So today was the start of the new working year. It hardly seems like there has been much of a break – and at less than two weeks there hasn’t been that much real time spare. Between family and friends I’ve been working on my uni assignment trying to get it finished. With what appears a class wide week long extension, I’m going to be able to put in some finishing touches over the code before submission which I didn’t thnk I was going to have the time to do.

At Council I finished up SALMON, or Servers ALive Monitor, which will provide web based mimic panels to the output of Servers Alive. IT achieves this by basically scraping the standard HTML page that it generates and pushing it into a MySQL database. From here the web app builds a mimic panel to display the information. Today I cleaned up the system a bit and added some extra features, such as details URL for services and item icons. One of the original goals was to have groupings that would identify sub items and collated their overall status for display (displaying the worst status of the entire collection). The system today gained this feature and I’ve also made it so that it is a recursive lookup. This means that items may be grouped together with other items or groups to have this displayed as a collated result as well. This will provide the ability to nest pages to an unlimited depth (though the more they do the harder it’ll get) though the system doesn’t permit cycles.

I finished my work day having a look over the latest release of Auth Manager, a Joomla! extension which primarily handles CAS authentication. In part it overlaps with the work that I’m doing however it takes a different approach to solving some problems. I’ll have a more detailed look tomorrow to see how it works and how it differs from my own goals.

After writing all of this out on my iPhone, the WordPress application deemed the ‘save’ button unecessary to be displayed and well, I couldn’t say my post. So I went and now I’m sittingmy computer typing it all up so that I don’t lose the last half an hour of typing. To add insult to injury Firefox did its annoying “you’ve got the box selected but I won’t let you type in it” bug where its trying its hardest to find something to autocomplete but nothing appears (as it shouldn’t) which thankfully can be mitigated by clicking onto another form or similar. Sometimes I wonder if we haven’t gone backwards, I’ve never had my pen mysteriously stop working and lose all of my previous work (mind you I might not have been able to continue but a new pen usually solved that) – or at least prevent me from securing my work. Not happy. It took me ten minutes to retype everything again off my phone. With everything safely written up I quite the application and relaunched it. This time the ‘save’ button appeared magically and I could save the post I was working on. I’m not sure I want to put my faith in using that technique too often but I guess in future I might check if there is a save option before I spend half an hour writing a blog post. 🙁