18 April 2026

OK lets leave yesterdays post for the record and start fresh today.

Back in the 1980's I was happily working with Borland BCB as my development framework, and all of the systems worked off that. We had developed a simple graphics card that allowed multiple monitors to be hooked up and used as for information displays. Four 625 line RGB feeds of each card, and a number of ISA cards could be driven of the one machine. Novel at the time since multiscreen did not appeared in windows until a little later. The quality of Microsoft's software was poor and some of the language used in the driver software should never have been allowed to be published, but we got by and displayed systems running 16 and 25 monitor stacks at many locations at the time. Of cause today multiscreen displays are standard as my current 11520 by 2160 desktop attests. While demonstrating a 4 screen setup to the Benefit Agency, a chance conversation opened up one major path, and the Caller Management System was created. This started life running on a single 286 based computer talking to an array of simple alphanumeric terminals. The Benefit Agency had not at that time even started to use computers, with everything being done on index cards and paper. Waiting times were logged in hours and the early systems at least kept track of just how long people were waiting. A fuller history can be found on the LSCES website, so lets keep to the software side of things. One thing that the BA system was initially not allowed to do was to identify callers, they were just a ticket number, but fairly quickly that bar was lifted as staff realised that information on previous visits could save a LOT of time, so the data management side came important. Being Borland based, Interbase was the obvious choice to handle this although the decision to end of life it in 1999 caused a lot of problems which initially resulted in the code being open sourced and Firebird came into existence. Many critical services had been using Interbase and when the accountants realised they had made a mistake they tried to close the door again ... and failed. Borland changed hands eventually being taken over by Embarcadero in 2007. I did keep up the annual fees to keep the development framework working, but by then the alternate path had already appeared.

At the end of the 90's, computers were starting to appear on the counters and interview rooms of the BA, so a request was made to replace the keypads with something on the computer, and making that browser based seemed an obvious move, so adding PHP into the mix happened. I was involved with the development of the early releases of PHP5 and actually went live using the beta release rather than PHP4. Since Firebird was not yet active, we still had to rely on Interbase, but that was supported by it's own PHP driver. This was also supported by a PHP library ADOdb which has been my base since day one. The original CMS web based code worked happily into the 2020's and the last systems were only taken out of service with the closure of face to face offices as a result of Covid.

There had been a development of a much more powerful version of CMS which offered a lot more flexibility, but in the end it never got rolled out live, however it was used on several websites such as my son's Cotswold Security support system. The original base was tikitwiki, but as with the BCB based systems, the core developers had rather blinkered views and adding functions was somewhat frowned on, so I became involved with a fork called tikipro which was based on a modular approach to functionality. It was renamed bitweaver following complaints from the tikiwiki project and I see that project has now adopted simply tiki. The latest build of bitweaver is what is running this site with Nginx, PHP8.4 and Firebird5 backing it up, and the forked code is fairly well documented on github. In addition to the ADOdb based stuff I have been forced to with Laravel's illuminate and the current driver for that is also on github. This was because while I struggled to keep phpgedview working with PHP8, the more active fork of that, webtrees, had dropped ADOdb and move to illuminate. I have the family tree back up and running finally, with everything stored in Firebird which is comfortable at least.

James had a falling out with his original employer before setting up Cotswold Security, and to tide him over he took over Rainbow Digital Media. The history of this is documented on that site and many of the customers were converted to bitweaver as soon as it because apparent that their sites were not as well protected as he had been lead to believe. I ended up stepping in to wipe a lot of inappropriate or fraudulent content that was sitting on sites that used an assortment of frameworks that had not been maintained at all. Initially the hackers were still accessing the sites which was also fun, but once the various back doors were eliminated, often simply by disabling on line editing of content, we got things back under control. The move to using bitweaver provided a secure way to restore clients edit facilities and in many cases, the existing style sheets could be mirrored as a bitweaver theme very quickly. Although a few clients did pay for redesigns as part of the process. Following James's death and with a number of live sites having been moved to their owners own hosting, only a few sites remain on the RDM banner.

That brings us almost up to date and where I am today. One thing that I have been trying to add to bitweaver for many years has been the ability to use pdf files like any other content. Search engines do index the text layers if available, and having spent much time scanning 50 odd years of Model Engineer magazines, being able to view an index of them on line, search for particular content and then display a selected result actually opening it on the right page with it's find function available has been a dream. Dolphin on my Linux desktop can search the content ... along with libreoffice content as well ... but then one has to manually find the relevent page. So what I have achieved in the last couple of weeks is a search that includes pdf text and and in browser viewer that then highlights the search result. All I have left to finish now is protecting access to material that will require a login. It is working fine on the development machine, but getting the production servers to mimic it has been a little problematic. But I will crack it! In the meantime the public domain material just needs processing to read the existing pdfs and update the text field in the database ...