Today had a lackadaisical start with me working on getting Dawn of War:Winter Assault to work on my Mac (once it was fully patched seems to have started working, yay for no copy protection!) after doing a whole heap of disk swapping last night to get the base installed only to see it complain it couldn’t find a CD/DVD drive. After I installed the 1.50 patch it asked me if I wanted to start and for the first time it actually started the game without issues. I managed to load it up and play a quick game and fielded a call from my Mum before heading to work. I also added some projects to my list and categorised items, now on the todo list: an automated login key generator for Joomla! and a component to compliment the ban IP/address plugin. Now all I need is time!

The Kerberos keys that I had asked to be remade were ready for me by the time I got there. It took a bit of time to rebuild the different keytab files to support the vhost environment (need to merge the respective keytab files) but once that was done everything was working. Well, mostly working. Firefox on my Mac worked fine, Firefox on the Windows desktops I tried worked when they were configured (see http://grolmsnet.de/kerbtut/firefox.html for information on what you need to do to get Firefox to do negotiate), IE on most of the desktops worked fine however some installations weren’t getting SSO, all of the Citrix servers seem not to pass through authentication (they end up going in a weird loop where IE appears to keep loading the page) and Safari on my Mac doesn’t seem to want to play the game either. Perhaps I’ll sort that out over the next week or so but that consumed a reasonable amount of time going through and checking different IE versions and if they worked. The only machine not to play the game seems to be Firefox on my Linux desktop (it should be working) so I’ll have a look at the ones that don’t work and why they don’t want to work. For the Windows boxes I have the feeling that the Netware client is causing issues (which would explain Citrix) so hopefully when our network eradicates Novell we’ll be fine.

And that leads us to the afternoon’s fun of building Joomla! 1.6’s backup system. I’ve managed to get the system to export the sample database, reimport it and then delete the files afterwards so I’ve moved onto much larger goals. I’ve taken one of our internal websites and I’m trying to get it to important. Suffice to say that it has enough data to cause an issue with the system. For data loading I’m using a heavily modified version of Alexey Ozerov’s “BigDump” script, which has been used in the past in a less modified form for the Joomla! 1.5 migrator. It is slowly being converted to use the new Tasks system in 1.6 which is another concept borrowed from the 1.0 migrator. The Tasks system in 1.6 has two items: a task set which is a container for individual tasks. So considering backups, one task set might be a full backup run of the site with individual tasks being an SQL backup, a file backup (tar archive perhaps?) and maybe copying that to a remote FTP site or similar. So the one task set would have an “SQL backup” task and a “file backup” task. Extension package installation may do a similar item as well splitting the install into different parts.

A new part of this is the data load system that provides functionality to read and load data files, at the moment only supporting SQL but I’m hoping I’ll be able to create a CSV one as well some luck, again probably reusing Alexey’s code in part here as well. I’m mostly through building parts of this system though I’m experiencing a strange issue with my sample data (hence why the updates haven’t been committed to J!’s SVN repository today) where it loads the file up through to almost 2000 queries and seems to stop suddenly. I’m not quite sure whats going on but I’m happy enough that the task system is picking up and storing values for it to progress as far as it does.

Another successful day spent on my Mac as well, NetBeans doesn’t seem to want to look at my project any more crashing instead of loading it which is disappointing but I’ll work that out another day. And now its time to enjoy some Dawn of War.