March 23, 2020

Micromounts

Most of this was written back in 2008 and needs major revision in light of all that I have learned in the intervening years. Some topics:

My micromount collection database

I keep a record of my micromount collection in a database. This serves two purposes. One is that it lets me look up things I have. I can do a variety of searches, including looking for all I have of some species, all the specimens I have from a given location and so on.

At least as important though is that it lets me generate labels. I decided there was no possible way that I was going to do what some people do, namely use one system to track their collection and another to make labels.

Under the hood, my database is an sqlite3 database. The ruby application is a front end that handles entry of new records, searches, and label generation. I used to use a ruby on rail application to handle my micromount database. Rails is such a disaster and train wreck, that I abandoned that and converted my application to a ruby application. That still has issues that arise due to ruby versions and problems with gems and packages, but nothing like the chaoos and misery I experienced with rails My application is open source and available on Github for anyone who wants to use it.


Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Mineralogy Info / tom@mmto.org