I’m not sure where the majority of my ‘regular’ working hours went. Somewhere between fighting with MySQL Workbench and sending emails to people some form of work happened. I’m not entirely sure what but I guess that dealing with emails is work.

The first problem appeared to be four new classes of student that have been created. This causes issues with the catalog because the driver is hard coded to recognise these classes. An easy enough fix to add the four items to the requisite array but it would be nice to abstract this out into a database table at some point or similar.

Next battle was fighting MySQL Workbench to get it to create an ER diagram for me. Eventually I managed to work out how not to trigger its “pure virtual function call” – you need to ensure that you close the bottom panel before opening a new table. I’m sure they’ll get around to fixing it one day. MySQL’s GUI tools have historically had problems for me. MySQL Query Browser rarely manages to let me graphically create a table without crashing. Yet I still try. I think I’ve managed to work out most of the error conditions to avoid them but it is sad that such easy to trigger bugs exists. In any case I managed to get the diagram modelled correctly which will be useful for future reference as well as for the Faculty of Business who were chasing it. Hopefully it is of use to them.

The afternoon was spent fighting with our EQUELLA instance and trying to work out why it was misbehaving. I didn’t work it out and ended up purging the item in question instead and starting on a new item. I’m not sure what I did to get it so grumpy but the item is purged now so it isn’t going to cause me an issue. The institution in question is going to be wiped out again in a part of testing. I managed to create some cool tools as a part of working out how the system works which should make some future work easier. Also finished work on an interface as well. I went home perhaps a little bit too late but it gave me the chance to concentrate on getting things worked out in peace. I found a minor quirk in Joomla! that I’d found previously but now I have a reasonable solution to get around it.

More work, more juggling but the wheel slowly turns.