Site News

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. There's a page or two of Open OLTP News, that's updated in a very sporadic way too.

Real Soon Now

The Sofa - world corporate headquarters for now

News on little projects that I, Martin Sullivan am involved in that may come to fruition soon, later, or never. It all depends upon what seizes my imagination and if any enthusiasm can be found under the heaps of lassitude found on the desk in front of me. Maybe there's some of it down the back of the sofa. Who knows?

Site News has now been augmented by a dedicated Blog. This Wordpress-powered site has been put together to make the update of News easier and quicker. As such it'll be the forum for more trivial stuff like site outages and tweaks to various bits of the dynamic site. It'll also be the place for some casual technical observations that don't merit something as heavy as a Technical Note or an essay here.

I'll still update this, the Open OLTP News and Update pages on the Home site, but only with the bigger items, so there isn't too much duplication.

Not For Readers in Nothern Ireland (11 November 2011)

For some time we've been scraping JobcentreOnline, the separate Northern Irish goverment sponsored job vacancy web-site has been scraped as a complement to the Jobcentre Database Mirror, which covers the rest of the United Kingdom. This only resulted in a series of FTP files, and was never extended to anyting else. Lately, the Department of Education and Learning, Northern Ireland (DELNI) have introduced severe anti-scraping messures and a somewhat fierce new set of Terms and Conditions. We've therefore withdrawn this service.

There are ways and means, however. Should this inconvenience you and you've a compelling non-commercial case then we can see what we can do.

SOC Codes on JCPM (4 Jun 2011)

Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) Codes have been used since the inception of the Labour Market System (LMS), the computer system underlying Jobseekers Direct, to categorise jobs. For reasons one can only speculate upon, these have now started appearing on the Jobseekers Direct web-site. They appear just as bald numbers, and without explanation. We've stared scraping them and they're appearing as an additional field in the nightly FTP dump. In addition we've added some description to give these codes meaning, when vacancies using this code are displayed. Finally, we've written some code that exploits the code to offer a "find similar jobs nearby" link too. The usual caveats and feedback requests apply; explanations of the Unofficial National Jobcentre Plus Mirror are found elsewhere.

A Generalised RSS Example (18 May 2011)

As you may have seen, we've a somewhat localised example of Real Simple Syndication. This has now been joined by a more generalised version that allows us to look to places that we used to reside in. This page has a search form for towns close to your heart too. They'll certainly be bigger and more important that Cockermouth.

Yet More Style (6 May 2011)

I've been experimenting with Casscading Style Sheets (CSS) again. I used to be meticulous in keeping a Lab Book and I'd add little notes in the margin, in blue, to contrast with the normal black. Vanity says I was quite famous for them. I've therefore been doing a little work on this, to produce something similar on pages in this web site, and the results should be visible in your browser now.

Here's an example of an 'aside'.

This idea of a margin-note is not unique, indeed HTML 5 has a new tag, <aside>, which seems to be designed for this task. In the interests of back-compatability, however, I've built this on <blockquote>. Of course you can examine the source code for this page, but if you mail me and we can discuss the philosophy, technical tips and whatever.

FTP Hiatus (20 April 2011)

The JCP Mirror took a little holiday last week. One of the processes that provides authentication crashed and, as a result, other programs didn't work too well. In a chicken-and-egg sort of way, I could get in remotely to fix it and it had to wait until I was back in the office.

Things are back to normal now. Earlier in the week, although, things were playing catch-up. We apologise for this and we're fixing things so that the failure shouldn't happen again.

A Cockermouth RSS Example (28th March 2011)

We've been looking at our logs and noted how many of you are using Real Simple Syndication (RSS) to access the Jobcentre Plus Mirror database. So, we've done a little work on this ensuring that the 'description' field contains a little bit of description, for example. Also as an example we've put some PHP together to show how an RSS feed may be used in a 'local' page. Initially this was fewer than 20 lines of code, but it's grown as a Javascript asynchronous mechanism was added and then a non-Javascript element that did a similar job. In due course a Technical Note may be written, but until then you'll just have to read the in-page explanation of the example.

New JSON Interface (3 March 2011)

A forth JSON interface has now been added to the 591 system. Json_find_all is a version of the json_find that returns just about everything.

Same Old Site - New Syle (22 February 2011)

We've been rummaging around the web and noted how everybody's a good deal more, stylish than us. We've applied minimal Cascading Sheet Styling (CSS) to our literary musings for a while, but they were quite retro. Now, we've seen our rambly prose pasted over a quite wide screen, and considered it hard to read. We've also found several suggestions, both on-line and elsewhere, that said that text should have a set width to improve legability; it's the reason why newspapers and magazines are multi-column. All this has inspired a bit of CSS hacking and the floating two-column effort you'll see gracing your screen now. We hope that you'll like it, but do send feedback, especially if it doesn't particularly work well in your favourite browser.

Zois.co.uk Moving (21 February 2011)

As part of the changes that have been more or less forced on us by our current ISP, the zois.co.uk Domain will be re-hosted shortly, to give us greater flexibility in the face of these kind of challenges. Expect the odd little hiatus and unresponsive IP address. We are monitoring the situation closely and will try and fix things as they occur.

Older Than This

Site Archaeology can be found in the Old Releases page.

Releases

The author, Martin Sullivan, writes (on 2010-01-13)

I abandoned the formal release strategy some time ago. And much of this web-site has been on a care and maintenance basis since about 2003. My health sabbatical has exacerbated things and the inertia has been palpable. I have recently been moved, however, to start documenting the little hacks that I've done since then as Technical Notes. The following are relatively recent additions, the date of the TN reflects when the original work was done rather than when I got around to actually writing the TN.

Recently Published TN

Recent, as in months old ...

TN-2011-07-11

Building an Asynchronous Portal using Lightweight HTML Injection. (published 2011-07-01).

TN-2010-12-01

Jobcentre Plus Mirror Data Definitions. (published 2010-12-01).

TN-2010-11-11

The Jobcentre Plus Mirror Find Interface. (published 2010-11-11).

The Others are Here ...

If you've not already spotted them there are two sister sites (basically being run from the basement of Stag House). The ZOIS Home site is designated as a rapid prototyping site, to show-off little hacks that might be difficult and/or not allowed by our co-location service and ZOIS Ash, which is a sort-of friends-and-family place of ephemera.

Cockermouth's former Jobcentre Plus office

The ZOIS Home site is home to the Jobcentre Mirror stuff. We scrape the Jobseekers Direct web-site and offer an FTP feed of what we've found. In addition there are two search systems. One is 'canned' and specifically for Cockermouth, together with an explanation. The other exploits the observation that local vacancies are tied to local Jobcentre Offices and yield a better geographical match than the official postcode-based one. Start by finding your local Jobcentre and following the links to a cornucopia of relevant vacancies. You can bookmark the local Jobcentre Office results page and return day after day, until you've found what you want or given up in despair. We've written an explanation of this too. Finally, to prove we're not dinosaurs, we've put a Facebook Fan Page up on this, as an experiment but also to allow discussion and feedback.

Statistics of Sorts

We still get quite a few page requests a month and the logs have been building up. Some lines of Perl later and we can see what pages are the most popular. Here's the top 10 for February, 2010:

• ZOIS
• CICS Overview
• Tuxedo Overview
• Martin Sullivan
• Encina
• Enterprise Java Beans
• Site News
• Contact ZOIS
• ACID
• Mr. OLTP's Answers

~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.