Whilst the first Android phone, the G1, has been released on September 23rd and I am beginning to wonder: where are the other Android powered phones? In a year since Android has been announced, we’ve only seen one phone and the second half of 2008 has passed with the claim for ‘phones’. Where are the phones? When are people who aren’t in the US (or more importantly for me, Australia) going to see these even the existing G1 phone let alone any of these other handsets?

Today whilst eating breakfast I saw that the Drupal site I’ve been playing with I broke (that’ll learn me for opening files and accidentally making changes to them, save all not good doh!) so I decided that I would just extract the package over the top and things would be fine. I refreshed the page that I was on (/admin/build/block) and got a charming looking 404 error. Figuring it was just an issue with the extract I retried and got the error again. I looked at the directory and saw that index.php was there so I checked the root of the directory and sure enough Drupal appeared. Part of Drupal’s package is a file named ‘.htaccess’ which is great for the first time that you install, but this file also contains configuration information as well: in this case the ‘RewriteBase’ needed for the fancy URL code to work properly. When I first saw it I thought “well, its a well written .htaccess, I can see that it wouldn’t have any issues” but now I realise the mistake in that thought having to go back and fix up my .htaccess file again.

Progressing forward in the day I returned to work on the voting system again. More features, improvements and fun though I introduced a bug on Friday by adding the postcode search which I quickly fixed up. The other aspect of the system is starting to work properly and I’m getting some sample data in and validating the system. I did have an incredibly strange SQL bug with a non-printable character which I’m not quite sure how it got introduced but managed to work out (yay for hex dumps!). Looking forward I’m going to need to put in a batch detail view so that we can look at individual batches and with any luck it should be done.

Now its time to get through my weekend blogging back log and publish some older blogs!

Ordinarily I was going to avoid blogging on the weekend in the today section but it has been more like a work day so I figured I should anyway.

I spent the day at UQ in Brisbane due to my girlfriend doing her English exams. I thought that I would be able to get back to my Uni using the eduroam network. Sadly it seems that it doesn’t quite work as expected. After a bit of research using my phone and managed to get a mostly working connection but whilst I could ping hosts and the Mac OS X route monitoring tool saw the University of Pennsilvania and even Google being announced it would seem that I couldn’t get out of the network, even by trying to VPN back to my University (I could ping the server but not connect to it). Eventually I gave up and worked in my project instead.

I managed to get two new features implemented and I have so only had to break one of my self imposed restrictions once. I’m not doing as much as I had planned but I’m moving smaller items slowly. Hopefully I will meet my deadline but I may end up taking a few shortcuts getting there. I’ve identified some areas that I’m going to have to do some considerable work but at present the simple aspects of the system appear to be working properly. Time will tell as I expand my testing.

On another more personal note I’m also at Brisbane International Airport sending a friend off and have noticed that due to the rennovations there is a lot more space and tonnes more seating in the lower area. At one point there was more space dedicated to shops than there was for sitting, it really was a sad situation. Having visited the airport semiregularly since 2003, I have seen the amount of seating slowly decrease to the point that it was almost impossible to get a seat in the main mall. Thankfully this has changed for the better. I wonder how long this will last for before it gets replaced with more shops again.

As expected I ended up working on some more voting projects. It didn’t take too long to build up a simple application to handle what we need it to do. For the most part it is read only, so putting it together was only a matter of putting the right files where they are needed. Building MVC apps in Joonla! 1.5 takes a bit more code, more files and a lot more structuring (view folder, model folder, template folders and a few more depending on what you’re building) than the preferred way in 1.0 but it ends up paying off as the requirements of the project change. Suffice to say the app meets the requirements and will be easily modifiable for when they change again on Monday.

The other aspect was going over the Defect Register with the principal engineer for Crows Nest North and working out the feature differences between it and the Main Roads/RoadTek AMMS application. The main differences appear to be that their system uses chainages to locate road segments (ours just has the streets that they’re between which works well in the city but may not scale well outside of the city) and it can also specify the lane. It also appears to have a primitive synchronisation feature which sounds like it works well on smaller data sets but fails on larger sync’s. So when we’re (hopefully) rebuilding the new system we’ll have to add the simple changes (lanes, chainage and precincts) as well as working out how we build distributed offline editing into the system. Nothing like a challenge!

Today was a day of preparations for the election system (requirements came out yesterday after testing confirmed a bug in both Practical systems, one from Jondaryan and another from Crows Nest – each with their own errors the same in nature but with different data) that had become a priority yesterday. We have something like 15 business days left until the election and the requirements daily become increasingly more complex and different. Today’s introduction included adding the ability to determine which one of four states a vote is in (up from two: voted or not) and a new requirement to search and report on electoral roll details. The main application is going to be written in Delphi and is designed to handle the bulk import of data from the barcode scanners. Its also designed to handle the situation with the increasing states of votes. The back end for the system is going to be MySQL and we’re going to place a web front end once the data has been entered into the system so that we can easily report on the information available. I’m probably going to spend tomorrow building the system to handle all of the little things that are required, shouldn’t take me too long to do it all and test that its working.

The other thing I did today was prepare the groundwork for one of my other research projects to prove feasibility. It looks like at the preliminary testing stage that things are going to work properly, its going to take a bit of time and effort to get things up and running but it looks like it may yet work. With any luck I’ll get some more time to look at it tomorrow though I’ll probably end up looking at road defect maintenance software as well as voting software, yay! Fun for the whole family.

Today I managed to get my first cut of the working backup system into the Joomla! trunk with the task system support. It hasn’t been fully put through its paces and the backup SQL plugin doesn’t appear to be working properly though the other plugin, the table copy one, is working properly which is good. It hasn’t been put through the full sequence yet of a task set but I’m hopefully I’ll look at it over the weekend.

What was more fun was spending time trying to get Drupal to play the game as a Joomla! component. It seems that different PHP apps have different approaches to handling paths. CiviCRM (and PEAR) for example rely on the include_path being set properly which usually stuff them up when you can’t set those variables for whatever reason – or the location they are isn’t in the path. I’ve seen issues with CiviCRM because you can’t set the include_path to what CiviCRM wants and the system just falls apart. Not so good. Drupal does things differently, relying that the bootstrap file is in the right folder. CiviCRM being cross platform (standalone, Joomla! or Drupal) can’t rely on Drupal’s technique because as soon as the entry point is in a different directory, it breaks. So I ended up rewriting Drupal’s include and require statements so that they didn’t use “path/to/file” or “./path/to/file” (they aren’t consistent about it either which is annoying) and made it use the Joomla! style of doing things. Joomla! when it gets started defines a bunch of constants that you can use to build file paths and be assured that they’re correct. Its done in one place so it only has to be changed there and the entire system can be shifted without include or require statements breaking horribly.

So I first tried doing global search and replaces and that didn’t work well and then ended up trying to manually find and replace entries. I managed to get the system through various levels but eventually gave up after a few hours and not having it work properly still. The final error was something about not finding some random menu function – annoyingly Drupal uses include statements instead of require statements and gaurds items with file_exists functions which makes it almost impossible to track down where a file isn’t being included properly and thus causing an error. I think I’ll need a different approach to solving the problem. To end things I decided do a clean Drupal install and follow through their module tutorial for something new and different. I’m not quite sure I agree with things fully even though I’ve gone through it and it seems to work in a primitive way.

I spent the majority of my morning working on getting Joomla! 1.5.8 released due to issues with the package builder. The first was more an issue with people not being patient enough and the next was an issue with the Xserve we’re trying to setup to be a build and test server. My older Linux box stepped up and faithfully albeit slowly built the final packages. From here Anthony did the rest of the work uploading the packages, tagging and finalizing the release.

From here I headed off to TRC and spent the day taking apart a dead Maxtor OneTouch and recovering it’s drive (which was still good, the USB controller must be dead) as well as trying to find a replacement for our road defect register. I thought that there was something that was going to work but it looks like investigating things that it isn’t going to work. Another project is born.

Another day passes with nothing interesting to report. I spent some more time working on getting the task system to work focusing on issues arising from having tasksets within another. The main reason this is important is that the backup framework will create it’s own taskset for each instance and potentially the backup adapter will create it’s own task set. In the case of the SQL backup adapter it already uses the new data load framework to provide the restore functionality. This system also uses tasks to provided the ability to handle large data loads without timing out. Cool eh? The problem is that we start layering each of these tasksets so we need to ensure that we return the previous taskset so that it can resume properly. I think that I have everything set up in a way that will work properly so I just need to code up the individual pieces and get them to work. It’s just a lot of little pieces.

Today you will have noticed that I’ve put a lot of posts up from apparently nowhere. These are posts that I’ve had sitting around in my drafts lift so I’ve decided to go through the ones that are mostly and do a bit of work and publish them out. I’ve got a few more that I’m going to work on tomorrow and post.

As it seems a few of my mornings are starting I played a quick albeit one sided game of Dawn of War with my house mate to test that the network play was working between my Mac (using CrossOver Games) and his PC (Windows XP). Suffice to say everything worked fine network wise, my Mac stil has some visual issues but I’m not too phased about that at the moment. So that was an interesting start to the day and when he returns from work it’ll be an interesting end as well.

Work again is fun as always. We’re working on solving various election problems and getting envelopes. Our printers came back stating that they didn’t want to do Code 128 for the barcodes because its too hard preferring Code 39 instead. As the day progressed it turned out that we’re going to use Code 128 more for space issues because we’ve got that much junk going out on the envelopes. This saga has been occurring over a few days, I really want to get a few proofs done before we actually get the batch done from them first to ensure that everything is good but we’ll see. Testing on the system we’re going to be using to track the election on has also begun to ensure that the system can in fact handle items properly, we had a word of warning from one of the newer guys from the regions that it had issues and that was with nowhere near the same workload. So we’re hoping we can test the system out with a few VM’s emulating the system for multiple data entry. There have been issues with the system in question in the past (in fact the system is being replaced)  so hopefully this won’t be a time when it does have issues otherwise we’re going to have large numbers of problems.

The bulk of my day was spent working on the restore framework for Joomla! 1.6, or more accurately the new JDataLoad system and the JLoaderSql adapter. The data load system, as its name suggests, loads data into the Joomla! database from a data source. In this case I’m looking at the SQL files which in my sample data is actually one of the 1.5 sites that I’m an administrator over at work. Its relatively small in the grand scheme of things with only a few meg and around 9000 queries. So far its been sufficient to find a few issues, one being dropping a table before a task yield which caused a missing table error from J! (put in a simple patch for that, if the last query was a drop, go to the next query in the hope that its a create) and another was a minor typo error which caused some multiline strings to be processed incorrectly when they were on a yield boundary again as well. But all in all its working well even importing data faster than MySQL Query Browser was (to its fairness it highlights each query as it goes) in my test runs. Its now committed to trunk and when I get a chance I’ll write up something about it and put it somewhere

Extra fun today came from trying to write up business cases for the projects I want to work on in the next year or so until I have to write it up again (fun, yeah!). Initially my boss (who is great) thought of me and tried to convert the files from Excel into a more Open format so that I can get at it on my Mac and Linux box. Somewhere during the conversion however the fields got trimmed and data lost, so I offered to edit the document in Excel directly using our Windows only document management system logging in via our Citrix services. The system, OpenText’s DM, isn’t too bad for the most part and does the job well and today I found no fault with it. Today was the day when Microsoft’s tools decided they wanted to misbehave.

Earlier in the week my boss had emailed me a doclink to the document stored in DM. A doclink is a small text file with the document number in it which basically triggers the system to load the specified document, something that usually works quite well. However Outlook, due to various configuration changes, decided that it didn’t want to start for some reason even though earlier in the week it was working perfectly fine. After Outlook repeatedly informing me it wanted to recreate my profile and then informing me that it couldn’t contact my Exchange server and offering to allow me to work offline which consequently failed due to a lack of a profile, I ended up using Mac OS X’s built in “Mail” application (yes, the email application is called “Mail”) to get at my email to find the document number and open it. Usefully enough this is done through the IMAP interface on Exchange and worked well and doesn’t suffer from some of the other issues that the Outlook clients have, such as the address book caching which caches the old Lotus Notes addresses instead of their newer Exchange ones resulting in emails going to the wrong place. Yay Outlook! Suffice to say I found the file and made the changes that I needed to before accosting our Exchange administrator who had returned to see if he could fix the issue – which he did mind you after some trial and error.

The last little item I looked into was building a system to version the content from Joomla! back into our document management system. The new document management officer assures me that we can do it and has even proposed a nifty way of importing the data into the system. It looks like one of the products we have, KoFax, will help us by allow us to generate XML files which specify the documents that we’re creating and the different versions. If we can get this to work it will be really awesome as it’ll mean that our website is in part integrating back into our document management system without hacking into the database! I’ve still got to build it and work out where we want to target the extension, but suffice to say its on my project list for next year.