Daily Archives: August 7, 2007

Intelligent systems

I started back at work yesterday, and I’ve gotten up to speed today and gotten a few things done. In particular, I have added some more intelligence to one of the web systems I work on, in order to avoid duplication of users. It’s the form for creating users I’ve been working on, and it now looks at the data you enter, compare it to the data already in the LDAP directory, and tries to guess if the user is already there.

I showed it to a colleague, having explained the nature of the script, and we agreed it looked okay. Then I showed it to my boss, who immediately mistook the functionality for a search engine – clearly unwanted behaviour! I will have to find a way to make it more obvious that it’s just trying to help you.

Now I think I’ll sit down for half an hour and practice on my piano.