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

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 it down the back of the sofa. Who knows?

Not Only But Also (11 Jul 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.

EURES Used as a 'Backup' Scrape (5 Jul 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 Jun 2010)

I, Martin Sullivan, who's the author of most, if not all, of the stuff on the ZOIS web-site is now a part-time employee of a company called MegaNexus, who offer Human Resources Management type services. I think you could say that's what they do. They are, or at least one of their principals is, anxious that I continue to provide my JCP scrape feeds and do the odd little bit of scraping software for them. It is good, it makes me feel wanted, and 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. MegaNexus is a spin-off of the Computer Science department of University College London, so it's nice to be in some geek-heavy company, even it it is only by e-mail.

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.

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.

Older Than This

Site Archaeology can be found in the Old Releases page.

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 the last couple of months or so ...

TN-2010-03-13

Scraping Jobseekers Direct (published 2010-03-25).

TN-2010-02-17

'Click-through' on Stateful Third Party Web-sites Using PHP (published 2010-03-12).

TN-2009-11-15

Quick and Dirty Ajax (published 2010-03-07).

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

$Date: 2010/07/11 07:18:59 $