Today almost seemed to be the start of the maintainence day that was scheduled for tomorrow. The USQ website was taken offline though that wasn’t so bad because not long afterwards the net link went down. Turns out there was a series of mishaps starting with a sparky wiping out one of the the interconnects between the firewall edge devices. This on it’s own wasn’t too bad until the fiber link to Sydney went down which with the edge interconnects down meant the failover didn’t work and for a few hours there was no internet connection. You see some people determine that without internet access or email there was no point being at work, which I find interesting.

I sat down and worked through ePrints most of the day. Its some how broken on my dev system, perhaps due to me trying to resync all of the systems together and creating a new field through the filesystem not through their interface. It appears that this has broken the system which is unfortunate. However I’ve managed to get everything in sync between dev, test and prod.

Almost all of today was spent working on the Adobe Presenter based tool from yesterday. Surprisingly it isn’t working properly so I ended up working to fix it. The issue appears to be that some how on the same computer but different users, Internet Explorer behaved differently enough to cause an issue and prevent the system from working. I really at times wonder what was going on and how the same computer differs for different users. Another Windows mystery is born.

Luckily I could replicate the issue on my machine so I went to work to try to work out what was going wrong. It turned out that for some reason the Javascript in the web page wasn’t working properly. It also didn’t work in Firefox so I used it to debug the issue and get it to work properly. Once I had Firefox up and running I went back to Powerpoint to test. This time when I went through it managed to work fine and passed the point where it was blocking last time and it looked like everything worked. It said it uploaded and encoded everything fine before finishing up stating the it had successfully uploaded the file to the USQ Studydesk (our Moodle site name). It lied. At this point I fired up VB6 that I had installed in the morning and opened up the project. I put in some debugging statements to try and work out what was going wrong. At this point I tried to work out how to install it and having a look through all of the resources he copied over and noted that I couldn’t find the code used to make the installer. I wandered next door to the other guy from our department that went and asked him if he remembered anything about the installer. He didn’t so again we ventured to his office. He doesn’t have a phone connected in part due to his own lack of desire I think and allegedly doesn’t respond to email. So we went and visited and discovered that he hadn’t copied the installer code over. So we got him to copy the code over even though he protested that we didn’t have the software to use the code that he had written (it was written in PowerBasic, the truth of the statement also is in question because he wrote it as a part of our Distance Education Centre (DEC) and is now working for the Centre for Sustainable Catchments, so technically the licence for the software should be owned by DEC anyway).

With the install code I managed to work out what I needed to do to get my modified version working properly to test it. Eventually I tracked the problem down to poor URL parsing which broke when I added an extra field to track another value. I shifted this field and magically it started working again. Whilst doing this I also discovered that there is very little error checking in the VB app itself and it merely hopes that everything works and will turn out fine. Looks like another app to rewrite and likely more work for me.

It has been an incredibly long time since I used Windows and now using it full time I’ve managed to get most things the way I want them, beyond the odd occasion when Windows decides that I didn’t want to use my start menu for much – but I’m working on ways around that. I’m also using Outlook full time as an email client and getting rather annoyed with its lack of functionality.

Every so often Outlook notifies me its connecting to an Exchange server, the other day when I was having IP issues it notified me that it was going to reconnect to the server but never got around to it (I ended up working out that the “You are working offline” error message and the actual “work offline” setting don’t corelate – there is another item at the bottom that was displaying disconnected). Impossible to assign rules for mailer subsystem.

Another annoyance I find with Windows is that it is hard moving maximised windows across desktops. On Mac its simple, you just drag the window across and if it doesn’t fit in its destination for whatever reason (dock, menu bar, smaller screen), the window gets resized to fit automatically once you drop the window (release the mouse button). Linux has a similar deal however windows in transit get unmaximised and can be remaximised at their destination. Windows however forces you to double click the window, shift it to the right display and then maximise it again. Interestingly on Mac and Linux I can use keyboard combos so I don’t even need to select the window’s title bar to move it (Alt dragging on Linux and I have Zooom on the Mac to handle that).

Like the previous few days I spent majority of my day trying to get ePrints in a consistent view in my SVN repo. Mostly boring.

In the afternoon I went to the handover of some presentation recording software. It is written in part with Visual Basic 6 for the Powerpoint integration and then some PHP on a Windows server that integrates with Adobe Presenter on the Windows box to handle converting the Powerpoint file and the associated recodings with the generated Flash file. While we were there the system actually broke so we stood around and waited for it’s developer to fix the system up. He seemed really reticent to hand over all of the code but I managed to get him to copy the directory. Originally he was only selecting a few files but was excluding some of the important Visual Basic project files. Hopefully I have enough of the code to get it to work

Most of my day was spent again on ePrints again. Nothing particularly interesting. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

I’ve been noticing a bit today that Slashdot appears to be going down reporting 500 Internal Server Errors. I noticed it first last night and a few times throughout today and then again just now. Not sure what is going on but they were having issues earlier self DOS’ing themselves, so perhaps something similar is occurring. Most times it comes back after a refresh or two which is good but still worrying that its happening a few times too regularly, I hope they get it fixed 🙂

Having moved from Council to USQ, I’m still getting everything set up. HEAT is USQ’s call logging tool, which is supposed to be I guess analogous to ITSM. I must admit that ITSM was one of the least most favourite tools, a sentiment shared by many colleagues, with it failing to work multiple times, losing work, being plain unavailable as well as requiring ‘administrator’ intervention. ITSM was originally planned to be delivered via a web interface but that quickly died when we realised that every time you selected a drop down box the entire page reloaded (the typical incident form has a minimum of 6 drop downs that need to be selected). ITSM however was typically relatively easy to get up and running presuming you had the .Net Framework installed and had admin rights to set up the privileges to let the thing install properly.

HEAT appears to much easier. After a first few attempts the IT technician wasn’t able to get it to work. He disappeared and returned about 4pm and managed to get it to work by copying HEAT’s files from his own computer. Ouch. Fortunately the team I’m in has a habbit of closing those jobs in HEAT and transferring them to our own long term tracker in Gemini. This is similar to how I would have liked more longer term issues to be handled at Council, except we used ITSM and I had a Bugzilla instance that I deployed. The HEAT interface doesn’t look as smooth as ITSM’s .Net look and feel but if it works that’ll be an improvement. We will see what happens sooner or later.

More ePrints fun today trying to get everything into Subversion. It took me a while to get access to the repository (eventually got control of the server first) and then I found out that the servers didn’t actually have Subversion either. So I put the Subversion client on the development and test servers. From there I slowly managed to get both development and testing branches some what into sync though they’re still not there they mostly look similar and I don’t have any major problems so far. Once I’ve done this I’ll try to get everything cleaned up and then have a look at ensuring that on disk test and prod are in sync. At that point hopefully I’ll be happy enough to implement new changes. Much more fun and its only Monday!

This morning marked my first change at USQ. The uni being a much larger organisation has a lot more beurocracy around change management and is perhaps not as agile as Council though that isn’t necessarily a bad thing when one considers things. The change itself went through well and I passed it onto the functional team to test and release. I haven’t heard back from them so I figure that at the close of business things worked out fine.

The task tracker, Gemini, is an interesting and mostly functional tool. It is another .Net application however it appears to have been mostly sanely and not rely on .Net’s form libraries that create almost unusuable web applications. It certainly isn’t the greatest tool of all but it is at least on par with Bugzilla, except you have to pay for this one.

HEAT access is on by list and it will be interesting to see how it compares to ITSM. Not that ITSM worked well at Council, but if parts of it worked better it would be really awesome. Assignable subtasks for items were perhaps my most favouritw concept, however it is a shame that the application never actually saw fit for them to work properly, typically causing some form of weird error when predefined actions tried to take place. Cool idea if it worked.

More ePrints work today, even trying to track down a PEBKAC error which is particularly hard when you are yourself learning the system (and more annoying when you realize the system worked fine and the code was right which is why you’re pulling your hair out trying to work out why it doesn’t appear to be working!). Other smaller tasks consumed my day as well as minor amounts of paperwork. Good fun!

My day entirely was made up of ePrints. ePrints is an open source tool for exposing published papers. It is really well designed with translations taken of care of in a pretty cool and efficient manner. Minor customisation work on the tool appears to be relatively easy as well although I’m hitting a few snags in customising some parts of the workflow system to get it to do what I need. It is written in Perl with a large amount of flexibity provided via XML files for various tasks. I must admit whilst it seems really complicated it is also well put together as well so once I’ve got my head around it things should be peachy!

Today began with a small amount of furniture shuffling to get a desk. Once we’d managed that bit of minor co-ordination I was able to startbworking through the back log of email that I’d received while I was absent. Very much fun. I have also somehow managed to line up some early mornings for myself in the few weeks ahead which isn’t going to be the most fun. I start with an 8am on Friday to upgrade some software followed by the Monday and a 7am meeting. I’ll have to get some early nights some where. I’m still yet to recover completely from the weekends excessive lack of sleep and exhaustion so I’m still feeling rather sapped.

I also today started to make a list of education users that use Joomla!, more on that when I get it more cleaned up and progressive. Mostly its users who also use LDAP or JAuthTools (or both) who are on my list so its slightly slanted, but we’ll see.