Today was the last day of my present contract at the university. This is weird because its also the day when I managed to sort of most of the problems that I have had with my access at the university. The last of my firewall changes actually went through yesterday and today I managed to get myself connected to the Moodle Development Database on the Oracle development server that the university has, yay! I did some more work on a weird issue with contexts in Moodle and had a job interview at the university as well. Hopefully that went relatively well and I’ll get the position, if not I can always go back to Council.

From here I progressed to Council and a new project. Servers Alive has an abomination of a web reporting tool, so network administrator wanted to see if we could build something that would show groupings on a web page and little traffic lights denoting if there was an issue with one of the groups. Parsing the servers alive page was fun with it not being valid anything. It had tags closed in the wrong order, seemingly random end tags (there was one closing bold tag sandwiched between a closing td and a closing tr tag). By the end of the day I’d managed to get the thing into a database in a much saner format (even reoutputted in a much cleaner format) so that I can do useful stuff with the data. I’m going to borrow some very old code I wrote years ago and repurpose it into something to help me out with this problem. The project was the ARTIS (Automatic Real Time Information Service) Water Monitoring system that I had written that handled displaying the water status of the Toowoomba City area before the project and all of its data supports were cut following the retirement of the chief proponent of the project, the head of that particular engineering department. Its really ugly code, so whilst I’m borrowing concepts and using the shell I’m also gutting the majority of the system and replacing it with newer methodologies, better coding practices and more extensible frameworks. Today its a mess, but with any luck I’ll be able to get it cleaned up enough to be functional tomorrow.