Today was my first day at USQ as a full time long term member of staff. Saw the Ford Fiesta ad, a new one this time, and it strikes me as to why Ford Australia was so annoyed at it: having already aired in the UK, you can’t help but think it was copied. But I digress, my first day involved no work with a computer I could consider my own instead working to configure or fix other peoples computers. First helping to configure Apache and squid to proxy data for one of the developers that had through firewall fun been blocked from her Subversion repository and bug tracker, ouch! From here I managed to work on helping to configure a Ubuntu laptop to get it up and running, configuiring Apache, MySQL, PHP and getting Eclipse to play nicely (ended up disabling the Validation builder). It still isn’t playing the game properly so I will probably have a look at it at some point to get it to work). Managed at 4pm to get my account reinstated so I’m up and running with everything. Now all I need is a desk to sit at, another task for tomorrow.

Today was my last day at Council after more than five years of service. It wasn’t an easy day works wise as I ended up following through the small incidental tasks that one must do. Hopefully I have written enough documentation. Tomorrow I head off for Joomla!Day Melbourne before starting work at USQ on Tueday.

Another day of mostly documentation with a bit of coding fun with LDAP and Active Directory. More filing in of documentation again today. A tad tedious but such is life.

Some days you find stuff that you forgot you built. Looking through my research folder I found an old script that detected IP addresses for users in an eDirectory system. I gave it a spin and it worked as expected. It is amazing the little tools that extinct in the my miscellaneous research folders.

An new minor project for the day has come up which is a simple project to validate data in the Council’s Active Directory server against what is in the main eDirectory server. We’re having issues with IDM not synchronising data properly into Active Directory. The solution appears to be blanking the field in Active Directory, waiting for it to push across into the eDirectory system and then pushing back the existing value into directory and let it replicate back properly. So I guess I’ll look at that tomorrow.

Another day of documentation today as well writing up how to join Mac OS X boxes to AD trees and configuring applications like Mail and Address Book to work properly. More fun again tomorrow!

Today I spent a reasonable portion of my day working on getting the single Mac of the organization outside of IT up and running properly with the network. The Mac experience within IMB has historically been limited and nobody has ever taken the time to look after the device. Typically the sole user of the device would look after it. Times have changed and they’ve moved on so I’m taking the time to fix things up the way that they’re supposed to be. So I’ve joined it to the domain and set it up properly. I also wrote some documentation for setting up Entourage to connect to our Exchange systems.

I’ve been working today to convert a legacy app up to Joomla! level. As I progress with the app I get annoyed with the painful assumption that it makes that everything is in the right directory. It reminds me of PEAR that relies on people have it in their include path. In the world of shared hosting that might be something impossible: no ability to use PEAR to install packages and sometimes no ability to change the include path. Then you end up having apps breaking when either of these assumptions break. CiviCRM has this issue, amoungst others.

The day ended with acting principal (we go you, co-ordinator, principal, manager, director, CEO; some may be skipped, e.g. I have no co-ordinator) reaffirming that I should be working on backup systems as a priority, works for me. It was handed to him as a task to have this meeting and he left it until late in the afternoon on his last day. Obviously high on his priority list. Mind you it told me what I already knew, so it’s nice to be affirmed.

Later tonight I think it’s time to release JAuthTools now that everything is in order. More documentation to write.

Another day and a new feature request for SALMON. Today’s request was a request for a metaitem for if Servers Alive hasn’t updated the page for a while. There was another request for an audible alert though I managed to convince our network tech that SALMON wasn’t the place to build that sort of item. Tomorrow I’ll go through go and make sure to get rid of some of the cruft then release it out to the world.

Beyond the ordinary helpdesk style tasks, I also did some work on one of my smaller projects. I had forgotten that I had done some work on it elsewhere an after making all it changes and committing SVN gave me a resource out of date error. I update and feared that I’d have to fix up a conflict but everything merged properly where the different changes had been made. Worrying something else would break I refreshed the page and saw that it had actually fixed another issue that I had been ignoring temporarily.

I also spent a short amount of time making some changes to the Joonla! Trunk install file. Nothing major mind you but some slight changes.

All in all, happy with the day.

The most interesting aspect of today was getting the filesystem restores working for 1.6, something that due to the way that I put it together wasn’t that hard to put together. Now that it’s up and running I need to integrate it into the upgrade system and give it a work through, will be good fun.

Today was the first day back after not only a long weekend but the Joomla! Developer Summit. I’d left work early on Thursday to attend which meant that I missed the flooding of our helpdesk and server support. My desk had been taken over in part by some of the server support people. Thankfully my Mac was still mostly plugged so I got started with of and then progressed through the day to get everything else out of the way though my desk still looks like a bit of a war zone (as well as the rest of the branch).

Nothing much interesting today but I did get some work done with Ian MacLennan about an OpenID plugin for JAuthTools. Still not ready yet but getting there.

Beyond the incredibly boring and time consuming task of building an SQL query for a CSV dump of our grave records for yet another third party to put it in another system to be managed. Looks like fun.

Migration fun again with people wondering why their site didn’t migrate properly with core hacks, fun for the whole family. Another one with strange anomolies which appear to be due to a lack of the iconv extension (took a few posts to get that point including asking twice but all good fun). Hopefully removing those nasty core hacks and installing iconv will fix most things up.

Towards the end of the day I decided to try my hand at creating a new MySQL storage engine and I’m presently not doing too well. There is tonnes of pieces of documentation scattered over the web which are incredibly light on how the system actually works. I think I’ve managed to get a grasp on how the entire thing comes together and data gets transported though I’m yet to get a build process that works properly. I think I’ve done everything I need to get the item to work and with a bit of hacking of the configure file the system bulids though I’m stil not sure if its working properly (mind you its not failing at the compile stage so thats a start). Tomorrow I’ll see if what I’ve got at the moment will load into the MySQL instance I’ve built and progress from there.