Over this weekend (Friday evening and Saturday) while watching the AFL Finals I got to work building a script to convert the standard Joomla! 1.6 beta packages into a format that would work with Microsoft’s Web Package Installer (WebPI). Early Sunday morning I managed to get everything done to the point that a Joomla! 1.6 package is automatically converted, stripping out the install and sample data scripts on the fly and reprocessing them as well as updating a WebPI feed XML file that you can use.

The long and the short is if you want to test out the latest Joomla! 1.6 beta release (beta 9 at the moment), all you have to do is add our own custom feed to the Web Platform Installer!
Read more

Today was an interesting day with the actual deployment of the DiReCt (EQUELLA) 4.1 system at USQ. It has taken far too long for this to happen and is I believe over a month behind where I had wanted everything to be deployed. But such is life. The last minute changes and the resultant litany issues that were generated by them which became almost recursive have for the most part been resolved (not so recursive now are we!). There remains some backend stuff that isn’t behaving properly but that will come in time and I have a feeling that something somewhere is breaking but I’ll get around to fixing it – one has to move on with these things. The new environment is behind load balancers, is running SSL by default (load balancer handles that) and I wrote some code that handles rewriting the path to be the new path that was picked. This is a bit of TCL that I retaught myself to get working properly with the F5 load balancers. Other fun things happening involve attending meetings with different people about ePrints related work and slowly getting closer on the world peace project.