End of year bonus!

My company does end-of-year profit sharing, so the check before Christmas is usually bit bigger than the rest.

Well, the last two years have been pretty slow as our marketing department has been somewhat asleep at the wheel for years now (we’re working on fixing this), so I wasn’t really expecting anything this year… But I got a small bonus anyway. 🙂

It definitely helps with my ten year plan.

I still need to invoice for all of the artwork I’ve done as well, being as I’m doing that on the side under my own company. It’s not much as I’m giving my CFO a pretty massive discount, but right now I’ll take anything I can get; houses aren’t cheap…

Other than that, I’ve spent the week attempting to re-re-write the 20 year old time tracking software we’ve been using here at work since 2003. 

It’s open-source PHP code running on a Unix LAMP stack and was written in 1998 by Peter D. Kovacs in PHP 3 and using MySQL 3.22. The application was taken over by Dominic J. Gamble at Advancen in 2002 and moved to PHP 4 and MySQL 4… 

Unix doesn’t stand still for very long — so I re-wrote large parts of it in 2014 to bring it up to speed for Ubuntu 14 which was using PHP 5 and MySQL 5.6.

Well Ubuntu 14 is about to fall off of the support list, and PHP 5 is EOL on December 31st. Ubuntu 18 is the new LTS (long-term service) and it uses PHP 7.2 and MySQL 8 — both of which are incredibly different from the older versions… I can’t even use the same password hash algorithm between MySQL 5.6 and 8.

Basically our time tracker will need a complete re-write to work with the new services, which is probably more effort than 20 year old cobbleware warrants.

So now I get to convince the powers that be that they need to use something else.

The complication with this of course is that there is 15 years of familiarity with this application, and that makes change really scary.