Having moved from Council to USQ, I’m still getting everything set up. HEAT is USQ’s call logging tool, which is supposed to be I guess analogous to ITSM. I must admit that ITSM was one of the least most favourite tools, a sentiment shared by many colleagues, with it failing to work multiple times, losing work, being plain unavailable as well as requiring ‘administrator’ intervention. ITSM was originally planned to be delivered via a web interface but that quickly died when we realised that every time you selected a drop down box the entire page reloaded (the typical incident form has a minimum of 6 drop downs that need to be selected). ITSM however was typically relatively easy to get up and running presuming you had the .Net Framework installed and had admin rights to set up the privileges to let the thing install properly.

HEAT appears to much easier. After a first few attempts the IT technician wasn’t able to get it to work. He disappeared and returned about 4pm and managed to get it to work by copying HEAT’s files from his own computer. Ouch. Fortunately the team I’m in has a habbit of closing those jobs in HEAT and transferring them to our own long term tracker in Gemini. This is similar to how I would have liked more longer term issues to be handled at Council, except we used ITSM and I had a Bugzilla instance that I deployed. The HEAT interface doesn’t look as smooth as ITSM’s .Net look and feel but if it works that’ll be an improvement. We will see what happens sooner or later.

More ePrints fun today trying to get everything into Subversion. It took me a while to get access to the repository (eventually got control of the server first) and then I found out that the servers didn’t actually have Subversion either. So I put the Subversion client on the development and test servers. From there I slowly managed to get both development and testing branches some what into sync though they’re still not there they mostly look similar and I don’t have any major problems so far. Once I’ve done this I’ll try to get everything cleaned up and then have a look at ensuring that on disk test and prod are in sync. At that point hopefully I’ll be happy enough to implement new changes. Much more fun and its only Monday!

This morning marked my first change at USQ. The uni being a much larger organisation has a lot more beurocracy around change management and is perhaps not as agile as Council though that isn’t necessarily a bad thing when one considers things. The change itself went through well and I passed it onto the functional team to test and release. I haven’t heard back from them so I figure that at the close of business things worked out fine.

The task tracker, Gemini, is an interesting and mostly functional tool. It is another .Net application however it appears to have been mostly sanely and not rely on .Net’s form libraries that create almost unusuable web applications. It certainly isn’t the greatest tool of all but it is at least on par with Bugzilla, except you have to pay for this one.

HEAT access is on by list and it will be interesting to see how it compares to ITSM. Not that ITSM worked well at Council, but if parts of it worked better it would be really awesome. Assignable subtasks for items were perhaps my most favouritw concept, however it is a shame that the application never actually saw fit for them to work properly, typically causing some form of weird error when predefined actions tried to take place. Cool idea if it worked.

More ePrints work today, even trying to track down a PEBKAC error which is particularly hard when you are yourself learning the system (and more annoying when you realize the system worked fine and the code was right which is why you’re pulling your hair out trying to work out why it doesn’t appear to be working!). Other smaller tasks consumed my day as well as minor amounts of paperwork. Good fun!

My day entirely was made up of ePrints. ePrints is an open source tool for exposing published papers. It is really well designed with translations taken of care of in a pretty cool and efficient manner. Minor customisation work on the tool appears to be relatively easy as well although I’m hitting a few snags in customising some parts of the workflow system to get it to do what I need. It is written in Perl with a large amount of flexibity provided via XML files for various tasks. I must admit whilst it seems really complicated it is also well put together as well so once I’ve got my head around it things should be peachy!

Today began with a small amount of furniture shuffling to get a desk. Once we’d managed that bit of minor co-ordination I was able to startbworking through the back log of email that I’d received while I was absent. Very much fun. I have also somehow managed to line up some early mornings for myself in the few weeks ahead which isn’t going to be the most fun. I start with an 8am on Friday to upgrade some software followed by the Monday and a 7am meeting. I’ll have to get some early nights some where. I’m still yet to recover completely from the weekends excessive lack of sleep and exhaustion so I’m still feeling rather sapped.

I also today started to make a list of education users that use Joomla!, more on that when I get it more cleaned up and progressive. Mostly its users who also use LDAP or JAuthTools (or both) who are on my list so its slightly slanted, but we’ll see.

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.

So today I got an email from an old friend about the Highfields Cultural Centre to fix up their website and after this weekend I have been looking for stuff to experiment with in relation to SEO. Jim Stewart has in part restored my faith in SEO people in a simple and I was wondering, how hard would it be to rank number one for “Highfields Cultural Centre” with just a simple a blog post, so here it is.

The Highfields Cultural Centre and Me

The first experience I had with the cultural centre was through a high school team building exercise. The Highfields Cultural Centre was probably chosen for the simple fact it was cheap and not attached to the school directly. In the past we did stuff at the St. Mary’s Hall but that never really got you away from the school. So we ended up trooping off in buses to the Highfields Cultural Centre multiple times to “get away from it all” making use of the full area with the auditorium. We had special speakers come in and teach us all sorts of useful stuff that I thought never got through to the people who should be listening most. But such is life.

Disco Inferno

Disco Inferno was St. Mary’s musical in my final year which was predictably held at the Highfields Cultural Centre. The Centre staff at times could be decidedly crabby but were usually right when they were doing it. As the Cultural Centre had most of the features that we required it worked well and the staff typically didn’t have an issue with the Stage Manager “Steve Loxley” who I note now works at the Centre. He must have made a decent impression on Rod after all.

Amalgamation

I finished high school and continued my studies at USQ whilst still working at Council. In 2008, Toowoomba merged with seven other local government authorities to form Toowoomba Regional Council. One of the authorities that was amalgamated together was Crows Nest Shire Council which contained the township of “Highfields” and thus the “Highfields Cultural Centre”. At this point in time I ran into a fine chap called “Brent Moore” who informed me of the crazy stuff the Centre had running out of it from time to time and the esoteric promises made by Councillors relating to IT around the Highfields Cultural Centre. Suffice to say, I’m amazed that the place wasn’t mobbed by angry people more often – perhaps that is why the staff weren’t the happiest.

And whilst lately I haven’t travelled out there I’m reliably informed that the Highfields Cultural Centre has been transformed with demountable buildings housing extra staff that have been dumped in there. The mezzanine level is now someone’s office which I must admit is quite crazy. To be blunt: the place has been transformed.

Leaving Council

So last week I left Council, but as I was leaving Mr. Loxley emails me from my personal website asking if I want to do some work on the Highfields Cultural Centre website. He’s emailed me through some information on it with the name of the centre all in lower case (seems to be the present style) and some links to what are decidedly ugly websites (including one with a flash splash page and iframes that seem to serve no purpose, really that bad). Their existing site looks a bit timid but beyond not being regularly updated (probably because its just a HTML page) it seems to be alright. It gets a page rank of three which whilst not spectacular (it should be doing much better than that) means it at least has been looked at by Google. The new design lacks content dramatically so I think they’ll some issues.

Why write about the Highfields Cultural Centre

Well I was thinking about the history and what the place has meant for me. Its interesting to be potentially given the task to redesign the site and I must admit I think it’ll be an interesting challenge. They’ve got a good start on the site style wise but they’re going to need to a lot of work to get it up to scratch for what they need. I was also interested in seeing how hard it would be to get a blog post ranked by Google on their list. I’m not sure how I’ll go but I’m hoping to use it as an example of how easy it is to write some good content and get Google to index it. Hopefully I both get the job and get this blog post to rank to demonstrate my point, I’ll be disappointed otherwise.

Happy coding!

Context login is a new concept that I’m introducing in 1.5.4 that features a new login module called “mod_contextlogin” and support from both the Advanced LDAP and Advanced GMail plugin. I’ll focus on today the GMail plugin and how you can use both context login and the Advanced GMail plugin to connect to two different Google supported domains (e.g. GMail and a Google Apps for your Domain site).

The first step in all of this is to install JAuthTools. The Context Login bit is mostly self contained so once you’ve got my Advanced Tools extensions installed you should be able to install the extras package. You can grab the 1.5.1 version of the Advanced Tools extension off Joomla!Code at http://joomlacode.org/gf/download/frsrelease/6797/22390/com_advancedtools.tgz and install directly in Joomla!. The next item we’re going to need is the helper package, the best way to grab this is to install the JAuthTools Core Package from http://joomlacode.org/gf/download/frsrelease/9530/36171/pkg_jauthtools_core.tgz which will also give you SSO and User Source libraries as well. The JAuthTools Extras Package contains both the context login module and the Advanced GMail authentication plugin. The extras package also has the LDAP user plugin and the Advanced LDAP plugin but we’re not going to use that today. The current version of the extras package is 1.5.4 (just released!) and you can grab it off JoomlaCode at http://joomlacode.org/gf/download/frsrelease/9530/36195/pkg_jauthtools_extras.tgz and you can also install this directly into Joomla!.

Once you’ve got everything installed, you can get to work. The first place we need to go into the Module Manager in the Administrator and look for Context Login. It’ll be there but it won’t be published by default. Opening it up we’ll see a lot of the params that we know and love from the core built in login module but we’ll also see some params immediately below the caching option called “Contexts”, “Require Context” and “Default Context”. The “Contexts” param is a text field that allows you to enter a per line entry of contexts. In this case we’re going to have two different contexts: one for the main GMail domain (gmail.com) and another for a Google Apps for your Domain (say “yourdomain.com”). Perhaps you’ve got a few of these domains that you want to limit people to so what you can do is enable the “Require Context” option. This will enforce a given context upon the module and remove the ability for the user to be flexible. Keep in mind that this isn’t added with the request, only a context ID is sent which is then looked up and found on the remote site. The last option is the default context to use which is set to -1 initially but can be set to the index of the context (starting from 0). This changes the context select box with the default selected and is purely a cosmetic setting. Once you’ve put in a few domains, you can enable the module and position it somewhere. If you want to put in some extra settings you can also do this like you would do with the normal login module.

The next step is to configure the Advanced GMail plugin. The Advanced GMail has all of the features of the existing GMail plugin and then some. If you’re currently using the GMail plugin, disable it first before you switch to the Advanced GMail plugin. The Advanced GMail plugin has a few configuration options such as “Apply Suffix” (similar to contexts but limited to only a single domain), “Username Suffix” (used with Apply Suffix, a single domain name such as “gmail.com”) , “Verify Peer” is a SSL configuration option that should be left on unless you’re having seriously strange issues (at this point, change host!) and that leaves us with “Use Contexts”. This is a simple option that has “Yes”, “No” and “Require”. What this then causes it to do is look for a context in the request and then apply the context if it finds it. The “Require” option will then enforce the use of contexts and will fail the user if the contxt doesn’t line up properly. The last option is a ‘username’ blacklist. This is a list of usernames that the plugin should never authenticate for which is useful for accounts that you may not control (e.g. ‘admin’) to prevent people logging in using it. This is an extra security feature that I’ve introduced and is certainly recommend using. Enable the plugin and we’re off!

Once both the module is configured and enabled as well as the plugin you should be able to see it in the front end. From here you can see the form and log into to it, selecting your context and then logging in appropriately.

Today I finally got around to releasing JAuthTools 1.5.4, the latest release in JAuthTools. I’ve put together a lot of stuff for this new release and I’m happy to have it released out there. This release introduces Token Login, Context Login, the release of my own LDAP and GMail authentication plugins each with extra advanced features (including context integration), an OpenID SSO plugin submitted by Ian MacLennan, a new way of handling SSO plugins with new types of plugins and many more. There are tonnes of little items that I’ve added as well as bugs that have been fixed. I will follow up with blog posts about how you can configure different items to work together.

Travelling again within Australia, I notice that the number of obese people seems disproportionate to what the national average would suggest. There is perhaps a reasonable number of overweight people (myself) included. Another interesting observation.

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.