With the release of 1.5.10 we introduced an interesting side effect with an installer fix. This  side effect caused a whole heap of incorrectly written XML install files for components to fail to install. The reason for this is simple: a check added in the component installer that silently ignored errors in the XML file specification until the installer fix by passed that check in certain specific situation causing those broken XML file’s to break but for intended functionality to actually behave properly.

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I spent today having a look at some of the stuff from the University’s Planning and Quality Office (PQO). They have a single SQL Server for development, test and production which has full open access inside the University that are able to connect to their database though fortunately for them SQL Server at least enforces passwords. Its empty so far and they want to export XML from it for their work with ERA. PQO also want access back into ePrints for their RPCS system and we want access to theirs so I’m not sure how that will go.

There was an ePrints meeting about security, firewall zones and access to different systems. The security team want to put the new system into the DMZ and ensure that it can’t get back into the internal systems which complicates issues with the PQO people a little bit depending on where their server goes. There was also a cosmetic change in the dev system for ePrints that we’ll push up sooner or later.

Microsoft’s Forefront Security for Exchange is successfully nuking my DLL files in a ZIP files which would be very useful except for the fact that I wanted to send those DLL files and do something legit with them without having to work out how to subvert Microsoft faux security system.

I also did some more looks with Moodle and it’s email fun. There are a whole heap of headers which seem to do different things. Microsoft seems to want the “x-auto-response-suppress” header, auto-submitted seems to be another header whilst precedence and x-priority seem to be the traditional approach used to prevent autoreply/out of office stuff being sent. There are unfortunately issues with each option such as some causing different systems to behave badly, Microsoft solution works for only Microsoft systems. Eventually we want to permit non delivery receipts and disabling the invalid emails automatically with Moodle and eventually causing less spam.

Last night I looked at some of the iPhone developer stuff and saw them writing on the Macs and wondered if I should be going off and doing these sorts of things and the low developer time. The problem is that the people in these cases were intimately familiar with Mac OS X programming and with Objective-C which is something that I don’t really have. I would love to take some more time to work with Objective-C and get things up and running with it but I really don’t have the time between doing all of the work that I do with Joomla! and in PHP. Some times I wonder if it would be nice to work for something like Nokia and work on Qt using C++ as something interesting.

Working on Java today again with USQSafe, got a few interesting tips on what I need to do to get stuff to work. JasperReports/iReport is now behaving better and I’m getting used to its limitations. It only crashed once today, an improvement.

Today’s Outlook error is that for some silly reason it can’t preview HTM files. I’m not quite sure how or why, but it is what it is. This is from the ePrints tech mailing list which seems to mangle emails to cause this to occur for some reason.

This is a copy in part of something Evolution has had for a long time, however I think Evolution (and Mac OS X’s Mail application which also has a similar interface) has it much better as the attachment expands out in the email:

This makes it a bit more interesting and funnily enough Evolution can handle a simple HTML attachment,  I can’t wait for Openchange and proper Exchange support in Evolution. DavMail is good but causes weird lock up issues and doesn’t seem to properly support caching itself. I guess the alternative is to get the source and hack caching into the application, this should make it a bit more reliable and performant.

There are also repeated autonotification emails to Moodle to tell us that people have received the email, are out of the office, have moved on or something has changed in addition to the “this email doesn’t exist”. This is beginning to get a bit annoying and its time to have a look at cleaning it up and getting Moodle to automatically disable email addresses.

Being a Joomla! person, I keep up with the updates for Joomla! and I even have my own tool for doing this. The Update Manager I wrote for Joomla! 1.0 (and the version I wrote for 1.0 still works though we haven’t had any upgrades!) was upgraded to support 1.5 and is now a part of my Advanced Tools package.

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The most exciting thing for today was that we had a fire alarm and evacuation. Even though it was a false alarm, not a drill, it was the first time I’ve been in a proper evacuation sitaution for a fire. Everyone walked in an orderly manner perhaps due to the fact that most people seemed to think that it was a drill. In fact some decided that since it was a drill that they would take off instead of waiting and go to lunch since this was just prior to lunch. I think half the building ended up on lunch earlier than they would have expected since they were already distracted. Since some thought that it was a drill and wandered off, the entire procedure seems to suck as they’re supposed to check who was supposed to be in the building for the day at some point and this didn’t seem to happen. I do wonder what would happen in a real situation, not a drill or false alarm.

I continued my Moodle issue with the forum posting problem. It turns out that IE was causing the quoting to fail for some reason however using Firefox works and resolves the problem. I’m almost certain that the issue is in part on the server side though some weird IE extensions. Today wasn’t too much more productive with the functional team not being around which caused it’s own complications not only with myself but with the ICT Service Desk. Also trying to resolve another issue I am unable to contact a person to help fix their error, however though every time I walk to lunch or am outside walking past to the refect I can see the person for some reason. I wonder why can’t I call them and hve them actually be at their desk? I guess they aren’t there when I walk pAst either so what are they actually doing?

I rounded out my afternoon with USQSafe trying to work out why reports were not being found. I ended up trying a few thinga such as symlinking at the root folder but this didn’t work, tried some more symlinks in that directory and this didn’t work either. I figured at this point I’m stabbing in the dark and gave up on solving this problem and will look at it on the Monday with the help of my team leader who worked on it previosuly. I decided to use iRelort to build some new reports and got them tested out. iReport crashed once or twice which was annoying and I needed to restart the JBoss server due to accidentally extracting an EAR file in the wrong directory. I managed to add some extra data so that I could better test the reports and they appeared to work properly so I’ll just have to get it working properly in the application and finding the final Jasper reports including working out where the files should be located and why they can’t be found right now.

Today in Toowoomba is our show holiday where in theory we go to an overpriced agricultural show to look at animals and go on even more overpriced rides. As you can tell I am a great supporter of the event. I have attended as a child when I was less jaded however it has worn off I guess.

Instead I ended up with the girlfriend, her sister and husband and our housemate travelling to Brisbane for the day. This meant that I really spent a lot of time workng off my iPhone getting through my inbox and trying to get my backlog of blogs online.

The majority of my time has been spent using the WordPress iPhone application. Typing in landscape mode is a lot easier than the portrait mode however not so much faster than I would have hoped. Being in a car for a significant period of time typing was a bit more challenging as the car shakes so I’m not entirely sure if it is representative. What it would like is a time out for when I’m typing and miss the top row it doesn’t immediately shift the cursor but instead ignored the input and continued typing properly.

Another interesting effect that I managed to do was lock a particular post that I thought I had saved, even through restartng the application. I managed to unlock it by refreshing/rssyncing the post listing but it was still a bit of a worry and I wonder if I lost any data. It didn’t look like I did however I will never know. I’m not sure how I did it either so I can’t file a bug report though I might have a bit of an experiment. As most of the stuff I’m doing is already on my site I’m also doing online drafts not local drafts, which had interesting side effects as I moved in and out of coverage. If I didn’t have coverage I could open up an online draft from the list so obviously the syncing only gets a list of posts and not their actual content. It would be nice to have a mode where I can pick up the posts and copy them all down onto the phone and use it’s local storage.

Another annoyance of mime is that it won’t let me back date my posts on my phone. I can’t see any good reason for it and even worse it tries to reset the date to the current date on older posts you are working on. Even worse though was one post where I accidentally switched to the publish date screen and toyed with it a bit. My last extensive testing of this functionality was on the previous version of the WordPress software and I hadn’t seriously taken it to task under the newer version of the software. So I toyed with it for a while and then when I got bored of it not letting me set a date or time in the past (even a few minutes into the past seemed impossible) I gave up and returned to my post to find that it had been completely blanked with all of my local changes lost. I quit from the completely blank post and didn’t save it fearing it’d take even more with it and reopened to find all of my changes lost. But even worse just now whilst writing that section on my iPhone I hit save to store it back on the server. Strangely in this version there is some form of a background saving functionality (that also broke in my comments above and locked the post until I resynced) but if the saving the post fails for whatever reason then you lose your changes to your post. Major bummer! In my case I believe there was a temporary network issue to the server that my blog is hosted on that caused all active connections to it to be reset for some reason. The why is not so concerning as it went down temporarily and then came back up again, the issue is that the iPhone application shouldn’t have lost data. In fact the previous version would remain at the edit screen so any failures whilst saving would result in you being returned to your post with all of the information. There was one point where I actually retyped the post from my iPhone and I thought I was hard done by at that point, this makes it sound like a godsend.

I think that is enough ranting, now to go through and see how many posts I managed to write up properly and post them before I sleep.

Today was a mixed bag with a few different things going on.

I will start with the UniHIRTS/USQSafe system. We put in a time estimate for the work to do and we ended up getting an email back stating that the risk matrix feature request is actually a risk assessment system. A few emails back and forth turned out that by risk assessment they really meant two dropdown boxes which was all that I was thinking anyway. So that was fun.

There was also some work with Moodle SSO using the MoodleNet integration with both Moodle and ePortfolio we can easily come from Moodle into our ePortfolio site however we cant easily go back into Moodle the issue is that there is no way of identifying that the user is the see in both systems. In my view the way of solving this is to use the standard USQ SSO system for authentication which both Moodle and ePortfolio can trust (Moodle already trusts it for authentication anyway) and to seemlessly transfer between the systems we just use the USQ SSO system and it will handle the identification process.

If that wasn’t enough Moodle for the day we had so e issues with a user trying to post to a forum and having it fail with an unknown error. It turns out that there was a problem quoting the posting properly to work with Oracle. So I’ll have a look at that on Friday or maybe Monday but we should have a work around temporarily for the student in question.

To end the day i had a chat about ePrints with the manager of information systems at the library. We are having fun with the Office of Research and Higher Degrees with a system of theirs called RPCS which stores information about papers that are written by the University. ePrints also does this however more for the goal of making the documents publically available as opposed to making decisions from the information. Interestingly now the government wants to assign funding based on how much research and published materials the universities make. The Office thinks that they have some matching code that they can use to make crossreferencing the ID’s in the two systems not so tedious. So we had a chat about that shortly and we’ll see what happens next week when we have a meeting with all of the parties involved.

To round out my day we had a meeting on presenter again. There are a few issues such as that the system is mildly tempermental though in all fairness the lecturers aren’t using the tool in a way that was intended by (badly) embedding video into their Powerpoint, in some cases crashing Powerpoint, switching out of application to other applications or the browser (works if you alt-tab out). There are also other issues with the system but at the end of the day the lecturers don’t want something to baby sit their Powerpoint presentations they want something to basically recorder their screen as they go backwards and forwards through their presentation or as they swap in and out
of their presentations and have support for video. It seems the University already has a product that does most of the things that we need. The product, Camtasia Relay, has an interesting pricing model where the client is free but the server that handles the conversion on the number of concurrent jobs that can run. I’m not entirely sure how this works though because if we throw enough grunt at the problem why would we need more items or how concurrent jobs increase throughout when in most bulk conversion systems I’ve built personally built adding concurrent jobs on the same server slowed the process down to more than running them one at a time. Perhaps it works with concurrent servers and allows parallel execution with multiple servers. But one of the interesting features of the system is that it integrates with iTunes U. iTunes U is a special version of the normal iTunes that integrates to provide university content in the same friendly interface. I did a few calls around the place and found that as a member of the Apple University Consortium (AUC) we qualify for it and have already been asked if we were interested in taking part and not much happened. So if we can pick this up easily and do a good value add it will help to solidify the Camtasia option.

I had a fully written post here but since I wrote it on my iPhone and due to the new background saving feature of the WordPress application its successfully managed to lose all of the changes completely. I did have some notes left but I couldn’t bring myself to rewrite it again. Sad really.

Starting with Monday I feel that the weekend is not long enough, though I guess I could say that all of the time. I spent some time installing Visual Studio 2008 Professional edition on my annoyingly slow computer. Copying 4.3GB off the installation DVD took 1.5 hours though thankfully the majority of that time was sucked up in the Monday set of meetings. Funnily enough the installer crashed after I clicked “restart later”, at least everything was installed. After this I installed SP1 which took another hour before I went to lunch. The worst thing about this was that it made my entire computer slow and almost made it impossible to actually do anything productive. So I went to lunch and came back later to see it done and wanting me to restart (again). With all of that installed, I tried some stuff with DirectSound and this still didn’t solve my problem so I’m back to square one again without a solution.

Reading through the ePrints mailing list I found a cool looking app called Papers: http://mekentosj.com/papers/. Given I’m going to start doing a lot of academic style work it looks like it might be a useful tool. But I will see how it goes. It also has a companion iPhone application as well that looks really cool.

I’m sure I did something more today but it must not have been too interesting!

Over the last few days I’ve been trialling some different invoicing applications as my previous tool, a spreadsheet in NeoOffice or OpenOffice.org on my Mac, became increasingly frustrating to use. The main issue was that the applications would be unresponsive for long periods of time and hang almost completely. This is rather frustrating when you’re trying to bill a client and it starts taking much longer than it should.

So I went off looking for Mac OS X solution to solve the problem as these days my desktop is more Mac than Linux. Previously Linux solutions didn’t impress me much either and I couldn’t find anything nice in the PHP realm to run as a web service which is also an attractive option to me.

So I ended up looking around MacUpdate for options and came across Invoice 3 and Billings before noticing that Billable was on discount for the day. So I decided to try to grab that as well and see what it did.

It was also much smaller than any of the other ones so it managed to get downloaded first. I went through it’s quick introduction movie and then started using it. It was a bit late so I wasn’t interested in messing around too much and then the application decided that upon rendering an invoice a weird “no pages were selected to be printed error” would continually appear. The app locked up for a while before this and whilst now I know and understand why I didn’t know then and tried my best to quit from it properly between annoying error messages that kept popping up (also taking Firefox with it unfortunately) and went to bed.

The next one on my list was Invoice 3, the most expensive one on the list and the nicest looking. It mostly worked fine until it came try to render the invoice and annoyingly came up with the same error messagenas Billable however it didn’t take out Invoice 3 and the app responded better. At this point it has happened to two applications so I went off and did some Googling on the issue. One of the results were the Apple forums which had an issue with iTunes printing. This triggered me to wonder if the network printer I have set up for my dad’s network was breaking things. So I went into the cups config and removed the printer and restarted cups. Immediately Invoice 3 became much more responsive and after a restart of the application and removing it’s preferences file I was also able to get much further. I went back to Billable and it now started to work properly not causing the errors that had previously crippled it.

The other application, Billings, annoyed me straight from the gun. It required the clients to exist in your address book before you could use th in the application. Whilst I see the potential power of this method however I don’t want to put In all of the clients in my address book and them have it replicated to my phone and other devi we that I have synchronizing with my Mac. So that one is out and now back to Invoice 3 and Billable.

Billable and Billings both requested for a copy of my logo however only Billable let me drag and drop my logo into the app. Given at this point Billings is out of the question it was nice to see the logo by default on it’s template which was quite good. By default I liked Billable invoice default template style over that of Invoice, but Invoice looks like it has a much more flexible interface for handling invoice generation. I’ll create a copy of the Billable style invoice and that should keep me happy though I do like it has a message feature for its invoices whilst Invoice 3 will permit you to add multiple PDF’s to an invoice. So I’ll have a play with Invoice 3 before the demo expires and if I’m happy with it I’ll keep using it.