As I flew into land at Brisbane Airport I looked out the little port hole they give us on the world outside. It struck me first how many more houses I saw coming into land at Brisbane than I did at Melbourne but then I noticed something weird about it: the houses all bunched together attached either to rivers or large roads looking like infections working out from a vein in a human. When I looked out the other side (the benefit of being in such a small aircraft, a 737 with only six seats across and a small aisle) I noticed a similar effect except with the sea. Lots of houses built on the beach side with gaps where ‘nature’ lived. As I progressed into the city the ‘infection’ became denser with the natural environment succumbing to the built.

The human disease isn’t something new and was in fact a part of Agent Smith’s soliloquy on his hatred of humanity and how the machines came to categorise them. When you consider what we do from a height offered by aircraft (itself destructive to the ecosystem below) you wonder how we are different in some ways to viral infections in human. I feel that at this point its really a macro versus micro argument: we has humans at the macro level destroy the earth which given the scale of the earth is really comparative to the scale down of humans to a virus. We haven’t quite learnt to spread to different heavenly bodies yet but we’re working on that problem already primitively reaching towards the moon. We’ll get the skills down pat as we evolve the ability to infect other planets just as we evolved the ability to rapidly move from continent to continent to exploit it (first with sea travel and then with air travel). Like most horrible viral infections we’re destroying our host, the Earth, at an increasing rate and hoping that we’ll be able to keep it alive just long enough to infect somewhere else. Time will tell.

This morning started again with another ePrints deployment at 8am. This is the third week running, one per week, that I’ve done an ePrints deployment of some variety. This morning was a run to get SVN back in sync entirely, so now production is fully aligned with our test and development environments. There was still one outstanding issue, but we’ll address that as we go and its a minor change so we can do it without taking the service offline. Later on in the day I also wrote some ePrints migration doco so we’ll see how we go.

The Outlook look annoyance of today is that the “Delete items on exit” feature works only once per login. After you’ve quit for the first time, quitting again doesn’t seem to retrigger it. Logging out and then back in again causes it to redisplay the query to delete it but again, only once. Rather annoying.

I had some fun on Moodle again today, learning more and more about the system and how it goes together. Will have to do some more again next week, fun with one of the clean up scripts appearing to be a bit excessive, but that shouldn’t be too hard to look at.

After lunch it was a tad strange walking into the building and hearing the crickets almost as if I was outside. Some how the building I work in seems to be a habitat for crickets, so I’m not quite sure what is causing it but even on level three we have crickets appearing on the floors. Weird!

We had a meeting about how we structure our various Subversion repositories. Where possible we’re going to use SVN externals to build our Moodle tree instead of having everything live inside the Moodle directory. This will mean USQ developed extensions will live in their own repositories managed by themselves and then the core of Moodle will form the basis of the tree. This will permit us a lot of flexibility in the long run but we’ll see how we go with it. The one down side of this method is that it won’t support individual files at all and even in 1.6 not too well. We’ll see how things look and then progress from there.

Directly after our Subversion planning meeting I had fun with the ICE crew learning about ICE ORE, SWORD, ePrints and how the ICE team has them working together. They’re rather hard line about their view of the world and that the web should entirely be built from web accessible documents and want the end of PDF. Their demo included pushing a HTML document only and hiding the PDF of the actual paper beneath their HTML document. They didn’t seem interested in actually doing any statistics gathering on their suppositions either, which does make me worry about the team. Personally I would have thought they would have loved the chance to prove themselves correct, but they seemed to avoid wanting to gather information about user directions – what I’d really like to do is set up some A/B testing with a page displayed using their preferred method (HTML is the only option and you have to click on it to get the PDF) against HTML and PDF together. Implementation looks straight forwards so I’ll push it into dev and from there I’ll let the politics sort the battle out.

Another week over.

My preferred Internet provider is Netspace. So much so that I’ve recommended it to people and beyond myself I know of about five other people who have gone to them on my recommendation. They offer reasonable price and when you can get to their technical staff, the ones that I have encountered seem very reasonable and knowledgeable. The key is getting through. I’m writing this blog post whilst waiting on hold for Netspace about a billing enquiry. As I type it has been over 25 minutes of waiting.

At the moment my dad is planning on moving house having sold his current house. He has a 1.5MBit Netspace connection on a plan that doesn’t exist any more (a grandfathered plan) and I want to change it to his new location. After 31 minutes I had my answer: the other connection will have to be disconnected (have the codes removed from the line, 48 hours) and then the other one transferred. They can do the transfer but it will take 5 to 10 business days for it to be processed by Telstra (they didn’t mention Telstra but being ADSL1 there isn’t another option). I guess now I have to do the hard work and paperwork.

Another day, another useless Outlook message. The message of the day for Outlook is “Done checking your data file”. As a user I really need to see that message with a little warning logo, personally I wondered for a second it it had been corrupted, why else bother me? But then I remember something I read once comparing Windows to Mac: Windows is the impetulant child that always wants your attention whilst Mac is the butler tries to get out of your way. I don’t have annoying messages like this on my Mac, even if Mail is perhaps doing tasks on my “data file”. RIL is annoying me again compared to Quicksilver, items aren’t prioritised and useless entries (like DLL files and HTML files I’ve never looked at before) are in list ahead of the application I really want to look at, which was the MySQL Query Browser at that point. I get around it by putting ‘exe’ at the end as I type and this usually reduces the resultset to just what I want but its still a lot worse than Quicksilver. What should I expect from a Windows tool? On the subject of annoyances and Windows, Outlook for some reason has a particular hatred of the ePrints tech mailing list. For any HTML email that comes through it doesn’t open it but decides to display the signature of the list and gives me the option to double click on it. Strangely it doesn’t think it has a document previewer for it and when I double click the file opens fine in Chrome. A mild annoyance I must admit and I’m not entirely sure if its Outlook’s fault entirely though the lack of a ‘HTML’ file previewer is a tad depressing.

I also had Moodle character fun with restores not uploading properly due to legal UTF-8 characters and what I presume is PHP’s XML parser library though I’m yet to dig into it. It shouldn’t be causing an issue but it appears to be, for the time being the work around is not to use those UTF-8 characters (in this case it was a right single quote). In other Moodle news, I wrote a new group export tool for the Engineering department’s problem solving unit. It exports in tab delimited like they requested and maybe one day I’ll get around to making the XML file format that they wanted as a preference. However, walk before you run.

Still Excel and Sharepoint forget it’s password after the Office 2007 upgrade, it is annoying to have to put my password in to get to my time sheet. I’m told by a Windows fanatic friend of mine how wonderful Microsoft is in a pure Microsoft environment – but to be honest, its looking like a sham. I’ve got Windows, its joined to Active Directory, they have Sharepoint running on IIS boxes and I’ve got Office 2007 and it still doesn’t automatically authenticate me properly. Yes, life in the Microsoft world is always so much better, can you just re-enter your password again? Thanks.

So today my Outlook decided to be horrible non-responsive as it died under the deluge of rejection emails that the USQ Studydesk email received. I had fought with Outlook to set up a filter for the mailer daemon previously and had decided that given that the amount of messages wasn’t too bad I’d push it into a folder. How I was wrong. So now I decided that I’d immediately delete it. Upon looking at the Outlook 2007 Rules configuration a strange new “recommended rule” had appeared. I did a quick search and it looks like it can be quite nasty if I tried to downgrade from Outlook 07. Fortunately I’m still on Outlook 07, so I removed the rule. So I decided to alter the existing rule to delete hte messages. After a short while watching my deleted items autonomously rise I resolved to instead just to kill them without review.

Some how it decides that I must be running Outlook before it will automatically kill the message, however it will happily just delete the item (equivalent of moving) without user intervention. I must admit this differentiation between “server” rules and “client” rules is baffling coming from a Notes background. Notes, for all that is horrible about it, was in some respects really well designed. It wasn’t much to look at but it offered some really awesome features such as great document replication, offline modes that worked well and the fact that “applications” could run on the client or the server, so your rules always worked. This turned out to be really awesome for when I moved from a Windows box at TCC to a Linux box and found that all of my old email filtering rules continued to work perfectly fine even though I was working via IMAP at that point. Very cool in my opinion. Unfortunate that Exchange doesn’t have this ability and in fact even more of a shame that IBM sat on their heels and let it go to waste.

In other news I tried out the Safari 4 Beta today. The “Top Sites” feature appears broken for some reason appears ‘black’ on my computer. It sort of worked upon first install and its great to see Safari stepping out already and using a video tag for its intro page. It has in part some aspects of Google Chrome with top mounted tabs. I haven’t had much of a change to use it but it has a few changes. I’ve downloaded and installed it on my computer at home but I’m going to need to restart my Mac first. Funnily enough it saved the day for the Mahara/load balancer fun we have been having for the last few days.

For the last day or so the Mahara team has had fun trying to get the test system to deploy fine. After success with the development environment, the test environment with the load balancer raised many issues. IE returned nothing useful beyond that it couldn’t hit the page and Firefox returned a redirect loop error. I tried to use Firebug to see what was happening but couldn’t see it as Firebug seemed to temporarily work and then once Firefox determined it was in a redirect loop it killed Firebug’s output. At one point blame was laid at the load balancer, much time was spent reconfiguring the Apache server to get it to work including misconfiguring it and reconfiguring it. Eventually Safari was slow enough to display the redirects to figure out that the load balancer was redirecting to HTTPS whilst the Mahara was then redirecting back to HTTP. After quickly reconfiguring Mahara it appears that most things are working properly. Unfortunately this then lead us to a problem with the MySQL database which was strangely reporting tables existing with “SHOW TABLES” however when one selected against it the MySQL server reported that the database didn’t exist. We ran through all of the GRANT’s to ensure that it looked fine however everything looked right and so late in the day we decided not to bother much and leave it for tomorrow.

Last but not least is a shout out to one of my more favourite windows tools, the RockIt Launcher (RIL). The tool is great though it is no comparison to Quicksilver, which is the Mac OS X tool that I was trying to replicate. RIL is a launcher on its own however Quicksilver has a bit more power. However, RIL meets the need for a keyboard based launcher tool for Windows and its much appreciated.

After having fun with the presenter project we managed to get everything mostly sorted today. Although the desktop deployment job failed last night they were able to get one of the lecture theatres up and running with the new build for testing. Thankfully this worked fine with everything working the way that it should with no crashing of PowerPoint to be had. Other issues have since cropped up on the student systems in addition to all of the lecture theatre computers. My part is done however, so we’ll see what happens on Thursday for the public demo.

I also managed to today fix up the dev environment of ePrints and wrote this down for future reference. It turned out that ePrints has a simple command to resync the database. At this point I managed to update the test environment to be in line with development. There have been continuing issues with the production environment having changes that weren’t made to either of the test or development environments. At this point I’m hopefully going to be able to get everything back up to date though that will be later in the week.

So I upgraded to IE7 today to try and work through some strangeness that has been happening with the presenter software from last week. I decided I didn’t want “Live Search” to be my default search engine for it and get sent to a list of searches I can use. Most annoyingly this spawns a completely new window to display the list of search engines instead of using tabs. Wouldn’t that be cool to demonstrate how useful tabs are straight off the bat? No? Shame.

So the regular search engines are there like AOL, ASK, Google, Live Search, Lycos and Yahoo but then there is Rediff which is “Search India as it happens”, Sify which appears to be “India News” and under Topic Search there are items like “India Times”, “Naukri” (“Top Jobs in India”) and then one Australian: News Corp Online. At first I thought that for some reason I’d chanced onto India so I selected Global Sites and reselected Australia to be regreeted by India. Virgin.com appears to be there and out of curiosity I installed it only to find it didn’t actually work. I searched for contact and it didn’t appear to actually find anything. If I type ‘contact’ into the search box in the page it does go to it finds results. Clearly Microsoft is on the ball with IE7.

But once I had IE7 installed on my system I found that this alone wasn’t causing the problem. We traversed over to desktop support and pinched their present desktop dev machine to do some extensive testing to see if it was broken as well. Surprisingly once we managed to get it all set up, it wasn’t broken. Unlike the current lecture theatre PC’s that crashed when trying to use the tool, this desktop system worked perfectly fine. Bizarrely the older software, IPLOD (not sure what it means but somehow its getting replaced) appears to have still been installed in PowerPoint’s configuration which lead to a charming error every time we loaded PowerPoint which was independent of our own error. Instead of issue once we had a non-crashing desktop was that the add-in registration only occurred for the current user with the developer’s supplied installer not within the local machine context. Whilst I haven’t quite had the chance to prove it yet, I actually believe that the registry install procedure does nothing however PowerPoint is in fact the thing creating the relevant entries when it starts and notices the DLL newly registered, as the correct entries appear to be created under PowerPoint however the developer’s registry strings refer to Word. Other issues include GPO fun with Windows causing issues with the C: not appearing, background issues and weirdness of the IPLOD system recurring. Unfortunate really, however hopefully it gets resolved by Thursday for when they want to demonstrate it. Fortunately for me however its not my problem any more. Yay. As part of rebuilding the installation instructions for the software for the desktop support team to something that works I sent them an email with the registry file, two executable files required and the DLL COM add-in. Outlook managed to let me upload and send them without warning however actually refused to send the email. Some how the email disappeared and never got to its destination even though I have a copy of it in my sent box. It appears that some how the email got eaten. Looking at it in Outlook, I noticed that the other attachments had been blocked by Outlook’s “You’re an idiot” protections that for some reason don’t appear to be easily able to be disabled. As an experiment I forwarded the email externally and something called “MIMEDefang” decided it wanted to remove the sole remaining attachment the DLL file. Eventually I got sick of it and resent the email with the instructions without any of the attachments. Microsoft Office: Productivity destroyer.

On the topic productivity destroyers, Word bullet points don’t appear to work properly in 2007. I’m used to hitting enter twice to escape from a collection of bullet points however for some reason this doesn’t appear to want to work properly. I end up hitting delete around three times to get back to where I was, which is far more annoying than hitting enter a few times in a row, at least I know it doesn’t have any side effects.

The last item on my list for Monday actually happened over the weekend. What I love is how people complain that Windows is so easy compared to Linux. After my last ATI driver experience with Linux, I’m not particularly disinclined to this case however after what I had with Windows I’m not quite sure which is worse. After having the computer hard lock (probably heat issues), I decided to try to update the drivers. I downloaded the latest drivers off the nVidia web site, installed them, restarted and ended up with 640×480 256 colour display. No problem I thought, I’ll try to revert the driver – but didn’t see any easy way of doing this with the driver option not working properly. Ok, lets try to get a slightly older version of the driver. Load up Firefox and decided to hit the nVidia site and then Firefox crashes. This is weird because the page starts loading fine and then just crashes. So I tried IE and the similar case occurred. It then occurs to me that the Flash player is available in both cases and is perhaps crashing the browsers. Boned. I grabbed the original driver install CD, reinstalled it, rebooted and magically everything is back to scratch. This actually reminded me of how I did the same thing with the ATI driver except that my Linux box was a bit easier to handle switching drivers. Why does Windows make life so hard?

So a few weeks ago I released JAuthTools 1.5.4 which features Token Login. Token Login was created to solve the need to generate a secure token that you can use for automatic login, for example with stuff like newsletters. Today I’m going to show you how you can write something simple with Token Login to handle automatic login with tokens in a unique problem case.
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Have you ever done a search for a problem you’ve had only to see tantalizingly something that looks like exactly the answer you wanted before painfully realising that it’s on Experts Exchange and the page you have just clicked on says it has the answer but you don’t have an account. Sure you could sign up for their free trial for 30 days and you might even find the answer if you are lucky but what happens next time? It’s like a drug dealer: the first hit is free, but you pay for everything from then on.

Now the original design of Experts Exchange wasn’t too bad. You could ask questions if you had enough points. You could also assign points to different questions increasing in value for importance I guess. You acquired points by either paying or by successfully answering questions. The thing that annoyed me was that if you weren’t the person that was nominated as the one who answered it you got no tangible credit for your contribution even if it helps or even if the correct answer was actually wrong or perhaps not the best response.

But obviously at this point they feel that they have enough knowledge to justify not only spamming their pages with tonnes of ads but also starting to force people to pay for even more. And be aide they’ve been around for a while and have had a good reputation they’re using this plus close keyword matches on the question to continue to drive traffic.

So now with Google’s Search Wiki, we can fight back against Experts Exchange and it’s pointless entries in Google’s index. All you need to do is be logged in and when you see an Experts Exchange result in your Google search make sure you delete it from your results. My belief is that if we get enough people to blacklist and delete those entries, Google will take note and eventually lower the rank of the entries and we’ll stop seeing their results.

I decided this morning to give Panic’s Coda software a go. Coda is billed as an all in one web development tool. It has a whole bunch of things built in such as Subversion. At USD$99, I half expected it to just work, especially given their arrogant slogan. What I found by simply adding a “site” was that it crashed. I reported it and decided to give it another go. This time I got half way through adding the site and was about to save it before not one but two error dialogs appeared advising me to quit again. I haven’t had a chance to use it and it keeps crashing, not good. I think this is one bit of software I will not bother with. I guess I’ll stick to Eclipse.

Update: I have an email Coda stating that they believe that it is an issue with a third party application is causing the issue. When I have a chance to quit everything I’ll work out which application is causing it though if I can to forgo something useful it probably isn’t worth it.