Today you will have noticed that I’ve put a lot of posts up from apparently nowhere. These are posts that I’ve had sitting around in my drafts lift so I’ve decided to go through the ones that are mostly and do a bit of work and publish them out. I’ve got a few more that I’m going to work on tomorrow and post.

Over the last few months I had seen the signs of my university trying to die. Last year it was the loss of a lecturer that wasn’t replaced (he retired) and others who left and weren’t replaced. Courses were scrapped (including ones I was doing! I’ve got Data Mining and Intelligent Agent Technology on my list that don’t exist any more; I managed to defeat the dreaded and quite pointless Australia and the Asia Pacific with patience, it died before I needed to graduate). Other subjects on my list have drastically changed, such as my networking course which went from having a strong programming and development component to basically be a Cisco course. Other things have started being palmed off to other departments, such as the new Oracle requirement for the web development course which is a Business course and a rather practical one at that. It also looks like the system administration course is shipped out to business as well with the “d” in the Unix permissions now meaning “delete” not directory (yes, on NTFS or NSS from Novell both have a ‘delete’ or ‘erase’ attribute to set however this wasn’t that).

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.

This morning whilst I sat down I saw the start of a new national identity card in Thailand that goes far and beyond the layers that we already see with normal identity cards. These cards start to move into the sphere of being one card to rule them all from not just national identity to the world of banking and even education (both for students and for teachers). Whilst it is a great idea in principle and it means that the five something cards I currently carry around in my wallet reduces to one, it also starts to mean that one bit of plastic becomes the entire part of one persons life, and that in itself is a bit of a worry when you think about it because with that one card you can take over their life or contol their life or even rewrite their life so that they are never a part of the world again and change their identity. This one card becomes powerful but we find that even now without the one card to rule them all we have a situation where people can find their social security number in the US (which is analagous to the tax file number in Australia). We’ll see how it turns out next time I’m in Thailand.

As it seems a few of my mornings are starting I played a quick albeit one sided game of Dawn of War with my house mate to test that the network play was working between my Mac (using CrossOver Games) and his PC (Windows XP). Suffice to say everything worked fine network wise, my Mac stil has some visual issues but I’m not too phased about that at the moment. So that was an interesting start to the day and when he returns from work it’ll be an interesting end as well.

Work again is fun as always. We’re working on solving various election problems and getting envelopes. Our printers came back stating that they didn’t want to do Code 128 for the barcodes because its too hard preferring Code 39 instead. As the day progressed it turned out that we’re going to use Code 128 more for space issues because we’ve got that much junk going out on the envelopes. This saga has been occurring over a few days, I really want to get a few proofs done before we actually get the batch done from them first to ensure that everything is good but we’ll see. Testing on the system we’re going to be using to track the election on has also begun to ensure that the system can in fact handle items properly, we had a word of warning from one of the newer guys from the regions that it had issues and that was with nowhere near the same workload. So we’re hoping we can test the system out with a few VM’s emulating the system for multiple data entry. There have been issues with the system in question in the past (in fact the system is being replaced)  so hopefully this won’t be a time when it does have issues otherwise we’re going to have large numbers of problems.

The bulk of my day was spent working on the restore framework for Joomla! 1.6, or more accurately the new JDataLoad system and the JLoaderSql adapter. The data load system, as its name suggests, loads data into the Joomla! database from a data source. In this case I’m looking at the SQL files which in my sample data is actually one of the 1.5 sites that I’m an administrator over at work. Its relatively small in the grand scheme of things with only a few meg and around 9000 queries. So far its been sufficient to find a few issues, one being dropping a table before a task yield which caused a missing table error from J! (put in a simple patch for that, if the last query was a drop, go to the next query in the hope that its a create) and another was a minor typo error which caused some multiline strings to be processed incorrectly when they were on a yield boundary again as well. But all in all its working well even importing data faster than MySQL Query Browser was (to its fairness it highlights each query as it goes) in my test runs. Its now committed to trunk and when I get a chance I’ll write up something about it and put it somewhere

Extra fun today came from trying to write up business cases for the projects I want to work on in the next year or so until I have to write it up again (fun, yeah!). Initially my boss (who is great) thought of me and tried to convert the files from Excel into a more Open format so that I can get at it on my Mac and Linux box. Somewhere during the conversion however the fields got trimmed and data lost, so I offered to edit the document in Excel directly using our Windows only document management system logging in via our Citrix services. The system, OpenText’s DM, isn’t too bad for the most part and does the job well and today I found no fault with it. Today was the day when Microsoft’s tools decided they wanted to misbehave.

Earlier in the week my boss had emailed me a doclink to the document stored in DM. A doclink is a small text file with the document number in it which basically triggers the system to load the specified document, something that usually works quite well. However Outlook, due to various configuration changes, decided that it didn’t want to start for some reason even though earlier in the week it was working perfectly fine. After Outlook repeatedly informing me it wanted to recreate my profile and then informing me that it couldn’t contact my Exchange server and offering to allow me to work offline which consequently failed due to a lack of a profile, I ended up using Mac OS X’s built in “Mail” application (yes, the email application is called “Mail”) to get at my email to find the document number and open it. Usefully enough this is done through the IMAP interface on Exchange and worked well and doesn’t suffer from some of the other issues that the Outlook clients have, such as the address book caching which caches the old Lotus Notes addresses instead of their newer Exchange ones resulting in emails going to the wrong place. Yay Outlook! Suffice to say I found the file and made the changes that I needed to before accosting our Exchange administrator who had returned to see if he could fix the issue – which he did mind you after some trial and error.

The last little item I looked into was building a system to version the content from Joomla! back into our document management system. The new document management officer assures me that we can do it and has even proposed a nifty way of importing the data into the system. It looks like one of the products we have, KoFax, will help us by allow us to generate XML files which specify the documents that we’re creating and the different versions. If we can get this to work it will be really awesome as it’ll mean that our website is in part integrating back into our document management system without hacking into the database! I’ve still got to build it and work out where we want to target the extension, but suffice to say its on my project list for next year.

Today had a lackadaisical start with me working on getting Dawn of War:Winter Assault to work on my Mac (once it was fully patched seems to have started working, yay for no copy protection!) after doing a whole heap of disk swapping last night to get the base installed only to see it complain it couldn’t find a CD/DVD drive. After I installed the 1.50 patch it asked me if I wanted to start and for the first time it actually started the game without issues. I managed to load it up and play a quick game and fielded a call from my Mum before heading to work. I also added some projects to my list and categorised items, now on the todo list: an automated login key generator for Joomla! and a component to compliment the ban IP/address plugin. Now all I need is time!

The Kerberos keys that I had asked to be remade were ready for me by the time I got there. It took a bit of time to rebuild the different keytab files to support the vhost environment (need to merge the respective keytab files) but once that was done everything was working. Well, mostly working. Firefox on my Mac worked fine, Firefox on the Windows desktops I tried worked when they were configured (see http://grolmsnet.de/kerbtut/firefox.html for information on what you need to do to get Firefox to do negotiate), IE on most of the desktops worked fine however some installations weren’t getting SSO, all of the Citrix servers seem not to pass through authentication (they end up going in a weird loop where IE appears to keep loading the page) and Safari on my Mac doesn’t seem to want to play the game either. Perhaps I’ll sort that out over the next week or so but that consumed a reasonable amount of time going through and checking different IE versions and if they worked. The only machine not to play the game seems to be Firefox on my Linux desktop (it should be working) so I’ll have a look at the ones that don’t work and why they don’t want to work. For the Windows boxes I have the feeling that the Netware client is causing issues (which would explain Citrix) so hopefully when our network eradicates Novell we’ll be fine.

And that leads us to the afternoon’s fun of building Joomla! 1.6’s backup system. I’ve managed to get the system to export the sample database, reimport it and then delete the files afterwards so I’ve moved onto much larger goals. I’ve taken one of our internal websites and I’m trying to get it to important. Suffice to say that it has enough data to cause an issue with the system. For data loading I’m using a heavily modified version of Alexey Ozerov’s “BigDump” script, which has been used in the past in a less modified form for the Joomla! 1.5 migrator. It is slowly being converted to use the new Tasks system in 1.6 which is another concept borrowed from the 1.0 migrator. The Tasks system in 1.6 has two items: a task set which is a container for individual tasks. So considering backups, one task set might be a full backup run of the site with individual tasks being an SQL backup, a file backup (tar archive perhaps?) and maybe copying that to a remote FTP site or similar. So the one task set would have an “SQL backup” task and a “file backup” task. Extension package installation may do a similar item as well splitting the install into different parts.

A new part of this is the data load system that provides functionality to read and load data files, at the moment only supporting SQL but I’m hoping I’ll be able to create a CSV one as well some luck, again probably reusing Alexey’s code in part here as well. I’m mostly through building parts of this system though I’m experiencing a strange issue with my sample data (hence why the updates haven’t been committed to J!’s SVN repository today) where it loads the file up through to almost 2000 queries and seems to stop suddenly. I’m not quite sure whats going on but I’m happy enough that the task system is picking up and storing values for it to progress as far as it does.

Another successful day spent on my Mac as well, NetBeans doesn’t seem to want to look at my project any more crashing instead of loading it which is disappointing but I’ll work that out another day. And now its time to enjoy some Dawn of War.

Today was a mostly ordinary day, though the day started with me buying Red Alert 3, so that wasn’t too bad – yay! Australia! A week behind the rest of the world! I could have pirated the game and had it faster and cheaper, perhaps even finished! But I digress, it was an ordinary day.

Today is Melbourne Cup day, being the first Tuesday of November, so we had a luncheon of sorts and a drawing for the horses. Didn’t win, the food was good, I’m $10 poorer and such is life.

I’ve been spending more time at work using my Mac as a primary machine. Since I’ve moved to Exchange from Domino (or Outlook from Notes), I’ve gotten Evolution on Linux mostly working (with the exception that it doesn’t automatically look up names for emails which is tedious) and Apple’s Mail and Address Book both playing nicely with Exchange. I do miss the fact that I had Notes on my Linux desktop and things mostly worked albeit slowly and consuming large amounts of memory, but it worked with all of the features available normally. Mail’s ability to due autocompletion is what is drawing me back to it as a client, which when you start writing emails is actually more useful than you would think. Its still not up to par with the Notes autocomplete which was quite cool and a lot more advanced than either Mail’s or Outlook’s (I get Outlook via Citrix).

I’ve also been trying out NetBean’s PHP Early Access through a nightly build (has the ability to create PHP projects from existing sources) and I’m impressed with it. I tried it out because I wanted to try out debugging with my PHP instance and the dated version of Eclipse I had (3.2) seems to have issues – more than likely my fault – and I don’t want to waste time on trying to fix something. NetBean’s installed and worked almost instantly, however it took me a while to find where I could change the params to get J! to route items properly. I managed to work out the bug that I was having without too much issue. I knew what it was but not where it was: turned out to be exactly what I thought, an assignment operator used instead of the append operator. The Subversion support seems to be a bit off and doesn’t work yet, so I’m not quite ready to ditch Eclipse yet – but I’ll try with later versions to see what I get.

I had a chat with the principal (we have principal, manager, director, CEO as our chain of command) about the projects that I’m doing and the ones I’m interested in so I’ll have to do some paperwork and business cases for the new projects and justify items. We’ve recently got a new manager who is trying to find where everything is so part of this is explaining everything so that he can get a grasp of the way the system works.

Then I spent the majority of the afternoon with one of the ITS guys working through how our Citrix boxes work with Flex profiles and the mandatory profiles filling in the gaps in his knowledge and how different parts of the system and why items might break or behave in a particular way. I think he’s worked out how it works and he’s even figured out why a few issues are happening. So nothing exciting but useful.

And finally I had fun with Kerberos. I built the Kerberos module on the SLES10 server, installed it, restarted Apache and tried to get it to work. On my Mac both Safari and Firefox requested a username and password instead of using a Kerberos token and IE6 in my Citrix session seemed to just go in a weird infinite loop. I slowly worked through my entire Kerberos configuration on the server until I got to looking at the keys. It turns out that the keys were created with the wrong virtual host name for the server which is causing the issues. The keys for the real server name actually worked fine when I got around to testing them which proves that everything will work once I get the keys. The last part is a fix to the Citrix system which for some reason think that the intranet site is actually on the internet, but I’m assured that this should be easy to achieve. Getting Kerberos up and running was pretty easy ignoring the faulty keys compared with some of the nightmares I’ve had getting items to play nicely together. I’ll probably add something to my guide (http://sammoffatt.com.au/jauthtools/Kerberos) on it, to help with items.

Who knows, I may have even figured this Kerberos thing out!

Today I was woken up by something that I haven’t been woken up to in a long time: very heavy rain. It isn’t often that it rains, and when it does it isn’t really that heavy, its usually quite soft or doesn’t last as long. Usually if it last for a reasonable period of time, its also quite soft, so it was quite interesting to have it go for so long and so heavy. Unfortunately I couldn’t sleep because it was too heavy (it woke me up to begin with), but it was nice to sit in bed and think about the rain and what it meant. It lasted about an hour or so and I left for Uni between breaks. It rained on and off throughout the day, though not as hard as it did in the morning. However, I bet none of it fell over the dams though but it’ll make my patch of dirt a lot greener.

My birthday’s gift from my girlfriend created using Mac Mosaic application

Today was an interesting and rather long day of travel. Starting at 8am I begun my journey from small little Toowoomba (~100,000 people) to Munich (1.3million) with a few stops at small places like Brisbane (1.8million), Singpaore (4.5million) and London (7.3million in Greater London).

So by 10am I’d reached Brisbane International Airport, a bit early for the 2pm flight out on QANTAS to Singapore. After sitting around the airport for a while looking at things and trying to find power so that we could recharge the laptops we ended up boarding hte flight and had a rather uneventful flight from Brisbane to Singapore. The only thing of note was that the plane was perhaps the smallest of the whole lot and the inflight entertainment system’s personal LCD panels were very dark. It made it impossible to look at a movie or show that was very dark. Very bright colours are fine to watch however there were very little things there that would make it worth watching (chick flicks mostly).

Singapore was Singapore. Landed in the first terminal (along the C concourse) and wandered to get some rather horrible tasting coffee. This wasn’t the worst I’ve had however it is pretty much down there. It turns out that they have free wireless there and all you have to give over are some details so that the government can track you (normal if you’ve been in Singapore before). However I didn’t realise this until I walked past a sign (usefully facing the way towards the boarding gates behind a pillar) so I didn’t get much use of it. We’ll be spending a longer amount of time when we come back so that tied with the laptop access areas should make life a bit more bearable.

Then we lined up to board our plane to London (Heathrow). This wasn’t too bad until five minutes after the time that we were supposed to take off the captain announced that someone had been lost in the terminal. Eventually the person was decided to be permanantly lost and that in accordance with most airlines they were going to unload the baggage which takes about 20 minutes. Then it turned out that we needed to wait a further 45 minutes to get a free flight spot over Afghanistan (it would appear the airspace over Afghanistan is highly controlled by the Americans). During all of this the air conditioning system wasn’t functioning properly as it would in the air under full engine power, so whilst it was warm for me, I don’t think we quite got to the 28C that other parts of the plane got to (which was at the back and very hot). In the end, an hour and a half after we were supposed to depart we finally got up in the air. Great. This then delayed all of the meals and the like which ate into the sleeping time, however we managed to only be half an hour late. I got maybe three hours sleep on the flight before waking up at about midnight Munich local time – start of a long day.

London was mostly uneventful. Involved getting off in what really felt like a shed, wandering through very ‘regulated’ walk ways (had all sorts of nice barriers to remind you that you really are just cattle) down to the bus we needed to take to the new Terminal 5 (having landed in Terminal 4), which was about 20 minutes away.

Terminal 5 is the newest terminal and is very shiny and nice looking at the moment. We wandered up through the terminal, passing the customary security checks and made our way to Terminal 5b. For some silly reason we were required to take a small train (we waited longer for the train than the journey took, would have been able to walk it faster if there was the option) under the tarmac to the building opposite which stands alone and is a building surrounded completely by gates. Fortunately there was a coffee shop there that I got a massive cappuccino (more than I’m used to in Australia) before we boarded the next flight to Munich.

This next flight wasn’t so bad, an hour and a half flight and we managed to get off the ground early and into Munich early (score!). Now Munich was an interesting airport. It is perhaps the easiest airport I have come through in the world. I didn’t need to fill in any entry documentation at all, the guy merely looked at my passport, stamped it and I went to baggage control. From there I collected baggage and walked straight out the door. Everywhere else in the world I have to at least fill in some form or another however not here. It really felt too easy and not right (it’ll be harder to get back into Australia).

From here we managed to find a train (and work out how to get the ticket stamped) into town (~50 minutes), then onto the subway (~5min) and then walk to the hotel (~10min) to check in. Once checked in (and with a quick change) we continued life around Munich with some of the rest of the crowd including lunch, some sightseeing (really killing time before dinner) and dinner.

And evreything here is green.

Long day!

I’m a proponent of open source software and free software, and in some cases even non free software has its advantages so long as the source is available (e.g. commercial GPL) but someone gave me a link the other day that reminded me why a lot of closed systems have issues:

http://forums.cubecart.com/index.php?showtopic=33714&pid=151145&st=0&#entry151145

Their server went down which means you couldn’t (temporarily) update your site. More of a disservice. Similar to Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage issues legitimate people have had with that “service”.