So this tells me that at least Android 2.1 level applications do not respect the proxy settings I had set up. I’ve obviously got something set up properly because the web browser users them. Looking around there seems to be suggestion that I should root the device to set proxies properly or something. For something that “just works” on an iPhone and it is something of a no brainer I would have thought it would have worked fine on Android, at least with Google’s own applications.

However the real nail in the coffin is the lack of complete 802.1x authentication, which while improving it appears that USQ’s current configuration makes it fail. USQ has started to deploy of 802.1x wireless networks to reduce the requirement to log into the wifi network, log into the Cisco access points and then from there gain access. This meant that the earlier wireless network testing was possible albeit a little tedious. Using it from an iPhone was just as tedious however there were apps to get around it. As of this week they’ve switched that network off and now Android doesn’t want to play the game.

The first problem with the 802.1x network is that USQ uses a certificate signed by AusCERT which doesn’t appear to be in the normal trust path for either Android or iOS. iOS gets around this by prompting the user to accept the certificate like what normally happens on a desktop web browser when an untrusted certificate is presented. One has to go through a rather complicated set of hoops to get this working on Android from what I’m told including putting the certificate on an SD card and navigating through a few layers of menu. Having the user download the certificates independently, find an SD card writer, put it on the SD card and then going through a process to import the certificate isn’t particularly user friendly. When you consider that USQ has something like 5000 people on campus so this sort of task doesn’t particularly scale well as opposed to clicking “accept”. Once we’ve gotten over that hurdle the second problem appears to be getting the Android device working properly with the AES encryption used. Apparently this is a barrier that an USQ ICT member with a masters degree is currently tackling though I believe that Android doesn’t support AES only PKIP so I don’t think he’ll have much luck.

Of course on iOS its rather easy, select network, enter credentials, accept certificate and then add proxy settings to the network. And you’re done. This was enough to convince one of our faculty librarians that perhaps the Sony Xperia X10 that they bought in the last few months was really not worth fighting against and now wants an iPhone. The X10 was sold with Android 1.6 which really just makes you wonder about fragmentation in the Android platform.

UPDATE: USQ’s certificates are signed by AusCERT, Australia’s version of CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team), not self signed as I had earlier suggested. AusCERT’s CA doesn’t appear to be in the normal certificate bundle for either platform. This means it came up unverified which is why I had assumed we’d been using self-signed certificates. The secondary issue appears to be the more secure AES being used for the authentication instead of the less secure PKIP. Android doesn’t support the more secure AES and thus fails to work even when the certificate is trusted or the signing CA is added. Additionally I’ve been told that you don’t need to root the device to install a certificate but you can put it on an SD card. These changes have been merged into the main document where relevant.

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.

Sedona doesn’t appear to offer any form of integration services so the fact that they could integrate with ePrints via SWORD (deposits) or OAI-PMH (harvesting) is sounding impossible even though it would be a great standard way to send data around. The suggested synchronisation involved FTP but details are light on the ground.

Apparently the system doesn’t work properly with Chrome to the point that it won’t let you login claiming you need IE, Firefox or Safari. The system isn’t normalised as well with the author names fields (first name, middle name and last name) being stored as individual fields in the database (e.g. fname1, fname2) and limited to five authors. For overflow there is an “et al.” multiline textbox. The system does have a method of adding co-authors however this is distinct and is again a multiline select box. There is another free form box for citations which makes sense as they limit the list of periodicals (drop down select list) and lack enough information to build most citation types from the data that the system stores.

The system does appear to have given some thought to an export with an Access database being generated with appropriate tables. Access, whilst not perhaps my preferred database system, is perhaps one of the better choices for data export and certainly beats sending CSV or XLS files around. There is the proprietary aspect to Access but there could be no option at all and at least maintains type data better. It also appears that this form of export is the way of adding extra fields that might be required by the University to store extra information. It wouldn’t surprise me if an Access database isn’t the preferred synchronisation tool though that personally scares me. But at least they have thought about it which is a good start.

Overall I look at the system and think we could integrate it into ePrints and increase the overall value of our data anyway. We could handle the few extra fields that Sedona appears to add with the extra item types. The extra datasets are exactly that: datasets. ePrints has workflow to handle editing items to do what it needs. It would be less limited and give us more power to do what we need.

Reports appear to be the systems strong point. There is a prebuilt CV and various other rather trivial reports for a member. There is a set of aggregate reports that I haven’t looked into and there appears to be a rather picky way of formatting things for the AACSB requirements (including printed CV’s in a particular format – I hope AACSB doesn’t cover IT related areas given the backwards requirements).

The fun task I ended the day with was returning to work on the monstrous PHP application I’ve been fighting with all week. The particular point I’m at is adding plugin functionality to a section of the code base. Since I’ve been incorporating the Joomla! Framework into the system, doing this turned out to be relatively trivial. At the point where I wanted the plugin trigger I load a file called ‘notifier.php’. This loads in the Joomla! framework bootstrap file which defines a while bunch of things (JPATH_BASE, JPATH_ROOT, etc) that Joomla! uses and loads the relevant files plus a few other files to get the system started off the bat. The ‘notifier.php’ file also defines a class aptly named ‘Notifier’ which extends JDispatcher. JDispatcher is the work horse of the Joomla! event subsystem from which plugins derive. The Notifier constructor loads up a particular directory and opens all of the files in it and tries to create new classes in the format plgNotifierFilename similar to how Joomla!’s plugin infrastructure works. This then registers those classes with the notifier class for use. Then in the original file I use JDispatcher’s “trigger” method to send a message to all of the registered plugins and the integration is done. In the original file there is only 4 lines of code added to load the file, create the class and trigger the message – plus a comment summarising this as well. It is one of those things where the framework makes life really easy to extend systems in a flexible manner. Now if I want to attach multiple plugins to extend that particular bit of code it is easy to do and with the framework it is easy to define multiple plugin triggers.

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.

The piece of code in question is a data mapping system. It takes an array as an input and then transform it eventually into XML and feeds this into a web service. The list of valid keys is stored in an array (in the global scope) which is filled in with the values from the input array. I couldn’t work out why there was a function that basically appeared to clear what was an empty array until I realised that the global was being filled with data and so if the code path was reused it’d have the old data in it. Nasty work around for a problem that should have existed.

So the functions related to the mapping and the two arrays that were living in global scope were shifted into a class on their own. The relevant functions were adapted to work properly with the variables not being global and I’ll work on eradicating the other situations where the variable was still used but the particular purpose I need it for is cleaned out. At the same time I pulled into the class some extra functions that were related to the system but weren’t located with it (curiously enough!).

But working through the mapping functions I noticed another quirk. Just as previously the global was being altered even though it was supposedly a template, another one of the functions decided that it would alter the input array that it was given before setting that value in the output array. The field in question, a format field, is reset if the field isn’t set under a particular condition in a loop. This means that the loop goes through a few times and this variable is undefined and the items checking this behave one way. Then an iteration occurs which triggers this code path and the variable is changed. The lines that were previously run would have checked that and possibly taken a different code path as would the following items. Why this approach was taken baffles me and could potentially be a source of a few bugs. It is unlikely this has been a concern as the code spewed out copious amounts of undefined index errors due to insufficient checking to see if the values were there and just hoping they would be there. Fortunately I managed to clean up the majority of it though a few undefined index errors remained. The solution mostly was using Joomla!’s JArrayHelper::getValue function which will work out if the value is set and give you the option to filter the value to a particular type and also set a default value if one isn’t there. Handy little function cleaned up the majority of the errors.

A few other changes were made, globals were annihilated and I progressively removed dependencies to clean up the system and all was right with the world. And tomorrow? Fix another part of the broken.

Suffice to say the entire system lacks at form of standardised testing which makes refactoring even harder. Given the intermixing of HTML outputting all over the place I think it would be hard to quickly put in a unit testing framework to ensure that the system behaves sanely.

Whilst it immensely frustrates me that I have to deal with it, I’m hopeful that I can start cleaning it up and improving the overall quality. Shifting functions around and centralising items in ways that makes sense as well as clearing up old cruft and the elimination of the immense plague of global variables that this application has. I thought Drupal was horrible with all of it’s global variables (it was seriously the most global’s I’d seen before at around 20 of them) but this one at over 50 and counting takes the cake – it really is global domination.

So I tried at home on my favourite Windows XP VM and it installed fine. Fine is of course subjective because it required three restarts to actually install itself (one for .Net 4.0, one for Windows Installer 4.5 and the final for Visual Studio Web Developer Express) – I’m not quite sure why these couldn’t have been bundled together into one restart (which is reasonable) or even what VS Web Dev Express was doing to require a restart. But I’ll live. I fired it up and did a Joomla! install and everything worked nicely. I tried the VS Web Dev integration and found it loaded everything up except that Web Dev doesn’t do PHP – back to the drawing board. As an aside why Microsoft doesn’t support PHP in VS Web Dev directly is a wonder – PHP as a language appears to be more popular than either of Microsoft’s according to langpop.com’s view of the world. To be fair, langpop.com is a mildly biased view towards open source areas (Google Code, Slashdot, IRC, Ohloh, Freshmeat) which would explain the dominance of languages such as PHP or Python. In any case, it worked and it had a funky editor with highlighting and not a lot else as well as a database editor that handled MySQL – and all in one package.

So I try to install it at work. First hurdle: I need Windows XP SP3. Ok, bummer. File a job, wait for ICT Service Delivery (yes that is their real department name) to get back and install SP3. They call me back in a week and say “when do you want this? is now a good time?” and I say sure. A few hours later and 64+ updates my computer has SP3 on it. Let’s try Web PI 3 beta again and see how we go. Much better, we’re off installing WebMatrix and all sorts of shiny. I ticked the Joomla! box as well and that is also installing. Everyone is happy. It then goes to try and configure IIS on my XP box. It pops up a component install view window and eventually gets to the point of asking me for an XP install CD. Except this is a corporate box and I don’t have one. I don’t have an i386 directory handy to just copy files from. I have local admin so installing stuff isn’t an issue but I don’t have those files. Bummer. I go hunting for them and I can’t readily find them locally and I don’t even know where to find them on the network. Sheepishly I hit cancel and WebPI keeps installing without configuring IIS 5 on my local machine. I thought I’d selected to use the WebMatrix server so I’m not entirely sure what is going on anyway. .Net 4.0 installs uneventfully (no restart this time) and Windows Installer 4.5 requires a restart. This time I’m not installing Web Dev so I don’t need to restart for that, yay! The rest went relatively smoothly which is good however at the end it complained IIS5.1 failed thus items dependent upon it (e.g. FastCGI for IIS5.1, PHP5.2.13, WinCache 1.1 for PHP 5.2) failed to install. MySQL Windows Essential 5.1 didn’t work because a service entry couldn’t be created, possibly because a MySQL service entry already exists. Joomla! didn’t work either but since both IIS 5.1 and MySQL failed to work I’ve got a selection of options.

Curiously I had an XAMPP install of MySQL set up and WebPI didn’t detect this properly opting to install its own version, perhaps a check on port 3306 to see if something speaks MySQL would be more appropriate to check. Improvements for next time.

So I fire up WebMatrix Beta and use its installer to install Joomla!. This one works better. It presents me with the same dialogue and insists I can’t have a blank password (my insecure XAMPP MySQL install insists otherwise but I secure it and both my security office and WebMatrix are happy). Joomla! appears to install perfectly fine now. Go figure. It also appears to have used the XAMPP MySQL install which is nice.

So some quirks in no particular order:

• Requests has an images filter which is nice but if you enable it, go from requests into something else and back again the filter button is depressed but the list isn’t filtered. Clicking on it filters the requests but messes up the state.
• Requests has an images filter which is a good start but no JS filter or CSS filter.
• The built in DB tool connects to MySQL fine however if you try to create a table with a column as both an “identity” (Microsoft SQL Server version of “auto_increment”) and a “primary key” it complains about multiple keys. Setting the field to just be identity appears to resolve the issue
• Perhaps most annoyingly the font choice is harsh, at least for me. Compared to Monaco on my Mac, it just looks disgusting. Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be a way to change it either. After coding for half the morning in Smultron whilst my desktop was updating, WebMatrix was just garish and jutting in comparison.
• Whilst there is no autocomplete for the PHP as far as I could see, it would be nice to include a reasonable formatter. At least something that fixed indentation by default. Mind you, Smultron doesn’t have this but I do miss it at times.

I also at one point managed to get WebMatrix to terminate however you need to remember that WebMatrix is still in beta as a product so it is understandable that there might be some issues that will hopefully get fixed. All in all it looks like a good tool. As a cut down editor it seems to fit the bill quite nicely as well as being one of the easier ways to get up and running on Windows with a web development environment and PHP.

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.

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.

Happy Easter!

I visited with ICT’s senior security officer, Luke, to work on configuring the load balancers to make library.usq.edu.au work better than it is presently. It still isn’t perfect but we’re a while ahead. Now when you go to library.usq.edu.au it doesn’t redirect around to libcat.usq.edu.au (well not immediately anyway) but serves up the page which is nice. Eventually it’ll behave like this normally but until we get there this is what we’ve got. The next step is easy enough now we’ve got this set up. We’ve also now got the library blog (http://library.usq.edu.au/blog) using /blog instead of /wordpress, shifted it to a new server (now hidden by the load balancer as well) and also performed an upgrade to ensure it was on the latest version of WordPress. We ran into an issue with firewalls on one of the servers making life difficult but one of our sick admins, Jayish, saved the day and fixed up the issue with the server. Jayish from home also granted more RAM to our library wiki box that we’re using for engineering problem solving and updated the internal and external DNS for the library load balancers. We got everything sorted just after 8am or so which was good.

Next trick of the day was to update the library wiki to remove the dependence on the LDAP server. Foswiki, the software that runs the wiki, took the approach of trying to sync the entire LDAP directory seemingly on every request. I think I’ve configured it correctly but I’m not entirely sure. To be honest whilst this is the first time I’ve seen this style of doing things (e.g. trying to suck in the entire LDAP directory), in my experience with JAuthTools I’ve had it suggested to me a few different times that the LDAP integration should work that way. It doesn’t particularly scale well and in our situation we’ve got our directory but we can’t limit it down to the particular courses because of the indexing that is in our LDAP directory. At some point we might get the indexing to work but even then its going to put an unreasonable load on the LDAP servers to handle the searches as well. David, one of the other fellows in Library Systems, did a lot of the hard work to create the new htpasswd file with all of the entries for each of the users we have in the system and handled the email notification. Fortunately everything appears to have gone well which is good – and no significant complaint emails or phone calls. Yay!

The middle of the day progressed towards meetings and emails. I had a meeting with my boss and his boss for a short while to confirm some stuff, spent a bit of time with the social club for their morning tea and had a chat with our resident Mac system administrator from ICT about our Mac. Some how this bit of non-productiveness sucks more time than it should, which is unfortunate. I ended up having lunch, a tad late but I took longer than usual. After 1pm was a meeting with ADFI about the media repository. More work that I’m going to need to do to get everything connected up and running which should be fun in some respects. I had a quick wander around Y block whilst I was there and had a chat with David, Matt and Jonathon. I had a chat with them about the changes I made to DiReCt the other day and Jonathon pointed out that I didn’t need to file a technical issue, I could have a chat with one of the USQ functional support staff, Warwick, to get it updated. So I wandered down stairs and had a chat with Warwick and we got it sorted. This will hopefully mean that students from the UAE (predominantly what distinguishes the students with issues) and others on weird ISPs or limited work accounts (I don’t think even USQ would let you in if it wasn’t on campus already) won’t be seeing the weird timeout or connection error messages that they have been seeing. One more thing resolved for the day. Whilst I was on the second floor I went for a wander to haras Jason, one of the sound guys but he was busy – or at least pretending to be anyway, it is rather easy when you’ve got signs up.

That pushed me into the mid afternoon and a few more meetings to round my day out because you can never have enough meetings. I finished off by demonstrating JIRA to my boss in an attempt to get him to use it more. Might even pan out. I rebuilt a dashboard for him with custom filters and all sorts of mildly relevant information. We will see what happens.

I finalised the day by cleaning up on some documentation, actually clearing off some of the paper on my desk (or at least sorting it into nice piles) and updating my infrastructure todo white board to note the changes I made this morning (things on the list still include resguide environment refresh, moving the podcast system and some extra dev environments). Might write some more documentation tomorrow, for something new.

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

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.

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!

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!

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.