Mike Murnane
Software System Specialist
Working with old legacy data?
Is it making a mess of your page layout?
You sometimes see odd characters mixed in with normal text on a web page. This can be a sign of old legacy data or improper encoding specification in the web page.
So, what do? The first thing to try is to manipulate the encoding via the charset declaration in the web page to see if this corrects the problem (for how to do this click here). This will not work if the data is a mix of encodings like UTF-8 and some code page like 8859-7 (Greek).
If it is still messed up, try this more detailed step-by-step procedure: Legacy Data Conversion
Introduction
I am a software systems specialist. I take a broad view of the environment in which the current task is embedded – looking at prerequisites, sibling tasks, dependent tasks – in order to fully understand the current one. I can then apply a variety of tools from my kit of skills and experience. (I have been software development manager, a team lead, a scrum master, a mentor and a developer – so I can look at the situation from a few different perspectives.)
Most recently I have been working in Legacy Application Modernization. This work involves a variety of mainframe code and processes that need to be analyzed and understood in order to modernize them. My experience with older approaches to data processing, legacy tools and mainframe languages is my lense into this work.
Previously I worked in electronic publishing. This mostly involved transforming older data from legacy formats into modern, usable, XML documents from a variety of publishing systems and vendors.
My systems process millions of records, so I work closely with production and have a good appreciation for their concerns. The related issues of repeatability, standardization of processes and documentation are ones that I have experienced and addressed through test suites, source control and workflow management.
I have also developed automated XML document verification processes to check that they conform to their specific industry standard document specifications, and built software to access MeSH.
What I can do for you ...
- Analyze production to improve throughput and reduce errors.
- Untangle your legacy data issues.
- Work with your staff to improve the software development process.
- Implement automated job processing to utilize existing resources.
- Design conversion and transform processing to create valid XML/HTML.
Contact: mikemurnane @ shaw · ca
or via LinkedIn