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 at http://libtute.usq.edu.au/uMobile/ 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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Today was a slower day and I rocked up to work around 9:30am, read emails, attended a meeting about RPCS (we got some action yesterday), did some more emails, fixed a few things and had a long lunch with my boss discussing the shape of the world and things to come. I headed back to my office, processed a few minor things, made a few backups, responded to phone calls and emails before heading home for the day.

I went home, spent most of the afternoon crafting my assignment together. And then submitted it. To do this I need a TurnItIn originality report. Easy enough. I do all of that, wait for the report to come up, download the report (0% copied!) and upload it and the assignment to EASE. I have the sneaking suspicion that I had forgotten something and re-read the specification. I had, it was an introduction and a conclusion. I was close to writing one but didn’t because I forgot to put it in the original outline (I had everything else mind you). So I write up an introduction paragraph and a conclusory paragraph, regenerate the PDF (using LaTeX, NeoOffice on Mac is just a hog, is slow and non-responsive. TeXShop on Mac is fast and lets me write what I need with minimal fuss. Random style is hard but such is life) and resubmit to TurnItIn. Since I’ve already submitted they’re telling me I will need to wait two days. This really annoys me that I need this to submit, my university is paying anyway plus if we used the Moodle API we wouldn’t have this problem. In some respects it is a form of extortion because they want a material support to release it in some respects (signing up again with a new account would obviate the problem). In any case I submit anyway with the old report. We’ll see how we go.

Just recently I had issues with Outlook Web Access doing stupid things. I think my mailbox was over quota because when I emptied the trash via Apple Mail, everything started working. The weird thing is that when I clicked “Check Names”, it nuked the entire email for some reason. Curious behaviour. Anyway, email sent with mild frustration. Another day passes.

Today, like yesterday, one of my staff was away sick. Like yesterday this didn’t help things because with them away and another staff member away that means that we’re covering for two people. So I was helping out supporting the first guy but I also had to keep up with the support requests for the other person which was also fun.

So I had the on going issues with the wiki. Some appear to be legitimate, others appear to be an inability to copy and paste accurately. This is rather unfortunate but such is life. They are only first year students, so hopefully they’ll learn at some point. There were a few that weren’t in this bucket and I managed to get them resolved. We also had one student who changed their email address to a non-USQ student email address and is complaining that they didn’t get any email notification. I have a distinct feeling that the email was dropped as the student had a Yahoo! account and they have a habit of blacklisting us and our emails don’t go through. This is in part why we have the UMail accounts so that we can avoid this problem. We can’t blacklist ourselves.

Other issues involved some hosts needing to be added ezproxy’s list. It appears that EBSCO were redirecting this particular resource back onto ezproxy even though it was free. The ezproxy upgrade we did appears to have had this strange side effect that I will need to spend some time investigating if we can get rid of it so that for URL’s it doesn’t recognise it will unset itself.

The next issue was a link in the journal list that wasn’t being rewritten through ezproxy. That was an easy matter of updating the link where it was to run it back through ezproxy. I’m not entirely sure how it got changed but it was changed none the less and fixed now.

I had the regular Thursday tasks that the person off sick would have done. This involved kicking off the MARC export of our Library Management System, VTLS Virtua, and then starting the 11 hour reindex process into Solr and VuFind, the tool we use to index the catalogue. This bit doesn’t take much time however I spent a bit of time working on improving some of the scripts. I altered the way it handled logging and printed some user friendly messages to the screen. I’ve made small improvements along the way so hopefully this will continue.

Another curious thing was EndNote again complaining about a particular page implicating them more than VTLS. The issue is that since the upgrade EndNote has been broken. The original text read like this:

APOLOGIES – PLEASE NOTE: Currently there is no connection file for the USQ Library catalogue. We are awaiting a compliance upgrade from EndNote to match our Library Management System. We apologise for the inconvenience this causes. As an interim measure you might choose to search the UQ or other Australian Libraries for the title once you’ve found it in a normal websearch of our catalogue. We ask you to understand that this is NOT a permanent situation. Notification of the availability of the USQ connection file will be made ASAP

EndNote were upset about the implication that their system could be at fault here and that they had to do something. Curiously EndNote is the only system impacted and malfunctioning. Every other system that utilises the Z39.50 interface works perfectly well including but not limited to our Library Catalogue, the desktop management tool and web search tool provided by VTLS, OCLC’s VDX, Civica Aurora, Biblioscape 8, Yaz and Mercury Z39.50. Both Yaz and Mercury are freely available tools and Mercury was even tested off campus by a colleague at UQ. There are perhaps other systems that interface on Z39.50 that I have missed but it looks very much like the only system that isn’t working is EndNote. This has now been changed to the following:

APOLOGIES – PLEASE NOTE: Currently there is no connection file for the USQ Library catalogue. We are awaiting a compliance upgrade of our Library Management System to fix this. We apologise for the inconvenience this causes. As an interim measure you might choose to search the UQ or other Australian Libraries for the title once you’ve found it in a normal websearch of our catalogue. We ask you to understand that this is NOT a permanent situation and is not a problem created by the EndNote software. Notification of the availability of the USQ connection file will be made ASAP.

Fortunately VTLS have accepted that they made a change that broke EndNote and they’ve said they’ll fix it in their latest revision. It is unfortunate that EndNote seem disinterested in resolving the issue when VTLS took ownership and I must admit I never got a reasonable response from anyone about what was happening. As far as I could see from the logs, Virtua issues a challenge to EndNote which never gets responded to and EndNote just times out on its own. So whilst VTLS has agreed to do a fix to resolve the issue and restore compatibility however it will be in their next release which will be in a few months and due to the time it takes us to complete formal testing around the system it will likely be another few months after that until the fix reaches our production system. Unfortunate really. What I really don’t get is why EndNote is the only product that isn’t working but such is life. VTLS are happy to fix the problem and it’ll get resolved eventually. To be honest I don’t care who fixes it, I’m just disappointed that it took us a long period of time to get anyone to fix it.

Another day slowly turns.