Today I finished the migration of ePrints from its old environment into the much newer, much shinier environment. It has been moved from its old RHEL4 systems into a newer RHEL5 environment with a non bodgy mod_perl 1.99beta something that is supposedly version 2 but lacks a few things from version 2. Yay for Red Hat. Anyway, its now up and running with everything we need. As the main driver of the entire change, I went to check with ADFI to see if their SWORD  integration works. Thankfully after all of this it is up and running so they can now use ICE to submit stuff to the system. Lucky them.

I also spent some more time to research into iTunes U. It appears that there is a Mobile Learning Roadshow down in Brisbane later this month which should be good to go to and have a look at. We might never go that way but you can’t argue with their price.

DiReCt is also crashing again, with the databases dying yesterday and the application server today. They both have th same root cause: a lack of disk space. Cleaning up the transaction log for the databases (which was on the same disk as the database) and removing some extra logs and backups on the application server (no log rotation with backups made locally before being archived off). Causes are quite obvious in hindsight and I think discussions have been taking place to get everything resolved.

Weird file type of the day:     JET database attachment (.snp). It appears to be some form of form thing that we ended up printing but it is certainly something I’ve never seen before. Evolution apparently recognises it which is good and a Window box can print it so I’m happy. The USQ travel office appears to deal in these forms so I guess that’s life. It is a minor problem being a Linux user in this case as I don’t have anything to open it and my supervisor person who is presently seconded elsewhere also hasn’t seen it, doesn’t recognise it but is happy that Windows opens it. So am I

Outlook Web Access Contact Search on IE7 doesn’t actually search properly, looking for the “USQ EXECUTIVE COMMUNIQUE” using the terms “EXECUTIVE” (either case) or “COMMUNIQUE” (either case) results in nothing sane, thankfully they appear near the top of the list when searching “USQ”. Interesting I found a reference to USQ in Dubai as a mailing list still which is quite strange as it was supposed to be killed off ages ago, it appears remanents of its legacy still remains. It was a rather large scandal for the University at the time so it is interesting that everything was scrubbed.

Back from the long weekend, one of the last for the year. Why is it that long weekends tend towards the start of the year and not the end? We need a few more holidays at the other end of the year but anyway.

Today was spent organising everything to be set up for the switch over of the ePrints production environment including not one but two system administrators coming to our meeting (yay! the team leader as the guy who will be awake before 8am). We had a nice chat about exactly what is going to happen when and everyone seems mostly happy. They don’t really have much to do but they still have to do it (lucky them) – its mostly a DNS change and server rename on their part. In addition to writing even more documentation, I also spent some time reconfiguring and tweaking the Apache settings on the new production server.

I also spent some time working on DiReCt to get the ICE interface up and running. Its now in the development environment as well as copies in the test and production environment. DiReCt is having some major malfunctions which is a tad worrying but nothing that I can particularly control.

Last but not least I ended my day working through tonnes of paperwork to get basically no where. I’ll have to have a chat with people tomorrow to see what I’m supposed to do and where I’m supposed to find the next level of paperwork I’m expected to fill in. But all good fun.

After a couple of months I’ve released another update to the Migrator tool. This is a minor update to support the ability to reconfigure the increments that are used to handle transformations – this should help users with larger data sets when exporting as they can configure up a larger number. As always the latest version is available at the FRS site: http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/pasamioprojects/frs/

It is a Thursday and just like Arthur Dent, I don’t think that I’ll get a handle on Thursday. The DiReCt project is progressing and a few more changes are required to be things finalised but today at least the testing was completed. They’ll deploy the changes to production plus a few more changes that were needed to happen as well. Fortunately that much doesn’t involve me so I ended up spending even more time looking at ePrints. We’re getting even closer to release of the production environment, and today I had a chat with our DBA (who is great but a bit green on MySQL) about shifting the grant permissions and reconfiguring the MySQL server the way wants it to behave.

We have also at this point double checked a whole heap of other tasks that we need to do during the shift including renaming entries in DNS servers internal and external as well as renaming the server. It’s all fun and games until Wednesday morning! But that’s next month right?

So I’m using the latest version of Ubuntu at work and its been interesting. The upgrade process was smooth which is what I’d expect and I didn’t have any problems. My work machine isn’t particularly complicated and doesn’t have esoteric packages and dependencies unlike some of my other machines (some of which I have a weird combination of Debian Unstable running on as well which makes upgrading fun).

The problem I have now is that Ubuntu have introduced a whole heap of new features that look cool but don’t really work properly. Take for example something that appears to resemble the Growl notifications that I have on my Mac. Ubuntu have them with a nice rounded black opaque box with the text and potentially the icon of the application reporting stuff. Pretty cool and I’m happy with that, until I want to dismiss one. I can’t do it. Hovering over the thing causes it to disappear but then unhovering from where it was causes it to return until such time as it disappears. What the? Growl gives me a few options: I can click on it and it’ll either go to a URL, activate the application or disappear harmlessly (depending on that) but in addition to that it also has a little cross on each notification so that I can make it go away forcibly. It also has a slightly different behaviour on hover: it stays around for longer. Perhaps its a longer message you want to read properly, hovering over it keeps it active and it doesn’t disappear. Ubuntu seem to have seen this idea and copied it badly, which reminds me of another operating system vendor who copy ideas badly.

The next point of weirdness is their update manager. Now this doesn’t appear to be a new thing but in fact a rather strange old bug. The update manager displays normal updates and security updates but it also displays some weird form of distribution update. Why it displays this is beyond me because one cannot select it for update no matter how hard they try (ticking its check box infuriatingly just unticks itself) and even when all of the other updates are installed it remains there but at least at this point the entire update list is disabled so its obvious you can’t update it. It turns out that the solution for getting rid of this is to go into Synaptic and update or remove the package manually which then prompts the user with a list of packages it’s going to remove/update and continues on its merry way. I can see they don’t want people to click it randomly and potentially break things but having it there and not obvious what to do with it is a rather glaring design flaw. Either provide instructions on how to resolve the situation or don’t bother displaying it in an interface where you can’t do anything to fix it and where it looks like the rest of the updates (it clearly isn’t).

I probably wrote a whole heap more on this topic but WordPress (in its infinite wisdom) seems to have lost that information. I seem to not be having much luck with it lately.

Another day, and more work on DiReCt again. I think I’ve managed to get everything completed and working, so that’s good. Also spent some time helping my supervisor getting her PC up and running as we encountered some weirdness with Ubuntu’s 2.6.27 kernel and VMware 1.0.6 (the older version has a much nicer GUI – and is also a fifth the size). Not much else is happening today though. Tomorrow should be fun.

Today was a day full of meetings of all sorts. I started the day with a bit of PHP coding before moving on to the regular team meeting, a meeting with my master’s supervisor about my masters and some interesting stuff about using relationships for permissions and then onto a seminar by Elisa Bertino from Perdue University on data trustworthiness which was followed then by a meeting with the Planning and Quality Office  about our ERA submission and some more work. Coming back from this I wandered past the library to try and find some people but failed to find anyone as they were at a workshop – fun. So I had lunch and returned to attend another meeting about getting a website (Discovering Disabilities) out of the USQ CMS system and into something else, either Joomla! or WordPress. Given the client it seems that WordPress is perhaps going to be the choice which is unfortunate(ish) but perhaps the best option for the client. At this point it was getting close to three and I did a few check ups on different items and decided to head off early at 3pm and go get my tyres changed. Bring on the weekend.

At some point I will get everything set up and working. Unfortunately I still have firewall problems and they keep coming. The University has this strange policy that development should happen on servers and then backs this up by providing firewalls and limitations to access into the server via gateway machines which all prevent direct access. Then the servers themselves in part are unfriendly by not providing the greatest editors (personally I’m a vim person which is so much better than vi) as well as making it hard to get back to where things need to be because they’re then blocked by another set of firewalls. Makes things productive.

So today was filling in paperwork to get things working properly. Firewall forms, software install requests and all sorts of other useless things. I did manage to get some changes made however it is hard to test when you can’t look at your database to find information to test with.

Updates on the Camtasia front with a comment on this blog and a few emails. One email came back about customising the emails that the system sends and unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be an option. Hopefully we will be able to replicate part of what the Presenter solution that pushes the data straight into the Moodle course or courses.

And out of nowhere and directive has come down to prevent data transfers in and out of the University. Something has obviously happened and the management are shooting from the hip and are going to create a whole heap of red tape for the sake of trying to prevent stuff from happening. After a while I’m sure they’ll be sick of it as it starts to block other things but obviously for the time being things are going to be hectic. Of course with all sorts of things it is very vague about what they want, mean or are really even concerned about. It’ll be another fun task to add to the list.

…and ePrints is still sitting in the doldrums. Today I managed to get the production box and then found it wasn’t properly configured yet so I couldn’t do much with it anyway. Test is sitting fully configured and ready to rock and roll when I get the firewall rules set up to pull the data to it. Given I put the forms in the Thursday before Easter I can understand that it is taking a long time to get them processed and how Easter delays things. To be honest, this is getting beyond a joke. So ePrints is going nowhere really fast.

Another Camtasia Relay meeting and it looks like the tool needs a large amount of customisation in some areas to make it meet the gap of the tool that it replaces. Unfortunately it looks like that might not be possible anyway but I’m unable to get that confirmed or validated. My email to Techsmith about offering to help them get the Moodle integration working seems to have fallen through the cracks as well, so much for the expensive support and maintenance contract. Either way its probably going to go ahead because at the end of the day its what the lecturers want until it doesn’t work properly either. To be honest for what the lecturers seem to be doing this is better though having seen what someone capable of doing things with the tool has done it can work quite well. As a side issue it appears that the Presenter tool has disappeared from some PC’s anyway. Yay for change management!

And now onto something new(er), DiReCt. It turns out that it is now needed within the next two weeks (or less) to get the S2 study material preparation out of the way. It appears that like ePrints, the three environments (dev, test and production) are all out of sync with changes in each so getting those under control will be required sooner or later anyway. For the time being I just imported each one to have a base and will progressively get around to increasing control of the systems into a much more managed approach. Of course getting this far is fun with the servers for the boxes being Solaris entire command sets are completely different to the much more featured GNU tool chain. Funny to think that historically the commands came from these places to emulate them and they’ve now progressed into more featured versions. But I digress. Subversion is unavailable for these machines so I ended up making do via sshfs and a few interesting tunnelling arrangements between servers. Hopefully over the next few days I can get Subversion installed on those machines and up and running which will be really awesome and save me from half as much work as I need but for now I’ve got a solution that works and tomorrow will be a full day of customisations as well as a little bit of chasing up my ePrints boxes. Maybe they’ll get done tomorrow, a man can dream.

I would like to say that I did something productive today but at the end of the day I really feel tha tI haven’t done much. Today was another wasted day on ePrints stuff which is rather unfortunate because well there is very little progress being made until late in the afternoon. Managed to get everything up and running with the new eprints test machine however there were firewall issues standing in the way of getting things to work properly and suck content down across the line. So whilst everything in theory should be working perfectly fine for the test environment all we are missing is the data to test it with. Brilliant!

In other library related fun I also had a chat with the guy who has been working with DiReCt who guided me through some of the bolt on PHP scripts that they’ve added that are relevant to the changes that the library wants to make. It is some very nice looking code and design with a few ugly bits but you get that from time to time when you pull code around the place and make rapid changes. Given the time frame presently available it doesn’t look like any of the changes I’m going to make are going to be particularly neat or tidy either which is a shame (e.g. it’ll probably be a bulk copy and paste job).