Work has been going all right. I’m converting over an old Perl web interface to Rails. It seems so crazy to write a Perl web interface for a MySQL backend from scratch; the guy didn’t use any kind of framework. The project deals with bioinformatics, specifically a fungal database. The database itself is huge: 1.4G. I’ve been going through all the tables and figuring out what is and isn’t necessary. When the guy originally wrote it, the specs were being changed on him, so things are kind of hairy. For example, there’s a pe table and a programsexecuted table; I’m replacing them both with one table called executed_programs. I’m trying to stick with the Rails convention of plural table names, singular model names. So the model would be ExecutedProgram, hence why I flipped the words around. I’m supposed to be taking the project over, but the guy isn’t liking that I’m doing it in Rails. He said it needs to stay in Perl because all the biology people know Perl, and because some of the modules are written in Perl. I don’t think that’ll be a big deal. For one thing, I haven’t heard of the bio folks doing any of this coding on their own. Why else would they hire us? We’re the programmers! As for the Perl modules, if there’s not a Ruby version of them, I’ll figure out a way to incorporate the Perl version in there.