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.