Today i released an update for my migrator extension to 1.5 due to a fix to a subtle bug that I introduced with the configurable batch sizes that I introduced in Migrator 1.3 release. This is would cause weird SQL duplication for tasks that were suspended due to the timeout avoidance code. The change was pretty sime, a but of code that I had forgotten to update when I was doing some other changes. Next on the release list for tomorrow is an update to the ban IP address or range extension.

You can download Migrator 1.5 from: http://joomlacode.org/gf/download/frsrelease/10646/41924/migrator.zip

When I went through high school we had three segments for our maths and physics exams: we had the basic knowledge part that tested if we new a given fact and could apply it to a straight forward problem, we had the understanding part that tested if we could understand a fact and apply it to a slightly more complex problem and we had a complex reasoning section of the exam which tested a combination of the items we knew and took a large number of steps to get to the final answer. Today I’m hunting around to look for file system permissions and I’ve read something that makes me wonder if there should be that distinction.

Read more

I was sitting in Joomla! Bug Squad today chatting about browsers. Firefox 3.5 is almost ready (I’m typing on a release candidate with it, I’ve been using it since beta, I used 3.0 when it was still ‘Minefield’) and Safari 4 has been recently released (another one that I used throughout beta). Each offer improvements in speed over their predecessor which got me thinking about the progression of different browsers.

Read more

It strikes me as annoying that some how prepaid phone users get treated as second class citizens. They historically don’t have access to half of the features that are offered to those on plans just because you own your phone outright. In addition Australia has locking of phone devices to networks as well and then have the hide to charge you $30 whilst someone presses a few buttons for a minute and hands you your phone back. This situation has thankfully steadily improved over the years and with the introduction of Vodafone in Australia it seems things are slowly getting better but not quite there. Read more

Today was an interesting day. The usual Friday things happened: I came in, read my email and responded to those that required it, we had our 15 minute daily team meeting and I had my half an hour (or so) meeting with my master’s supervisor about metadata filesystems. Of course the usual occurs with work progressing. Today’s work is UniHIRTS again and I think I’m at the point where I’m happy enough with it. I’ve gone through and wiped out a few of the simpler tasks that I could handle with a few remaining tickets that are nice to haves. I’ve done a bit of a reskin and unfortunately it doesn’t all look good in IE but it still looks tolerable.

But most interesting today I heard word from my old Council friends that they’ve finally gotten to ditching Novell. Whilst I was there a project called “Get Rid of Novell” and “Get Rid of Legacy” which seems to have been given a heightened priority since Novell decided to double the licensing cost of their software. Council now has 90 days in which to remove all Novell software. This should be interesting as they have a lot of Novell supplied software: SLES, SLED, the Netware servers, eDirectory and its client, Novell’s IDM product, iPrint and  Zenworks. One of the things that kept Novell software around was the fact that it was half the price of the Microsoft equivalent, however with this it appears that this isn’t going to be the case so one of the reasons for retaining Novell, cost, is gone. And whilst it is a great solution for a lot of problems, the software that is slowly being deployed within the organisation is increasingly dependent on Microsoft’s software: running on Windows, integrating with Active Directory and providing management tools that integrate into Microsoft’s management console tools. Should Novell had let them be at the original price for another year, they’d have the money instead of doubling the price and well ending up with nothing. But life moves on.

Today I had a lot of small victories working on the Uni’s safety incident and hazard reporting system. It’ll be a while before this cycle is over so it will be a bit longer before it ends in production but it will also mean a lot more testing. Tomorrow I will try to get a few more things knocked off before I move onto something else. At some point I have to do some more work for the portal project to give them a feed of courses from Moodle. That shouldn’t be too hard to achieve however it will take a bit of time to see what permissions are required. At some point I also need to do a release as well.

In other news last night I wrote a quick WebDAV interface for Joomla! – its a slow thing and it also works like a bit of a composite as well with supplying an interface into the filesystem. It is using SabreDAV to handle the DAV interface into PHP which is cool but I’m wondering if it is slowing things down.

So I haven’t been blogging for a while which is a bad habit to get out of but I’m sure I’ll get there sooner or later. Today was an interesting day, I spent half an hour having coffee finding out just how bad the USQ Student Guild really is – so much worse than what I thought they were which was already pretty bad. I also spent an hour or so trying to get AC/DC tickets and noticed that they offered a second date and managed to get A Reserve Seating which is good, I’m not entirely sure what that means but anyway (since the A reserve standing was the same price). So yeah, there was some time out.

So with some admin tasks and meetings about different things including Camtasia Relay and ugly administrative tasks. The afternoon was spent working on UniHIRTS. I added a whole heap of code to basically add a workflow check to ensure that incidents or hazards can’t be closed when there are open actions. Something I thought would be really simple turned out to be a pain. But I couldn’t work out why it didn’t appear to work. I ended up putting it at the lowest layer possible and working backwards to find out why it wasn’t being caught earlier. It turns out that there were two functions next to each other that achieved effectively the same thing, except one didn’t run through any of the data validation checks. So once I found that I managed to update the code to use the same code path as the other storage code path that validated the data. Unfortunately in doing this it took me all afternoon digging through the layers of code to find where it actually was after I’d managed to get it partly and badly fixed. Another day in the office.

The bulk of today was wasted getting paperwork together to get everything put together. I spent some time finalising stuff for next week at JAOO (which is looking exciting) with car bookings and the like. It looks like everything has gone through fine but it is going to be a bit awkward switching cars but such is life. On the paperwork I had some more debating fun with the Queensland Government finding new and interesting ways to obstruct people. If I had more money I would love to fund a comedic ad pin pointing how ludicrous the system is but I don’t have money or acting talent (lets just assume I could bang out a half decent script at this point). Paperwork unfortunately ate a large chunk of my morning in what is turning out to be a white wash for my mornings but anyway.

I spent the afternoon planning for JAOO with Sally and Jon which was fun. Sitting down deciding which sessions we were going to do and how that works. It looks like a really good event to go to and I’m excited to be attending. It also expresses the confidence that the organisation has in me, something I don’t want to disappoint on delivering.

I spent some time trying to work out why some times a before insert trigger on one of the tables for UniHIRTS didn’t work properly. The closest I got was an Oracle “mutating tables trigger error” which sounds sort of close to what the trigger is doing but doesn’t feel right. Every so often the trigger fails to update the composite primary key for the entries which means we need to manually do it, the mutating tables sounds right but we don’t have a record of the error in the log files to work out why it isn’t working. It does seem strange that majority of the time the database updates perfectly but in some situations it doesn’t, especially when the item in particular should be executed in the database.

Today marked the slowing of a the library workload though I still ended up spending half a day cleaning up after the change yesterday to ePrints. Minor things and various paperwork to get stuff working again. We missed one of the firewall changes for the ERA stuff and it looks like our security guy is having issues with the fact that it isn’t one of the machines that we control or are a part of our section (our section being ICT as a whole). I spent the morning following up some work with that but moved onto UniHIRTS/USQSafe in the afternoon. I spent a bit of time playing fix the build with the initial scp transfer I did dereferencing all of the symlinks that I had which means that when the build script goes looking for those links it breaks because the link doesn’t exist but a copy of the file exists. It’s a bit of a shame I guess but at least I have a good copy of everything and something to keep in mind for future when I’m working on things – perhaps pipe things through tar to transfer things properly (SSH and SCP are really cool technologies for what they allow you to do with your computer). Whilst I was doing that I also got set up to deploy applications to the build server. Unfortunately in doing so it appears my application broke on the build server so I’ll have to roll it back again and work out what is going wrong there before continuing. But all in a days work.

I missed a loop when adding my increment code which lead to some weird results for large data sets. This update fixes that loop to remove that weird issue. As always the latest updates are available at http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/pasamioprojects/frs/