…and ePrints is still sitting in the doldrums. Today I managed to get the production box and then found it wasn’t properly configured yet so I couldn’t do much with it anyway. Test is sitting fully configured and ready to rock and roll when I get the firewall rules set up to pull the data to it. Given I put the forms in the Thursday before Easter I can understand that it is taking a long time to get them processed and how Easter delays things. To be honest, this is getting beyond a joke. So ePrints is going nowhere really fast.

Another Camtasia Relay meeting and it looks like the tool needs a large amount of customisation in some areas to make it meet the gap of the tool that it replaces. Unfortunately it looks like that might not be possible anyway but I’m unable to get that confirmed or validated. My email to Techsmith about offering to help them get the Moodle integration working seems to have fallen through the cracks as well, so much for the expensive support and maintenance contract. Either way its probably going to go ahead because at the end of the day its what the lecturers want until it doesn’t work properly either. To be honest for what the lecturers seem to be doing this is better though having seen what someone capable of doing things with the tool has done it can work quite well. As a side issue it appears that the Presenter tool has disappeared from some PC’s anyway. Yay for change management!

And now onto something new(er), DiReCt. It turns out that it is now needed within the next two weeks (or less) to get the S2 study material preparation out of the way. It appears that like ePrints, the three environments (dev, test and production) are all out of sync with changes in each so getting those under control will be required sooner or later anyway. For the time being I just imported each one to have a base and will progressively get around to increasing control of the systems into a much more managed approach. Of course getting this far is fun with the servers for the boxes being Solaris entire command sets are completely different to the much more featured GNU tool chain. Funny to think that historically the commands came from these places to emulate them and they’ve now progressed into more featured versions. But I digress. Subversion is unavailable for these machines so I ended up making do via sshfs and a few interesting tunnelling arrangements between servers. Hopefully over the next few days I can get Subversion installed on those machines and up and running which will be really awesome and save me from half as much work as I need but for now I’ve got a solution that works and tomorrow will be a full day of customisations as well as a little bit of chasing up my ePrints boxes. Maybe they’ll get done tomorrow, a man can dream.