Subject: Quick update

Date: Friday, October 5, 2001 6:03 PM

From: David A. Day <dad@email.byu.edu>

Greetings dear colleagues!

I hope you are safe and well. Thanks to many of you who have expressed kind concerns. We all hope that understanding and safety can increase in the world.

I have a quick report concerning the poll of computer resources. Thanks to all who responded. Shame on those of you who did not! Even with various responses, no other persons or institutions expressed any interest or possibility of hosting the project. As that is a clear response I plan to proceed with development of the online database here at BYU. I feel confident that the resources here will be adequate to create a fully functional system by January as projected in our goals.

The new Mac OSX ver. 10.1 (a UNIX system) just arrived today. We will be installing it and will begin with the MySQL and PHP design next week. I was recently very fortunate to be able to hire a student assistant who is quite proficient in programming in MySQL and PHP. He is only a freshman, but is surprisingly talented. He has been programming since junior high school and has already developed some rather sophisticated online databases. He has completely reworked the input forms. We should have some basic aspects of the database up and running soon. In our work so far we have come across some questions of design that will need to be addressed by the full group. I will write more on that later.

I still do not have word as to whether or not my grant proposal for student help for data entry has been approved. I expect to have word within the next few weeks.

So, this is just a short report to let you know that we are moving ahead here at BYU. We should have a beta version of the database online soon. I will write again soon.

Best wishes,

David Day