Almost depressingly the most interesting thing of today was the meeting on what services we were going going to deliver to the regions. We are moving in to try and unify the applications and deliver them at a reasonable pace to the users. The main problem is that people have applications out there already but their data is here and in the short term we’re not going to be able to deliver the links possible for them to reasonably maintain those services locally anyway…kind of sucks. For the majority of users we can deliver applications via Citrix in the short to medium term (we’re already doing this and its working for the most part) however there are some applications, particularly the Engineering ones (GIS mapping tools and AutoCad). These are applications that rely on dedicated graphics hardware and don’t fit in well with the Citrix style environment (or any form of remote environment for that matter). So we’re looking at different options such as VDI or VNC to handle those particular people. Where possible the main aim is not to move infrastructre out into the regions and keep it centralised. Wonder how long we’ll stick to that.

Today I managed to work out one of the weirder bugs with the antidemotion features of my JAuthTools that has been an issue for a while now. I was actually looking at a Joomla! Bug at the time and this issue struck causing itself another problem of it’s own. In working out that something clicked and worked out why this was behaving the way it was.

Today was the submission of an assignment for uni. As I spent the majority of the weekend working on it I’m looking forward to not seeing it for a while. It must be said, however, that it has driven some testing into different systems and was one of the reasons for my SSO manager development so that part of the system was easily user configurable. So over the weekend I’ve managed to get the system to work whilst also progressing towards a release for JAuthTools 1.5.4 with the new SSO manager in it. At the moment Im still waiting on some feedback for the LDAP user plugin prior to release. At the moment I’m happy with it’s status so when I get some final feedback I’ll do what I hope will be my final release for 1.5 and start to look only at 1.6 stuff. Exciting!

I finally managed to get some work done on my SSO Manager, so now it handles service providers as well as publishing items. It also provides the forms for type C links as well as the service provider links for type B plugins. I also did some work with module so it will handle it as well. At the moment I also have two modules for SSO, one that handles displaying the forms and links as well as another to bootstrap SSO (called SSO helper). Still coming together and hopefully I’ll get a release sooner rather than later.

Spent another day with SALMON today rebuilding the parser to include the entirely new file format that we managed to create out of it. This one now produces the groups that Servers Alive creates so I can use those to automatically create pages and autofill in servers to it (which now works). So now it not only pulls in data about services and their status, it grabs the ‘pretty name’ as well as the actual item being measured, it also stores the result of that even though it doesn’t use it yet as well as the last time it was updated. I’ll put all of this together into something more useful but for now the parser works on the new file format. It now also autogenerates pages from the group and automatically adds the relevant services to those pages.

Other fun tasks for the day include more documentation (this time on docs.joomla.org), a blog post (community.joomla.org) and looking through my favourite forum maybe even writing a reply or two (forum.joomla.org). I did have a look at my SSO stuff though it was rather limited. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have more time to spend on it and I’ll get it up and running with a proper installer so that I can get other people using it (yay!). I also noted today that our Human Resources department started to use the TIFF to PDF service that I offer at work after nobody touching it for a rather long period of time. Nice to see stuff used every so often and justify its existence.

So today I did some more work on my SSO system – though I had forgotten just how far I had progressed with it. Its still got a fair while to go yet mind you, but its done quite well. I added the ability for it to handle Type C plugins and the module now should also handle Type C plugins (if you don’t know what this means check out http://sammoffatt.com.au/jauthtools/SSO/Writing_an_SSO_Plugin). Next on my list is supporting service providers (Type B plugins) in both the front end and the back end of the system. I also managed to (again) bash out some more documentation, this time JAuthTools related. With any luck I’ll do some more tomorrow whilst I’m working on my SSO stuff.

The most productive task of today was writing up the documentation to JDiagnostic. JDiagnostic is my Swiss Army knife for stuff like authentication in Joomla!. The setup that I used was on the Mac OS X G5 workstation that I have at work with a cut down Safari window, Firefox in my Joomla! admin panel creating new articles and the Preview application to handle capturing screenshots. To make uploading to my server easier I used sshfs to connect to the folder I was after on the server which meant that saving files to the box was as simple as selecting the server on the file save dialog and waiting for the file to be uploaded. Thankfully the application saving the file is the only to block so I could take a screenshot in Preview and then type it up in Firefox and by the time that I went to add the image to the article the file had uploaded and was ready on the server to add to my new article. Preview is the stand out application which is a bundled application in OS X. It handles most image files easily and has a rather useful screen capture aspect built in. This tied with the menu bar at the top makes it really quick and simple to make screenshots – perhaps the easiest of all of the major platforms (Windows in my mind is second here because screen capture on Linux generally sucks except for the GIMP but it loses on usability). Another day of fun!!

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. 🙁