News and Comment on Orders of Battle.com

Jun

11

We`re Back!

June 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Today, I finally managed to restore this web site on my new web server after restoring the ordersofbattle.com and tech-crm.com sites a few days ago. Many apologies for the delay.

The outage was caused by a hard-disk crash on my old webserver, shortly followed by the mysterious death of the machine`s motherboard.

Therefore, I took the opportunity to rebuild my development box as a web server and restore all the sites on that machine as it had more memory than the old web server.

The replacement parts arrived yesterday and the new machine is now up and running. As it has a faster CPU than my current data server, I am going to port all my databases to the new machine in the hope that the combination of these two machines will give users of my websites some increase in performance.

Little has happened on the research front, but I am concentrating right now on rewriting the .NET classes that I use in both the ordersofbattle.com website and the windows application that I use to input data. These classes have been upgraded to use .NET 3.5 and I am rewriting them to use LINQ. This is an ongoing effort which involves modifying or creating over 150 program files so it is not an overnight job.

The reason I am doing all this effort is to put myself in a situation where it will be much easier for me to add new pages to the web site and improve the query capabilities of some of the pages.

Watch this space.

May

26

As usual, my update frequency on this blog is not very commendable, so I think it is time for a bit of an update.

To get the embarassing stuff out of the way first, the site was down, along with all my other sites, for about ten days in early May. Even more embarassing personally was the fact that I did not notice for ten days, so I did not know there was a problem. Mea culpa!

The reason I did not realise there was a problem was because I returned home to Canada at the beginning of May and immediately had a lot of important corporate accountancy and book-keeping to catch up on (which mainly consisted of sorting out hundreds of receipts for the current financial year and glueing them to bits of paper so that they were properly organised) and as a result I did not spare any attention to the web site.

Once I spotted the problem, I was able to fix it in about ten minutes. It was caused by Skype overwriting some of the port forwarding settings on my router when I installed the latest version of Skype on a different machine in my network. Unfortunately one of the settings overwritten was the port for the World Wide Web, so all my sites were not being accessed because the router was sending all requests to the router instead of the web server.

So, please accept my deepest apologies for the down time.

Now that I am home, I have been busy with various tasks, I have rebuilt my development box and am now continuing with the redevelopment of my Order of Battle Application to use LINQ. This is a .NET technology that I talk about on my other blog, http://www.tech-crm.com, from time to time. Once completed, it will allow me to add new functionality and web pages to the site much more easily as it reduces the amount of “plumbing” code that I have to write and gives me time to be more creative with the front end both on the web and in the windows application that I use to input data.

Needless to say, this development effort is quite heavy as I am having to write a brand new data layer and rewrite an awful lot of the code in my middle tier classes.

Enough technology talk, what is happening on the research front?

Well, now I am home, I have re-organised my library and am continuing with British Infantry Regiments and their evolution from the Rifle Volunteer Corps units formed from 1859 on into Volunteer Battalions of the various Line Regiments in 1881 and their ultimate evolution into Territorial Battalions of those same Line Regiments in 1908. I am also taking this opportunity to list all First World War Battalions of each Regiment.

At this point, I have completed The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, The Black Watch, The Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment and The Buffs (almost).

On the German side, I have input Divisional Commanders for all German Infantry Divisions up to 163.

I hope at some point to cover the First World War as well as the Second World War, which is probably hoplessly ambitious, and to that end, I am currently collecting source books for First World War Orders of Battle and Unit Commanders.

I have managed to acquire quite a few Regimental Histories in the last few months so I have lots of extra research material to access.

Unfortunately, I have not yet done any additional work on US Divisions so we are still stuck at 10 Mountain Division and I still have very little on the French Army. I do however now have the amended edition of Stanton’s World War II Order of Battle.

So, that’s a bit of a general round up as to where we are.

On the personal front, I am also job-hunting for another contract, so that will take up some of my time too (along with gardening).

Mar

17

Well the focus of my energy the last few weeks site-wise has been the redevelopment of the data tier to use LINQ and the Entity Framework, but more of that in another post later.

On the research front, I have finally input all British Numbered Regiments of Foot.

The highest number ever used was 135 which briefly existed in 1796 and all above 114 or so are fairly ephemeral only briefly existing in 1761-1763 and 1794-1796. Still I thought it was important for the sake of completeness to list them all.

Having listed all numbered Regiiments and Battalions of Foot, I now have a much better picture of how the British Army waxed and waned during the long wars of the Eighteenth Century, new Regiments were raised during war years which were then immediately disbanded at the cessation of hostilities only to be re-raised a few years later during the next war with the French.

Please note that there were many Regiments of Foot which never had numbers which I have not yet added to the database including many regiments recruited from different nationalities in Europe.

I have now returned to inputing British Infantry Battalions especially Rifle Volunteer Corps and Battalions formed in the First World War. I am almost finished with The Black Watch.

On the German front, I am now up to 112 Infantry Division and I have started inputting data from Tessin and Scherzer for the first few Wave 1 Infantry Divisions.

Nothing new on the American or French Armies as yet.  Â

Mar

17

There seems to be a slight problem with Unit Appointments right now for some recently updated Units. The hyperlink on the Unit Details page is active but the record is not displayed. The same Appointment record displays just fine for the associated Person record.

This is probably a data issue on the web database as the data looks perfectly fine on my local system. It also only affects certain records.

I will have a look into it in the next few days as I am busy tonight.

Feb

9

Research Update 8

February 9, 2009 | 5 Comments

Things are chugging along on the research front here at Orders of Battle Central.

I reached a milestone at the weekend when I finally completed input of all Pre 1881 Regiments of Foot that were represented by Post 1881 Line Regiments. I also finally got round to adding some basic information on the Irish Regiments that were disbanded in 1922.

I still have not completed all the inputs for the Regiments of Foot that had a peripheral existence for the wars of the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries, but I am working on that.

As usual, I have a few books with me including my trusty copy of Frederick Lineage Book of British Land Forces which gives me very useful information on British Infantry and Cavalry Regiments. I also have a recently purchased copy of Ray Westlake’s book The Rifle Volunteers which I will be using as a source for the Volunteer Battalions of 1859 to 1908.

On the German front, I have now input the commanders of Infantry Divisions up to 93. I have also started inputting some useful data from Veit Scherzer’s new book Deutsche Truppen im Zweiten Weltkrieg Vol 2 Part 1 which covers Divisions numbered 1 to 3. This book is a very useful supplement to the great Tessin series which I have to scan bits of as there is no way I can carry all eighteen volumes abroad with me.

I have finally bitten the bullet and started inputting German superior units as there is no sign of William McCroden’s upcoming book on the horizon which promises weekly orders of battle.

On the American side, I have completed the 9th Infantry Division and I hope to start on the 10th Mountain Division soon. The only problem here is that my only source is Stanton.

I have not done too much on the Person update side recently but I have lots of information to hand on Australian Officers from the 1945 Australian Army List.

Looking forward, my aim is to return to inputting the Battalions of each Line Regiment in turn along with their precursor Volunteer Battalions. Once that is done, I will move on to British Cavalry and Field Regiments.

I also hope to make a start on the French Army of 1939-40 starting with Military Districts.

Jan

12

Skin Issues

January 12, 2009 | Leave a Comment

As you may have noticed, this weblog is having a few issues in the appearance department!!

I am intending to change the skin quite soon which should make things look a lot better.

Jan

5

I have been a bit slack checking the website recently and have just noticed an error in the Unit Appointments page.

This page is being changed for Commonwealth Appointments so that Appointments are ordered by Branch and Directorate, however, I have not yet published the new code to the website yet.

Therefore, right now, the database and the web page are slightly out of sync.

I hope to fix this in the next day or two.

Dec

9

Site News 10

December 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Well after a lot of trial and error, a few weeks ago I finally managed to complete my Replication system to allow records written to my local database here in Europe to be written automatically to my databases in Canada and thus published on the web site.

So far, touch wood, it seems to be working OK.

Next on the horizon, I will be modifying the way Appointment Roles are grouped for Commonwealth Appointments so that they are grouped by Branch and Directorate instead of just by Role. This should give a better appreciation of the structure of Appointments especially for large static HQs.

The code has been in place on my local machine for a while but now I want to modify the Appointments Page for Units to use it as well. 

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Oct

28

Site News 9

October 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Well, it’s been a quite few weeks on the research front as I have still not managed to get my new version of replication up and running yet so updates have been very slow.

I am very hopeful that I will be able to get replication up and running very soon. Please see my Tech-CRM blog for more info. 

However, I have updated the web site with a new version of the Corps Index page which allows users to query Corps by Nation, which should be more useful than the previous drop down box. Having listed the Corps records for a specific Commonwealth Nation, the user can then drill down on a specific Corps to see the unit records associated with that Corps.

Sep

11

Musings

September 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Well, it has been quite a while since I updated so it is high time I put some thoughts to paper.

I was at home for a month which was great but at the start of August I had to rush off to Germany at pretty short notice to start a new contract in Cologne. As a result of that, I did not have as much time to spend updating the website as I hoped, but as usual I have some source material with me.

It has been a difficult few weeks for updates both to this site and the Orders of Battle database for several reasons. Firstly I had to find a flat in Germany, get internet access sorted out and so on which obviously had a knock on affect on everything. I now have a flat sorted out and regular internet access which is great but obviously I am once again pretty busy at work.

On the Orders of Battle side of things, updates have been slow because once again I do not Replication working so updates via the internet to my database in Canada are very slow which is frustrating. Until recently, I also did not have FTP working either (I hate firewalls!) which meant that I could not upload the newest version of my web client software onto the my computers in Canada either.

Finally, as I explained on tech-crm.com, a storm in Canada and a badly-set BIOS setting caused my database server to go down and stay down for about a week and I could not fix it because it happened just at the time when I moved into the flat and had no internet access at all, which was a problem.

OK, enough of all this doom and gloom. FTP is now working so I can now upload new versions of the website and client software to the servers in Canada. I have also completed the new version of the windows client that I have mentioned before and I am now working on the web site and I have written a new version of the Corps Units Page so that one can select Corps by Nation and then click on the Corps to see a list of the Units associated with that Corps which I feel is an improvement. I am now working on adding the Unit Waves and Unit Districts pages to the Unit Data page. There is not much data on these new pages yet but I hope to do something about that soon.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to get Replication working so I still have no convenient communication between my local database here and the master databases in Canada. In fact I have spent every evening for the last 5 days trying to get it working but I have totally failed so I am going to go ahead with my plans to write my own database “replication” architecture as I have mentioned before. Until that is complete, database updates will continue to be slow I am afraid. However, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the technical problems involved and I know how I will proceed so stay tuned.Â