Today was the nail in the coffin of the Samsung Galaxy S that I use at work to do Android based testing of the library’s future work in the mobile area. The device is a stock device running Android 2.1 (Samsung’s updater app cowardly refuses to upgrade it to 2.2 for some reason) however as the device is for testing and since it has WiFi built in I’ve decided to use that. It isn’t connected to the cellular data network (or even have a SIM card) and this has lead to some interesting problems.
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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.

Another day moves slowly away through meetings life gently progressed. Had chats with people about Sedona, something might happen and something might not. Mostly out of my hands for now. RPCS is starting to draw closer. Will have a whole heap of new stuff to add for them so doing it together with Sedona might not be too unrealistic. Not a lot else that I would deem as productive time beyond pushing stuff from one place to the other. Another day at the office.

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.
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In the wide world of USQ Library today turned into another day of digging through code, asking why and then progressing on with fixing things. Today’s strange problem was trying to work out why variables that seemingly were global variables weren’t marked as global variables yet were working. This revelation turned out to be a require of the relevant file into function scope – I’m not sure why I didn’t think to look for that first but the excess of globals threw me off. The function in question had around 12 other globals marked in various places so it isn’t completely out of place. Par for the course for the last week really and Business provided the most interesting aspect of the day.
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There are days where meetings seem to dominate. Today was one of those. With four hours of the day scheduled out into meetings it felt like I didn’t get much done but some how managed to get more work: ePrints, DiReCt, media repository and some finalisation on mobile. I did have a few minor wins in understanding how different parts of the library systems come together however there is a still a lot more to learn.

Today was another mixed day. We deployed out the trial library mobile application ahead of the system management committee (SysManCom) meeting. It is available through the USQ Library homepage and is still in trial (we found some more bugs so we’ll get that sorted). SysManCom progressed with a reasonable reception of the mobile application which is nice. Some tasks to follow up on from the meeting which is always fun – some writing to be done about eBooks in the library for users. This should basically amount to because publishers don’t give us the tools students can’t put the “ebooks” we subscribe to on “ebook” readers. Yay for DRM.

After the demo one of the most painful parts was the fact that we rely upon the CMS for a significant amount of content. The main problem with the CMS is that it is horribly unfriendly for mobile devices. At one stage the home page had a Flash banner which didn’t degrade properly which left a frustrating image that said “click here” but wasn’t actually linked to anything. So I spent the middle of the day working out how to strip out the USQ home page template so that we can embed it else where. I managed to get it sorted mostly though as I’m abusing an XML parser it’ll barf on poorly formatted pages or with HTML entities not in XML. Most of the CMS pages are fine but some legacy ones aren’t so lucky. I’ve put in some minor checks to clean things up but hopefully it isn’t too much of a problem.

The afternoon rounded out with a meeting before leaving early so that I could return for my evening of debates. Life in the fast lane.

Continuing from yesterday’s Global Domination theme today I worked on finalising my global annihilation. I worked on getting rid of almost all of the globals in the path way that I’m working on at the moment and I feel that I’ve succeeded. The application is perhaps a textbook example of why globals are evil.
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I think today I have seen one of the most poorly written bits of code I have ever seen. I have so far counted over 50 different global variables interspersed throughout the code occurring three levels deep into the application (yes, that’s three levels of includes before the global was set, scary!) even though they were being used at the root level.
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One of the nice things about Linux is the smooth way that the package management system operates. It just happens. The problem with Windows is that it doesn’t really happen – which is a painful experience.
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