The most productive task of today was writing up the documentation to JDiagnostic. JDiagnostic is my Swiss Army knife for stuff like authentication in Joomla!. The setup that I used was on the Mac OS X G5 workstation that I have at work with a cut down Safari window, Firefox in my Joomla! admin panel creating new articles and the Preview application to handle capturing screenshots. To make uploading to my server easier I used sshfs to connect to the folder I was after on the server which meant that saving files to the box was as simple as selecting the server on the file save dialog and waiting for the file to be uploaded. Thankfully the application saving the file is the only to block so I could take a screenshot in Preview and then type it up in Firefox and by the time that I went to add the image to the article the file had uploaded and was ready on the server to add to my new article. Preview is the stand out application which is a bundled application in OS X. It handles most image files easily and has a rather useful screen capture aspect built in. This tied with the menu bar at the top makes it really quick and simple to make screenshots – perhaps the easiest of all of the major platforms (Windows in my mind is second here because screen capture on Linux generally sucks except for the GIMP but it loses on usability). Another day of fun!!

So today was the start of the new working year. It hardly seems like there has been much of a break – and at less than two weeks there hasn’t been that much real time spare. Between family and friends I’ve been working on my uni assignment trying to get it finished. With what appears a class wide week long extension, I’m going to be able to put in some finishing touches over the code before submission which I didn’t thnk I was going to have the time to do.

At Council I finished up SALMON, or Servers ALive Monitor, which will provide web based mimic panels to the output of Servers Alive. IT achieves this by basically scraping the standard HTML page that it generates and pushing it into a MySQL database. From here the web app builds a mimic panel to display the information. Today I cleaned up the system a bit and added some extra features, such as details URL for services and item icons. One of the original goals was to have groupings that would identify sub items and collated their overall status for display (displaying the worst status of the entire collection). The system today gained this feature and I’ve also made it so that it is a recursive lookup. This means that items may be grouped together with other items or groups to have this displayed as a collated result as well. This will provide the ability to nest pages to an unlimited depth (though the more they do the harder it’ll get) though the system doesn’t permit cycles.

I finished my work day having a look over the latest release of Auth Manager, a Joomla! extension which primarily handles CAS authentication. In part it overlaps with the work that I’m doing however it takes a different approach to solving some problems. I’ll have a more detailed look tomorrow to see how it works and how it differs from my own goals.

After writing all of this out on my iPhone, the WordPress application deemed the ‘save’ button unecessary to be displayed and well, I couldn’t say my post. So I went and now I’m sittingmy computer typing it all up so that I don’t lose the last half an hour of typing. To add insult to injury Firefox did its annoying “you’ve got the box selected but I won’t let you type in it” bug where its trying its hardest to find something to autocomplete but nothing appears (as it shouldn’t) which thankfully can be mitigated by clicking onto another form or similar. Sometimes I wonder if we haven’t gone backwards, I’ve never had my pen mysteriously stop working and lose all of my previous work (mind you I might not have been able to continue but a new pen usually solved that) – or at least prevent me from securing my work. Not happy. It took me ten minutes to retype everything again off my phone. With everything safely written up I quite the application and relaunched it. This time the ‘save’ button appeared magically and I could save the post I was working on. I’m not sure I want to put my faith in using that technique too often but I guess in future I might check if there is a save option before I spend half an hour writing a blog post. 🙁

Today was a bit of a wash out beyond having a minor Christmas lunch at work, I left early due to a splitting headache and spent most of the afternoon asleep. I did manage to make some progress on the item I had started yesterday, a Servers Alive graphical interface, though progress on it was limited. It now handles displaying the basis of a mimic panel with the status of the respective server, the key requested feature was a grouping option, so I haven’t done that yet but its on its way. Mimic panel is in a basic edit mode, so I’m happy with that. I guess I’ll finish it in the new year!

Today was the last day of my present contract at the university. This is weird because its also the day when I managed to sort of most of the problems that I have had with my access at the university. The last of my firewall changes actually went through yesterday and today I managed to get myself connected to the Moodle Development Database on the Oracle development server that the university has, yay! I did some more work on a weird issue with contexts in Moodle and had a job interview at the university as well. Hopefully that went relatively well and I’ll get the position, if not I can always go back to Council.

From here I progressed to Council and a new project. Servers Alive has an abomination of a web reporting tool, so network administrator wanted to see if we could build something that would show groupings on a web page and little traffic lights denoting if there was an issue with one of the groups. Parsing the servers alive page was fun with it not being valid anything. It had tags closed in the wrong order, seemingly random end tags (there was one closing bold tag sandwiched between a closing td and a closing tr tag). By the end of the day I’d managed to get the thing into a database in a much saner format (even reoutputted in a much cleaner format) so that I can do useful stuff with the data. I’m going to borrow some very old code I wrote years ago and repurpose it into something to help me out with this problem. The project was the ARTIS (Automatic Real Time Information Service) Water Monitoring system that I had written that handled displaying the water status of the Toowoomba City area before the project and all of its data supports were cut following the retirement of the chief proponent of the project, the head of that particular engineering department. Its really ugly code, so whilst I’m borrowing concepts and using the shell I’m also gutting the majority of the system and replacing it with newer methodologies, better coding practices and more extensible frameworks. Today its a mess, but with any luck I’ll be able to get it cleaned up enough to be functional tomorrow.

Today seemed to be a day of almost entirely easy wins where I managed to close or defer most of the bugs that landed on my desk. I did end up with one bug that unfortunately sticked, it looks like a weird coding problem with Moodle where it thinks a context doesn’t exist when it does, attempts to create it resulting in failure (because it already exists) and generally has a bad day. Beyond that, nothing much interesting happened. Yay for bug hunting!

Its the small things that you miss in Windows that makes it really painful. Today in Outlook 2003 I tried to do something that I could do easily in Lotus Notes: download all of the attachments. It took me a quick Google to find that I was of course looking in the wrong place and that I needed to go to File -> Save Attachments -> Save All Attachments. I must admit that it never occurred to me to find a message specific option in the File menu after always finding it in the same context menu that you can use to save individual files. Another weird issue I have is that Outlook leaves a cancelled meeting in the calendar for some reason. Surely if the thing is cancelled I don’t need to see it in my calendar? Fun isn’t it, I guess the brains at Microsoft know more than I do on these matters.

Today was one of those days where you work through things slowly and make progress but it really doesn’t feel like it. I have a whole heap of things that I want to do in the new year, some ideas on how to change the way that certain things work and a few other things so nothing much to put on my plate for the present term.

One thing that I do want to do is for the university build a much nicer timetabling system. At the moment they have a whole heap of static pages which are a PITA because if you want to see where your time table clashes are you usually end up having to scribble them down yourself, typically into some form of an Excel spreadsheet. Ages ago I wrote a tool that handled the scheduling stuff though I must admit I haven’t used it much in recent times because my time table wasn’t that complicated (down to one subject in first semester this year) but when I was using it the system generated composite timetables of different subjects. At one stage I was going to do work on it for a university assignment but ended up giving up because it would be too much work and I didn’t have that much time for the assignment.

After a shaky start this morning before work, I’m coming close to finishing off the ugly MySQL data migration of the last few days. I’ve managed to get a dump file that should import fine, but I will find out later about that. A new project is ePrints which it looks like it has been rather well put together and is written in Perl. At the moment all I’m doing is a test upgrade for some items but I get the feeling I’ll be doing more work on the system as I progress.

Some days I wonder about MySQL. Today I tried to get MySQL Workbench to reverse engineer a database and it appears that now that feature is a pay for option – bummer. I funnily enough went and found the original open source project which allowed me to do what I wanted. Moodles full database fills up the page to overflowing proportions, so whilst it comes very close it isn’t quite what I need.

Beyond this I also tried importing rather large database. Most went well however some lines triggered MySQL’s max packet limit. Since the database is going to a shared host where we can’t change this setting so I increased it locally, removed the offending row, exported and reran the import. I left the import run after 5 so I’m not sure if it succeeded, but I’ll see tomorrow.

This morning I did my best to try to get one of the service accounts to prevent interactive login. I tried setting the login hours to nothing, limiting the computers it can login from and requiring smart card authentication for interactive login. Each setting prevented the account from binding to the LDAP interface. Changing tact I tried to set the login script to run “shutdown.exe -l” and get the system to shutdown – no joy. I also tried setting up the TS login in an attempt to get it to work but no joy. I don’t get how I can the account to be secured.

I also spent some time working on an older system at Council that was badly written. In this case there was a request to add some extra filtering to a report. The system as designed branches off into code specific files to handle searching on the respective code before pushing it into a not so temporary table called “temp2”. This is then outputted in a common set of code which pulls it back from the table. Thankfully there is enough information at this point to make a small join to easily make the filter work. At the moment I’m trying to work out why it isn’t properly handling date ranges. The dates are unfortunately not working but I’m not sure if it is because of the database server being ancient (4.0.14) or if it’s because the dates are being inputted in the first decade, e.g. the year 8 AD. Weird crap like this annoys me and makes it hard to extend the system or fix issues. I also did some minor work on both Joomla! and JAuthTools to fix some minor bugs.