%title New Job
%date 2009-02-02 20:25:06
:diary:livejournal:fossils:

So, I actually got a new job last week.  Sort of.  There was something of a lateral shift at work and now I have two bosses.  My old boss who makes the stupid homophobic jokes, is still my boss when I don't have any work from my new superior, who is actively homophobic, but okay to be around if I just ignore that.  

<details text="blather about that"><summary>blather about that</summary>Instead of being just LTS now, I'm also doing work for R&amp;D.  In particular, my task has been to modify <a href="http://mrbs.sourceforge.net/">a meeting room booking system</a> to fit our needs:
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<ul>
<li>Authenticate with Active Directory - students and staff may log in to schedule rooms using their campus ID and password.  Since Active Directory is based on LDAP, this part was easy: just plug in the required information in the config file.</li>
<li>Differentiate between students and staff - MRBS already has two classes of user to adapt to this: authenticated and admin; we just have to make staff admins
<ul>
<li>Repeat events - since only staff should be able to schedule repeating events, this just required a strategically placed if-statement around the portion of code that prints all the repeat information in the edit-event form, only executing that if the user is an admin.</li>
<li>Scheduling limitations - students may only schedule events up to two weeks in advance - after a note is put in saying so in the 'else' of the aforementioned if-statement, the form handler checks if the user is NOT an admin and if the date of the event is MORE than two weeks in the future, and gives an error message if so.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Printable pages - any screen displaying schedules should be printed nicely.  While this might've been done with CSS's 'media' attribute, that didn't test out well in many systems, and besides, my boss wanted each of those screens (day, week, and month views) to have a link to open JUST the calendar portion in another window/tab for printing.  This meant just copying those files and commenting the bits of code that printed the header and footer out, as well as removing the create-event functionality from the pages.  Creating the links to those pages was easy, thanks to $_SESSION['QUERY_STRING']</li>
</ul>
</lj-raw>All in all, simple tasks, but stuff my overwhelmed boss didn't really have time to futz around with.  It was a pain working with a codebase that wasn't mine, but what the hell, it was a learning experience.  Now, if only I could get a raise...

</details>