To be honest I’ve seen this tactic before where vendors lock you into a given platform. And realistically Apple is already there in a sense. They limit your ability to distribute iOS applications and limit what you can include in their store. Anyone expecting Apple to behave any differently in this particular situation is delusional.

Fundamentally you need to think about what iBooks Author really is providing: it’s a typesetting tool. It’s not targeted towards print like InDesign or Quark, it’s a tool designed to highlight the capabilities of the iPad platform. But essentially it is a typesetting tool in a world where you’re not limited to static content but can build interactive content. And at the moment no other tool really exists to provide this functionality because the platform really hasn’t existed yet. But that doesn’t mean someone can’t make a tool that does do all of this just like when the iPhone was first released the smart phone market didn’t quite have what the iPhone offered. There were products that had portions of the system: many platforms had installable apps, many platforms had web browsers, a few platforms had large screens for input and many had phone and data capabilities. None of them quite had everything that the iPhone offered which is what made it successful.

Now what is being missed here is that effectively the results of what you typeset in iBooks Author is limited in where you can sell it. What Apple suggest is that you can develop your content in another tool such as either Pages or Word and then finalise your typesetting in iBooks Author. You can obviously produce your content entirely within iBooks Author but you don’t necessarily have to do this.

However at the end of the day it is this strange sense of entitlement, this sense of how dare Apple seek to limit what you could potentially do with a bit of software they have given away for free. This reminds me of people lamenting that you couldn’t write iOS apps on Windows and that Apple should port it.

At the end of the day it is their ecosystem, if you don’t like it then leave. Certainly this isn’t the first time Apple have taken draconian steps to limit freedom and it likely won’t be the last. It also reminds us that we need to read these agreements we agree to on the sides of the Apple Mac App Store. All of the Apple developed apps I’ve seen on their store have all had an accompanying “App License Agreement” so I wasn’t surprised to see this one.

Audacity in putting the terms there perhaps, however it is hardly unprecedented. Perhaps the audacity is the expectation that a for-profit company known for their tendency for draconian restrictions on their software and platforms would behave any differently when creating a new free tool to create content aimed towards their platform. What is really more surprising that they didn’t create an entirely new proprietary format…they just added some stuff to an existing one (not quite as evil but certainly up there).

VuFind UConnect SSO
VuFind is the library catalogue system and UConnect is USQ’s custom SSO system that was developed. I’ve gone through and built an integration between the two which looks like the following:

I talk a bit more about VuFind, SSO and authentication in an earlier blog post.

Book Finder
This is primarily the work of Ken MacAlpine who is working on mobile technologies at USQ. Ken developed an SVG powered map of the top floor of the library to aide in the location of books. He put together a database of roughly where the catalogue numbers stop and start for each shelf on each side. It has been integrated into the catalogue and shows up as a “Show on Map” link for Toowoomba Main Collection items.

At some point in the future we will work to expand it to all campuses and collections. When it is clicked it appears in a new window like this:

It is aimed to be the same size as an iPhone display so that it fits neatly there. It also works in all browsers that support SVG. Fallback support is provided for IE since it doesn’t support SVG yet.

ePrints, RPCS and data conversion!
As an interesting exercise I also spent some time converting data from an internal reporting system, RPCS, into our open access repository – ePrints. This was a fun project which required connecting to RPCS’ MSSQL database and outputting an XML file for ePrints to eat. To do this I figured I’d pull out Web Matrix, Microsoft’s cut down editor for web developers. It feels on par with Geany though it has a built in web server, request tracking and a database explorer. It also integrates with the Web Platform Installer product which means I can easily install other applications. I used Web Matrix to kick start the Joomla! install for the Access All Databases research project as well.

The RPCS data is loaded into our ePrints system along side the Author ID project that existed there. We’re also pulling across the data from their system which is going to result in duplicate authors until we merge them down to uniques however doing so in an automated manner isn’t easily possible. There is a whole heap of work to get things together but all in all we’re doing well.

EQUELLA Moodle module
Last but not least I’ve been playing with the EQUELLA Moodle module. It adds an extra option to the Moodle resource drop down and enables access to select items from the EQUELLA repository software.

I’ve used Web Matrix here to deploy out a quick Moodle site utilising the same Web Platform Installer technology and managed to get up and running quickly with everything. The deployment of the module to our main Moodle environment would enable lecturers to directly select course readings to embed in relevant modules on their Moodle course pages – exciting!

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.

Currently ePrints lists authors by using the creator field of an ePrint. This is usually entered as the cited name of the author. If you have a small number of authors with different names this works reasonably well as the system can differentiate between people without much issues. The problem comes in when people are cited differently or have very similar names but are distinct people. Then it becomes bad.

One way of solving the problem is really quite ugly: you go through and change the cited author to make it look “neater”. In fact one of our library staff decided that they would do that greatly damaging the value of the data stored with in the system, tainting it horribly and creating more work for themselves. The cynic in me wonders that they’re just creating more work for themselves later to go back through and fix it all up. So there is a solution, non technical and pretty ordinary.

So our solution was to turn authors into a first class data set within ePrints. They’re not some unidentifiable free text field with no great purpose (there was a creator ID field but email address was suggested to be used for it) but in fact they are now their own entity which is cool.

We’ve done some different stuff with the author ID project at USQ that I’d like to share:

So an author has a name, they can be linked back to a user ID, they have an email address (both primary email address which should be used for contact and alternate addresses for aiding search), a biography and external identifiers. A cool feature of the primary email address is that when it is updated it automatically gets copied to the alternate email address list,  so you can easily update an email address and still retain the old one (you can still remove them from the alternate email address easily). The external identifiers section provides the ability to list useful identifiers for the author that mean something outside of ePrints. This could be stuff like a staff or student number that you record against the author to help with recognising your users. This is also a new field type developed called ‘Name-Value’ to represent name value pairs of data and provide an editing interface.

But the problem with authors is that they don’t stay the same: they’re dynamic. So they might move around an organisation, shift faculties, join a research centre or even leave the organisation. Recording this in the author record is more than possible but it starts to get messy – we start talking about ‘versions’ of the author but versions imply the wrong concept. A researcher might be working on papers in two different faculties, each paying for his time and each deserving of recognition. In our case we also need to use that information for reporting so that we can properly allocate funds based on research outcomes as well – for us it is important to know who paid for the research.

So to solve this problem I created a system called “author instances”. Author instances provide a subrecord of the authors that permits instances of specific data to be created and associated with the author. Then when an author creates a paper a link is created to this instance and not directly to the author. This allows the author record to contain information that is relatively static and data that might periodically change (such as department or even which institution someone is at) is then located in the author instance. As this isn’t ‘versioning’ per se it also works well for when a researcher is concurrently producing papers for different parts of the institution (or even for bodies external to the institution).

This screen depicts the edit view for an author instance.

The author instance is very light by default, it only contains the author that it is linked to, its display name and a preferred flag. The preferred flag is mutually exclusive within author instances – if one instance for an author sets the flag then it is cleared for all other authors. In the screen shot you will notice an untranslated field called “deptid”. This is another new metafield that has been developed called “Externalitemref” which is similar to the built in ItemRef field however it works on tables managed outside of ePrints. ExternalItemRef takes the params of a table name, a key field and a name field to operate in a similar manner to the ItemRef and link data back in.

The observant will notice that both the ExternalItemRef and the built-in ItemRef field also have a find entry button. This button has also been added to the ePrint item editing screen as well and triggers a popup window which allows easy searching for the particular item (user, author, author instance) that you are interested in.

The standard ePrints creator fields have a "Find Entry" button as well.

So as we can see there is now a “Find Entry” button that pops up with a new window allowing us to select an author instance for this author easily and not have to worry that we’re going to mistype their email address or similar.

This is just a quick introduction into some of the changes that the Author ID system which USQ has developed provides. Ideally we’d love to feed this back to the ePrints core so that everyone can use this, or a similar system, in a great way. If you want to read more you can check out the “Author ID Notes” document on my knowledge base download site.

For those playing at home who aren’t familiar with HECS/HELP, heres a quick primer on how it works. Once upon a time university education in Australia was free, surprising but true. This was a long time ago, about the same time as the present set of politicians were getting educated. And then it progressed to be that students wouldn’t get free education but they would be given a loan interest free that would get paid back to the government based on their tax return. This effectively meant that above a certain point you got taxed at a higher rate and that went towards paying your debt. Nifty, not ideal but not entirely horrible. The Howard Government in part of its many University related reforms decided that they would charge interest on this loan, using CPI to index it. When this was introduced it didn’t sound too bad. CPI was relatively low, 2% to 3%, and the cash interest rate was comparatively high, 6% to 7+%. So it didn’t seem to bad.

Fast forward to now and we’ve hit an economic crisis. Inflation is now 5% and the cash interest rate is at 5.25%. Keep in mind that banks are at present loaning at around the 8% mark up to 9%. It would in fact be interesting to see if the CPI retained its position and the interest lowered even further making CPI higher than the cash lending rate, but that much is pure speculation. However why does this matter?

Well whilst the Student Guild’s are bleating in pleasure that the Labor government is going to give them back their cash cow so that they can spend it on useless things again. Now I have nothing against the employees of said Unions/Guilds, my sister is in fact one and the people who work at my uni refect are also awesome, they just don’t offer me anything valuable. Take for example a bottle of coke, that is 20 cents cheaper out of the vending machine up the hall a little bit from the refect than it is to purchase from the refect. The vending machine itself is 10 cents more expensive than driving down the road a little bit to the bakery and considerably more expensive than buying it from the local supermarket. Part of this I can understand, but when I was a member of the union forcibly and had to pay $40 per subject (comparatively not too bad) the fact that I then have to pay for food that isn’t competitive is a bit of a blow. Keeping in mind that at my university the Guild has manage to remove any external provider and is the sole provider of sustenance on campus controlling the two coffee shops (one under the library and another near the book shop), having a club facility (coffee, alcohol at night, food during the day) and the main refect – after all of this it is still more expensive. Vending machines are a bit more complicated but seem to strangely compete with the Guild which leads me to wonder who exactly controls them. But I digress, whilst they bleat about wanting money and how they won’t squander it (some fees were as high as $600), the Government is also talking about the ability to defer this extra fee to HECS/HELP as well and nobody seems to care that the interest rate on said loan is in fact increasing.

It proves perhaps most to me about how pointless and useless the union system is that they make so much noise about getting money from the universities and not about ensuring the good of their potential members. My Guild didn’t act in my behalf and provided no tangible service which meant that I had no issues leaving them. Turned out that the university ended up propping them up anyway, so they didn’t lose much but at the end of the day they were next to useless. What I found most interesting was that when voluntary student unionism was being introduced they complained that the sports fields would be overgrown and unrulely. Funnily enough I felt that the university was an academic location and not a sporting facility so if the grass grew a little too long on a sports field then so be it. And in this single moment it encapsulates all that was wrong about the Guild.

I keep going off track here, but my problem is of course the fact that the Student Unions don’t do a lot to support their students and expect so much of them. I’ve heard nothing about the fact that CPI has doubled and thus the loan’s interest rate has also increased.

Perhaps nobody has realised what is happening yet because they haven’t looked at their tax yet or seen the increase in their interest. Perhaps next year they will see it and then there will be some noise, though I doubt. It’d be nice to at least go back to the last iteration where the government sponsored the education of its people and they had to slowly pay it back with no interest incurred. Perhaps I’m complaining about nothing, but wouldn’t you be worried if the loan you signed up for had doubled its rate and the prospect of getting a job was drastically reduced?

In some respects I’m happy that I got in when I did. I had courses when they were low numbers (great ratios!) before they were cut and things were enjoyable. You ended up in classes where it was easy to have reasonable discussions about things in lectures and practicals. It was good.

So now I’m looking at doing my masters, I’m already enrolled and having a look at some of the projects to do. The first subject on my list for summer is e-Commerce, which looks pretty interesting and I think that I have got a project in mind that should work properly for it. I wonder if I’ll get the chance to finish my masters the way I want to or if my luck has run out.

Some days I wonder about Business IT students, I wonder what they’re actually learning.

Obviously not what a hard drive looks like.