What gives?

[WILL]

Put the German kid to work for ya! They're pretty ingenuitive people.

Although is there any change of getting an extra 1 or 2 days dev time?

As I said, I'm going to be fairly flexible for the deadline. As such I may add a couple of days onto the end to allow people time to get their entry uploaded to the FTP. The deadline won't be as hardcore as a PGD Annual competition would.

[cairnswm]

Work takes up a lot of time - fotuntly I have the opportunity to code in Delphi at the moment. (Wrote a code generator that creates Oracle scripts to migrate and merge data from 7 different databases in to 1 - a total of about 3 billion records being migrated in 3.5 days - also written a full deployment tool to distribute other application automatically between 100 windows servers runnign Citrix)

I play a few online games at the moment - my favorite at the moment being GPRO.net which is very data/formula driven and I am writing tools in php and delphi to store data and to try analyse the hidden formulas in the game (a full data website in php and a multiple regression analysis tool in Delphi)

I still do a lot of exercise - in May this included a 500km race which we completed in 103 hours - to keep fit I ride my bicylce to work and back once or twice a week.

Got a family to manage - 3 kids and a wife can take up quite a bit of time.

So yes - this is busy times - just wish I could drown myself in the PGDmC entry i am working on - I last looked at it about 4 days ago.

[Traveler]

Busy times indeed. Sounds like you've got your hands full with some exciting stuff.
As a related topic, I'm currently waiting for a customer to implement a DB migration tool I wrote some time ago (also in Delphi). If all goes well it should migrate about 13 million records. I already thought that was a lot, but..... 3 billion records?!

[cairnswm]

The South African electricity producer's distribution division runs accross 7 regions in South Africa. Currently their maintenance system runs as 7 different instances. The current project is deploying a new version of the system and doing the consolidation of the environments into a single database.

Overall there are 3 billion records being migrated by the tool, however 1.9 billion of these are in one table. You cannot imagine the tricks we are doign to make it run as fast as possible - we thread (running multiple scripts at the same time), run in parralel (oracle parralel functions) and manage execution scheduling in unix scripts.

We are scheduled to go live starting the 11th of July, but expect a week or so's delay while the client gets their networks sorted out.

[code_glitch]

99% complete.... Oh wait, no power AAAH! ESKOOOOM! I hate you load shedding