The Tech Teapot

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Not sure how to subscribe to a RSS feed? Read Subscribing to blogs the easy way. Thanks for visiting!One of the interesting things about Lisp is the ability to use macros to effectively create your own language. Instead of using Lisp to [...]

It’s been a while. I managed to take a week’s holiday last week and this week I’ve just managed to get the PowerTime tests all nicely green again.
I’ve fixed some very nice bugs in the mean time and the software is a lot faster. The ECAD data is now processed in around 5 minutes instead [...]

I wish I’d found this a few months ago … an open source object database. Absolutely perfect for PowerTime.
I’ve managed to wring a lot better performance out of the SQL persister. The office unit test runtime is now down to ~11 seconds from over 40 seconds.
Things will get harder from now on… all of the [...]

PowerTime is now available on Google Code. You can even browse the code without having to download anything.
The only problem I ran into was the size of the ECAD data set exceeded the quota given to new projects. I’ve now split the ECAD data set so that it is available for download but isn’t versioned [...]

Whilst I’m busy trying to upload PowerTime into Google Code the hairy issue of which software licence to use cropped up.
Open source licences scare the living daylights out of me especially the GNU ones.
I like copyleft licences because whatever rights I grant to the user have to be provided by anybody else further down the [...]

Release early, release often is a mantra of open source software development. In that vein I am releasing a very early alpha of PowerTime, an end-to-end .NET time series database.
PowerTime supports Windows PowerShell out of the box and can also generate graphs too. PowerTime depends upon a number of third party libraries, namely the excellent [...]

Phew, PowerTime is now munching 16 million readings of European precipitation data at last. The images were generated using the PowerShell integration. The graphs consist of rolling 365 day averages. The test run takes 1,365.78 seconds (around about 22 minutes.) Whilst that’s not going to break any speed records, it isn’t as slow as I [...]

I’ve written about my woes finding some good test data sets for PowerTime before…some good news. There is a place you can get hold of climate data for free over at European Climate Assessment & Dataset project. Whilst the temperature data is averaged, the precipitation data is not…so that’s what I’m going to use for [...]

I thought I’d provide a small taster of what you can expect to find in the PowerShell support for PowerTime.
PowerShell includes the ability to treat various resources as if they are akin to a file system. We figured that this would be an interesting way to deal with a time series database.
New-PSDrive -Name ptdb -Root [...]

Whilst developing PowerTime, I’ve kept in mind the requirement that I need to ensure that the software can be built using only freely available tools.
Of course we will eventually provide an installer, but I like the idea that people can build the software on their own machine if they want to.
One way to make self [...]