the odd bit of pro-bono work by the way of therapeutic recovery. So if you've any odd bits of work that he can tackle on a non-commercial basis from his base in Cockermouth please let him know.

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 (by e-mail, see the biography page).

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 Jobcentre Plus 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 (ms11@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.

Old Releases

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 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.

~Z~

Navigation

This is some navigation, it should appear at the side if the page is wide, and at the bottom if it is not.

Search

Seek enlightenment and wisdom: 

Example: "tuxedo".

Highlights

This site is mainly about On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP). We've some other papers on this:

• Something for non-cognoscente.
• The executive summary.
• OLTP and big computers.
• OLTP and reliability.
• What Transactions are about.
• The need for scaling.
• Tuxedo.
• CICS.

Also of Interest

Juicy morsels from the rest of the site:

• Some site news; it's a sort of infrequently updated journal for the author too.
• Rather specific Technical Notes, the author can still bore people in the Historic Third-person.
• Of the little hacks that have been done recently, the Unofficial Jobcentre Plus Mirror seems to have gained the most traction.
• Other ephemeral, eclectic stuff. Mostly photographs.
• A series of Gormless Anecdotes, basically recycled e-mails.

About the Author

His name is Martin Sullivan. He's a fifty-something some-time computer programmer living in the quaintly named town of Cockermouth in north-west England.

The Company

ZOIS Limited is basically a vehicle for Martin and his OLTP work, he owns it. You can find out more about it elsewhere on the main site.

Pro-Bono Plug

Martin is currently on a health sabbatical, but is interested in the odd bit of pro-bono work by the way of therapeutic recovery. So, if you've anything that he can tackle on a non-commercial basis from his base in Cockermouth please let him know. Unsurprisingly, he's particularly interest in biology, again, and the application of computing to it.