Writing a planner

Here's an article about a STRIPS-like planner that chains together different calls to utilities according to the starting situation - I'd like to do this in the general case.

Decl integration with Padre; musings about actions

Something I haven't spent much actual development time on yet, but ... it's starting to seem that the natural working mode of Decl will be to state that an action will be necessary, then to invoke various interactive services to specify that action more specifically.

So for example, if I have an invoice to issue (yes, yes, yawn) I'd start by just stating, "invoice" and passing that to ... some kind of action-consuming agent. The agent looks at this, sees that it is underspecified, and starts a conversation with me to determine just what it is I expect to do.

Once the action is fully specified (a customer has been selected, one or more outstanding jobs selected, and so on), then I can say, "Do it", and it is done, logged, whatever.

So what interfaces are available to me? Well, let's assume I want to be able to see the structure as it is built: that structure should be in Padre. With Padre::Plugin and Padre::Document, I can do that. Really easily, actually. The documentation sucks incredibly because it's not exactly a mature environment yet - but it's a great design.

So I could easily imagine right-clicking on anything in a Decl tree and getting immediate expert tools to deal with it: set up a database, select boilerplate, etc. It should end up going really fast. I'm looking forward to exploring it.

Thoughts while doing sysadmin

Task: pruning some context tables that contain far too much very old information.

I'm struck again by the fact that my memory can't retain SQL syntax for longer than about a month. When I need to add an index, I have to look it up again. And of course there's no record of what I did last time unless I go back through anything I might have noted down on paper.

I need an administrative tool that can encapsulate actions taken - and log them. People have successfully used VCS systems to keep track of changes to SQL, but a workflow enactment kind of thing would be better. (Perhaps in combination with a VCS system.)

So again: the action.

Database administration systems are a dime a dozen, of course. It wouldn't be hard to slap something like that together based on the transaction patterns a couple of posts back, in combination with this notion here. Deserves some thought - especially given that the same concept could be extended to Unix commands in general. Administration of cron jobs, whatever.

In a larger sense, a sysadmin domain would be able to construct a picture of a system of some nature that could be used to inform the construction of this type of action. This thread of thought is still really vague, but I keep coming back to it. (And have for decades.)

Final solution: wrote a Perl script for each table that gently removes 10K records at a time, and put it in the crontab to run every 10 minutes. Building an index would lock the tables for hours, disabling the database for an unforeseeable period. This is the kind of thing that I should be able to reuse effortlessly.