Today was one of the longest days I’ve had for a while, it started at 7am and finished a little after 6pm. I should work less.
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One of the advantages of working for a university or government organisation is the use of flex. So today I made full use of the extra time I’ve worked up over the last week. I woke up late after going to bed early, so I caught up on a bit of sleep. I spent 1.5 hrs playing on Wii Fit which was good, it meant that I burnt off a whole heap of energy – allegedly over 300kcal, well perhaps not that much.

I finished up and went to uni to have a meeting with my supervisor. We went over the paper that we’re working on to get through a few things. I had a good two hour lunch catching up with people. It appears that ICT is going to be outsourcing with the people currently being sued by the University of South Australia. A curious choice, to go with someone who has a track record of apparent failure but they were probably cheap enough. I followed this by a short visit in my office to catch up on things before I went to visit with Luke, the ICT Security Manager.

We managed to get the library test site and blog working properly behind the load balancer which unfortunately took around 45 minutes to get right. Whilst I was visiting, he also fixed up coursereading pointing to test not prod which is good. This means I need to double check a few more things and we’ll be ready to

So today mum got a letter from Centrelink saying they’ll pay her money and that they’ve already paid her money which is good. However they also sent her a form which is to be returned tomorrow. Seems a bit much to hope that a letter will arrive in time, but it could be worse: it could have arrived tomorrow or even worse on Friday. Yay for Centrelink!

It strikes me that our language around problems is confused. When someone is talking about a problem they can be talking about the cause of the problem or they can be talking about the symptom of the problem.

This leads to the obvious that the symptom is treated not the cause. Removing the symptom by statement fixes the problem if you state the problem is the symptom. But that doesn’t resolve the root cause of the problem and thus it can potentially break the workaround you’ve created to remove the symptoms.

Another curiosity for the day.

So I’ve been having issues getting CNC4. Not only is it a legitimately bought copy but it was even a pre-order. It didn’t work properly so I filed a support request as you can read in my blog post entitled “CNC4 Fail”. My annoyance was that my details weren’t getting read properly. EA seem to employ many more drones and can’t be bothered particularly reading what I wrote. So I did some more work and I got some progress.

Ok, so I deleted everything in my temp folder, restarted and saw what happened. I saw the cnc4launcherupdate.exe file being created which was funky but then I received the same error message. So I deleted it, relaunched and got the same error message. Eventually after doing this repeatedly the launcher eventually loaded. Clearly you don’t a) check that the file is properly downloaded and b) prompt to redownload in this situation (given that you don’t check it to begin with it would be rather hard to do).

Once the launcher loaded I was stuck on the r1core_data_cnc4.game.rtp file not downloading properly and crashing. I am still stuck at this point.

So eventually got an update to this:

Hello there,

Thank you for contacting EA Games Support,

I sincerely apologize for inconvenience caused to you. I have checked the DXDiag of your computer the drivers are out dated please install the latest driver. In order to know your drivers open the dxdiag file and go to the “Display Devices” and check the drivers under ” Driver Date/Size” You will find how old your driver is. To correct this you have to update your computer driver, I have included the link for your convenience please go through and make necessary changes.

Should you have any further questions, please take a moment to review our Knowledge Base site at http://support.ea.com.

Sincerely,

EA Rep Austin
Electronic Arts

I’m annoyed that they’re apologising and not actually reading my responses. Drivers might be a problem but I initially a) couldn’t launch the launcher and b) the launcher can’t patch properly so it doesn’t matter what version of my display drivers I’m on, I’m not even getting there.

Seriously?

I mean, seriously? Your launcher has a flaw in it that it doesn’t validate that the download has completed successfully (even a simple MD5 sum or file size check should fix this) and then tries to run the app which fails because the file isn’t downloaded correctly.

Problem number two is what appears to be an issue that the launcher when you finally get the damn thing updated hands on downloading the r1core_data_cnc4.game.rtp file. This doesn’t appear to be an uncommon issue looking through the forum.

Don’t worry, I don’t need an answer to this. I gave up. I wanted to play the game and I got a crack. The game runs nicely and I’m progressing through the missions fine. Thanks for not reading my messages. Repeatedly.

The funny thing was that whilst I uninstalled and reinstalled the game I got a CNC4 server emulator downloaded, copied it into place, made the required changes to my hosts file and I started playing the game. It is working perfectly fine. It depresses me that I got what I couldn’t have paid for – I could have illegally downloaded the game and I would have actually been playing it faster than the legal game. As it stands the legal version isn’t still working anyway so in some respects I’m still behind by paying money. So I responded to their message with the text above and I also ticked the ” I no longer need an answer to this question.” I don’t require a response any more because it is working, just not their intended way.

Of course the sad thing is that the game is working fine and I’m enjoying it. It is a different concept that I’m trying to get my head around but it is pretty enjoyable. I haven’t had much time to go through it and I’ve only done the first few GDI missions but I’ll get there eventually. It looks like there are a few glitches which could be patched but since patching the game legally doesn’t work I guess I’ll never know.

Looks like I have a busy week ahead. Last week I was working on the death of lib1 and libblog which will have to continue to a point but it looks like not this week. Might get there but you never know. Other items ahead this week include iPhone training tomorow and DiReCt consultants up on Wednesday and Thursday. On Thursday we’ll start our catalogue reindex process again and hopefully that will continue successfully. I had some word today that we should be able to go the other way with the Virtua and library catalogue to help automate the reindexing so that we don’t have to do it all ourselves.

I had some fun with paperwork and a rather unfriendly colleague trying to be annoying. Managed to get all of the paperwork filed and shifted around the place which is good. It all ended up working out even though it was at the last minute. Nothing a bit of friendliness doesn’t help.

I was having a look at getting the JIRA jelly to notify non-users from JIRA when their issue changes. We don’t necessarily want people to be able to do anything but just be notified of changes. Creating users for everyone would seem a bit painful instead of just adding a few emails to the particular issue so that they’re notified when things happen.

To round out the afternoon I spent some time redoing the MARC loads for a new type of file and hopefully that will get properly tested tomorrow and all sorted.

Late in the afternoon I had an email from another part of the University. They wanted to attend some of the sessions to get an idea about the architecture about DiReCt since we’ve got two consultants coming up to try and work out how the system works. What I don’t get about this is that they hired the person who knows the most about the product at the University and gave them an extra two levels on top of what they were being paid. I don’t quite understand why need to get an idea when they already employ an expert already. But such is life.

The work slowly turns!

Ok, so I pre-ordered CNC4. I have pre-ordered every CNC game (except for RA3:Uprising because its digital delivery only and wasn’t available from any of the providers I like, e.g. Steam) lately such as CNC3, CNC3:Kanes Wrath and RA3. CNC4 wasn’t an exception. I enjoy the storyline so I don’t mind paying for it upfront and playing it. I also like RTS as a game style as well so it helps. I had the CNC4 Beta but it wasn’t working, I couldn’t work out why and no error messages appeared. There wasn’t anything in the debug logs to help me out either and at the time I didn’t have the spare time to work out what the problem was and file a bug report.

So CNC4 came in a few days ago, earlier because someone else managed to sell theirs earlier or something. Again, I had assignments and other stuff to do so I only tried to get it installed last night. The game installs fine without error. I go to launch it and the splash screen comes up, disappears, the CNC4.exe file sits in memory consuming around 30MB (it varies so it is doing something) and eventually I get an error message:

It looks like it can’t find something and bails out. Not sure what it can’t find or why but it can’t.

So I go to EA Support and file the following with the error dialog screenshot attached:

Starting the game the splash screen disappears and then nothing happens. After a few minutes of sitting around at 30MB of memory usage the attached dialog appears.

I then after digging around saw some instructions about dxdiag in notes, so I fire up dxdiag, hit “Save all information” and attach the resulting file with the follow message:

Attached dxdiag details.

I was having issues during the beta that I couldn’t spend enough time to resolve. I have fully uninstalled the CNC4 beta though.

These are time stamped at 5:41am and 5:43am, presumably PST (it was late at night AEST). EA promise 24 hour turn around and sure enough at 3pm on the dot I get this response:

Hi,

Thank you for contacting EA customer support.

We do apologize for the inconvenience you’re experiencing with the game.

Are you getting any error messages?

Please accomplish the following before launching the game:

1. Empty your Temp folder to prevent file conflicts. Click here for steps on emptying your Temp folder:
http://support.ea.com/cgi-bin/ea.cfg/php/enduser/olh_adp.php?p_faqid=10705

2. Please end all background tasks to prevent conflicts with other programs. Click here for steps on ending background tasks:
http://support.ea.com/cgi-bin/ea.cfg/php/enduser/olh_adp.php?p_faqid=10700

If the trouble still persists, please send us a copy of your system information which is taken from the DXDIAG program. To do this:

1) Go to Start -> Run.
2) In the box, type the following: dxdiag
3) Click ‘OK’
4) Click the ‘Save All Information’ button on the first screen of the application.
5) Then on top of the ‘Save As’ box that pops up, select Desktop (if it’s not set to save there already), then click Save.
6) Finally, attach the dxdiag.txt to your email reply.

Once we get the Dxdiag, we’ll take a look and let you know what to do from there.

If there is anything else we can help you with, please do let us know.

Thanks,

Andrews.
EA Online Support

I’m rather annoyed, and I’ve replied as follows:

Hi,

Thank you for not reading.

Don’t apologise for the inconvenience of the game not starting without reading the question or supplied information.

Yes a dialog does appear suggesting that something is valid. I’m not sure what as it isn’t that descriptive but it has a handy backtrace. That is attached already.

Removing the files in the temp folder shouldn’t make a difference as the backtrace is suggesting the file isn’t valid or potentially missing. Deleting stuff won’t make it reappear.

Stopping any background tasks will again not achieve anything as it is failing to launch something. All of my other EA games including every other single CNC game (except for RA3:Uprising because it was online only and I like having a disc even if you don’t) appear to be working fine. Even so the error message is indicating that something isn’t a valid Win32 application which suggests something filesystem related.

I have sent you the dxdiag for your reference as well as the error messsage screen shot in PNG format. As a developer I don’t believe the error is caused by either of your causes and could you please just look at the information so we can progress in fixing this problem instead of scripted support.

Cheers,

Sam

I went to reply and put that in and it sent me to a login dialog box where I put my credentials in a few times and got nowhere. Went to the root of the site and it had authenticated me. What is going on? Anyway, I had a copy for this blog so I went back to the support issue and replied with this again. 5:09pm.

Hopefully I’ll get someone responding without a copy and paste script.

I was recently looking through some blogs and noticed their use of categories against tags. It got me thinking about how I sort this blog. On this blog I have a whole heap of categories that I probably treat much like tags. Only a few actually have a significant amount of posts beside them and I’m considering slowly migrating them to be tags instead of categories. WordPress is good in the fact that it offers both loose categories that you can put something into and tags as well. Tags seem to be even looser than categories but they seem to be roughly equal. Categories have the advantage that they can be nested however tags can’t but all in all I don’t use hierarchical categories so realistically category == tag. All in all, perhaps starting after this post, I’ll work on adding more tags to items and paring back my categories (I actually added a new category to put this post into!).

Let the experiment begin!

My entire day seemed to revolve around meetings. Started off at 9am with the team meeting and being informed that I’m being put onto yet another task as well which takes priority over everything else. The unfortunate thing about politics higher than you is the fact that you get pulled all over the place. Such is life unfortunately. New work, new tasks and new integration targets.

The next meeting was a pseudo meeting for myself where I filled in a few more HEAT requests for the day. I had three, including one requesting to install HEAT at the suggestion of Luke Drury. I’m told it is only used in ICT related business. Such is life, I guess Service Desk really enjoy rerouting all of my HEAT jobs.

Following this was a meeting with one of the Faculty Librarians about Access All Databases (AAD) and looking at options. AAD is an application that has been picked up from elsewhere and repurposed by the Library and it shows. It is in dire need of a rewrite and it scares me how badly the entire item is structured. We’ve got some changes and we’ll have a demo at the relevant meeting later in the week. Lucky us! More work likely but no time to clean it up properly.

Next on the list was the ePrints meeting, the last for the quarter. We did alright this quarter and most things were completed acceptably. There are some outstanding items and a few things left but all in all it wasn’t too bad. Was a relatively quick meeting which also makes me happy as well and I got to lunch at a reasonable hour instead of being horribly late.

After lunch I ended up doing some quick support and investigation as to why something wasn’t displaying properly in our library catalogue. Looks like a data error but you can never be cetain about these things. We’ve changed the data but it will take a while for everything to flow through due to the design of the system.

From here the next meeting was to work with ePrints with an ICT staff member to implement a feature that I had previously built into ePrints. Whilst I was working on the Author ID project within ePrints one of the needs was to reference a data set that was stored and managed outside of ePrints, namely the department tree. To do this I created a new field type called the “ExternalItemRef” which extended from the built in “ItemRef” field type. ItemRef links ePrint datasets together and allows you to do references which is cool, ExternalItemRef does the same thing but instead of using an ePrints defined data set, it works with any particular table that is available to the system within the same database as ePrints. You define the name of the table, the key for the table (a unique integer value) and then a text value for it that is then displayed. This gets processed by the field and neatly integrated into ePrints. Further to this I have a widget that permits the user to have a popup dialogue displayed to enable searching of item results. The popup dialogue was itself new functionality that I added to the system to enable searching on the various tables easily. Because it is a popup it can present information in my mind a lot easier than a simple AJAX drop down list. The thing that took the longest was in fact loading the data from an Excel spreadsheet into the MySQL database but after a bit of work it was easy enough to do and we’ve got instructions for next time. The trick appeared to be not using Excel but OpenOffice.org – free software to the rescue. Also regular expressions are amazing at data transformation. I need to do some more practice at loading data into MySQL and work out more effecient ways of doing it but I feel I’ve got it figured out enough for this situation.

The afternoon was spent reviewing the various systems that are available internally, looking at their issues and working my way through my horrific inbox. So many little things that need doing, cleaning up and fixing. One day at a time!

At the prompting of Dom Knight (of Chaser fame) I was looking over my cinema’s booking system. Recently rebranded from Birch Carol and Coyle (itself a merger from long ago) to form ‘Event Cinemas’. They’ve done a technology overhaul and remade their website to be very good looking (with some Flash but not overdone, I’d describe the site as flash but Adobe have taken that word from the web site descriptive vernacular). They have a nifty iPhone application that appears to work well though as Dom notes perhaps not as good as it should. They have a mobile application which also doesn’t appear to work well. But this isn’t what bothers me, what bothers me most is the little note they had: Booking Fee applies online. Of course it doesn’t note that this is per ticket. So if you book five people online in one transaction you have to pay an additional on top of the purchase price. It costs you more to book online per person than it does to show up in person. Let us dwell on that. I could potentially understand a flat fee here to cover some sort of consistent expense but a per person fee seems a bit much. Especially at a dollar. Perhaps this is to make up for the cheaper tickets you get there, a sort of recovery mechanism. Not sure.

Whilst I was typing this up I ‘timed out’ a few times. This wasn’t in a screen far in, it was the first screen after selecting the session time. At this point the only persistent information that could possibly time out is the movie, date and time. All values I feel should easily be persisting at this point. There should be no issues with those values timing out. The trick is that the timer is for the entire booking session. You have 8 minutes to pick how many tickets you need, what extras you want and your payment method. I also managed to trigger a runtime error as well within the application, a well written application indeed.

The booking process, when it isn’t crashing, asks for a member number as well. It says that is has already filled it in for me but then works out that it really isn’t the right number. So I proceed without it which is unfortunate. But that is the story here.

The process for all of this acquires an email address, credit card number of other identifying item. And that is the key. That is the value in this transaction that they should be encouraging.

The process doesn’t necessarily make it easier for their front counter staff beyond having everything in the system and being able to go through slightly quicker with the order pre-done. It is about building a database of information. Not only can you register people with CineBuzz to get them to provide details and link it in but even if they don’t do that signing in online with credit cards will allow you to handle and work out all of this information into your databases directly. You don’t need to recover it from point of sale systems located all the way around the country, you can have it deposited directly into your system and providing you information. In some cases where you get the booking days before you end up making interest off the money you just took. And you haven’t even had to provide the service!

Sitting through a business intelligence course, I know the value of having information available to you. Encouraging online booking can integrate into so much more. All of the different systems, availability of historical and trending data that is available. Even mild predictive values systems based on online sales and ability to prepare systems. The more information the better. It is worth more than the $1 per person that they seem to be charging for the pleasure of booking online.