Today was a slower day and I rocked up to work around 9:30am, read emails, attended a meeting about RPCS (we got some action yesterday), did some more emails, fixed a few things and had a long lunch with my boss discussing the shape of the world and things to come. I headed back to my office, processed a few minor things, made a few backups, responded to phone calls and emails before heading home for the day.

I went home, spent most of the afternoon crafting my assignment together. And then submitted it. To do this I need a TurnItIn originality report. Easy enough. I do all of that, wait for the report to come up, download the report (0% copied!) and upload it and the assignment to EASE. I have the sneaking suspicion that I had forgotten something and re-read the specification. I had, it was an introduction and a conclusion. I was close to writing one but didn’t because I forgot to put it in the original outline (I had everything else mind you). So I write up an introduction paragraph and a conclusory paragraph, regenerate the PDF (using LaTeX, NeoOffice on Mac is just a hog, is slow and non-responsive. TeXShop on Mac is fast and lets me write what I need with minimal fuss. Random style is hard but such is life) and resubmit to TurnItIn. Since I’ve already submitted they’re telling me I will need to wait two days. This really annoys me that I need this to submit, my university is paying anyway plus if we used the Moodle API we wouldn’t have this problem. In some respects it is a form of extortion because they want a material support to release it in some respects (signing up again with a new account would obviate the problem). In any case I submit anyway with the old report. We’ll see how we go.

Just recently I had issues with Outlook Web Access doing stupid things. I think my mailbox was over quota because when I emptied the trash via Apple Mail, everything started working. The weird thing is that when I clicked “Check Names”, it nuked the entire email for some reason. Curious behaviour. Anyway, email sent with mild frustration. Another day passes.

Today, like yesterday, one of my staff was away sick. Like yesterday this didn’t help things because with them away and another staff member away that means that we’re covering for two people. So I was helping out supporting the first guy but I also had to keep up with the support requests for the other person which was also fun.

So I had the on going issues with the wiki. Some appear to be legitimate, others appear to be an inability to copy and paste accurately. This is rather unfortunate but such is life. They are only first year students, so hopefully they’ll learn at some point. There were a few that weren’t in this bucket and I managed to get them resolved. We also had one student who changed their email address to a non-USQ student email address and is complaining that they didn’t get any email notification. I have a distinct feeling that the email was dropped as the student had a Yahoo! account and they have a habit of blacklisting us and our emails don’t go through. This is in part why we have the UMail accounts so that we can avoid this problem. We can’t blacklist ourselves.

Other issues involved some hosts needing to be added ezproxy’s list. It appears that EBSCO were redirecting this particular resource back onto ezproxy even though it was free. The ezproxy upgrade we did appears to have had this strange side effect that I will need to spend some time investigating if we can get rid of it so that for URL’s it doesn’t recognise it will unset itself.

The next issue was a link in the journal list that wasn’t being rewritten through ezproxy. That was an easy matter of updating the link where it was to run it back through ezproxy. I’m not entirely sure how it got changed but it was changed none the less and fixed now.

I had the regular Thursday tasks that the person off sick would have done. This involved kicking off the MARC export of our Library Management System, VTLS Virtua, and then starting the 11 hour reindex process into Solr and VuFind, the tool we use to index the catalogue. This bit doesn’t take much time however I spent a bit of time working on improving some of the scripts. I altered the way it handled logging and printed some user friendly messages to the screen. I’ve made small improvements along the way so hopefully this will continue.

Another curious thing was EndNote again complaining about a particular page implicating them more than VTLS. The issue is that since the upgrade EndNote has been broken. The original text read like this:

APOLOGIES – PLEASE NOTE: Currently there is no connection file for the USQ Library catalogue. We are awaiting a compliance upgrade from EndNote to match our Library Management System. We apologise for the inconvenience this causes. As an interim measure you might choose to search the UQ or other Australian Libraries for the title once you’ve found it in a normal websearch of our catalogue. We ask you to understand that this is NOT a permanent situation. Notification of the availability of the USQ connection file will be made ASAP

EndNote were upset about the implication that their system could be at fault here and that they had to do something. Curiously EndNote is the only system impacted and malfunctioning. Every other system that utilises the Z39.50 interface works perfectly well including but not limited to our Library Catalogue, the desktop management tool and web search tool provided by VTLS, OCLC’s VDX, Civica Aurora, Biblioscape 8, Yaz and Mercury Z39.50. Both Yaz and Mercury are freely available tools and Mercury was even tested off campus by a colleague at UQ. There are perhaps other systems that interface on Z39.50 that I have missed but it looks very much like the only system that isn’t working is EndNote. This has now been changed to the following:

APOLOGIES – PLEASE NOTE: Currently there is no connection file for the USQ Library catalogue. We are awaiting a compliance upgrade of our Library Management System to fix this. We apologise for the inconvenience this causes. As an interim measure you might choose to search the UQ or other Australian Libraries for the title once you’ve found it in a normal websearch of our catalogue. We ask you to understand that this is NOT a permanent situation and is not a problem created by the EndNote software. Notification of the availability of the USQ connection file will be made ASAP.

Fortunately VTLS have accepted that they made a change that broke EndNote and they’ve said they’ll fix it in their latest revision. It is unfortunate that EndNote seem disinterested in resolving the issue when VTLS took ownership and I must admit I never got a reasonable response from anyone about what was happening. As far as I could see from the logs, Virtua issues a challenge to EndNote which never gets responded to and EndNote just times out on its own. So whilst VTLS has agreed to do a fix to resolve the issue and restore compatibility however it will be in their next release which will be in a few months and due to the time it takes us to complete formal testing around the system it will likely be another few months after that until the fix reaches our production system. Unfortunate really. What I really don’t get is why EndNote is the only product that isn’t working but such is life. VTLS are happy to fix the problem and it’ll get resolved eventually. To be honest I don’t care who fixes it, I’m just disappointed that it took us a long period of time to get anyone to fix it.

Another day slowly turns.

It was a bit of a slow day for me today compared to yesterday. I had my usual set of meetings, I started working on building out the interface for the opening hours and generally had an easy day. I did a bit of documentation and fought with Visio before giving up and going back to Omnigraffle to draw what I wanted in less time than I had been fighting with Visio for – depressingly. Was quite a quiet day overall however there does appear to be a quirk with the library blog now sending out notifications on any update instead of just when we post something, will need to look at that.

Happy Easter!

Today was one of the longest days I’ve had for a while, it started at 7am and finished a little after 6pm. I should work less.
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One of the advantages of working for a university or government organisation is the use of flex. So today I made full use of the extra time I’ve worked up over the last week. I woke up late after going to bed early, so I caught up on a bit of sleep. I spent 1.5 hrs playing on Wii Fit which was good, it meant that I burnt off a whole heap of energy – allegedly over 300kcal, well perhaps not that much.

I finished up and went to uni to have a meeting with my supervisor. We went over the paper that we’re working on to get through a few things. I had a good two hour lunch catching up with people. It appears that ICT is going to be outsourcing with the people currently being sued by the University of South Australia. A curious choice, to go with someone who has a track record of apparent failure but they were probably cheap enough. I followed this by a short visit in my office to catch up on things before I went to visit with Luke, the ICT Security Manager.

We managed to get the library test site and blog working properly behind the load balancer which unfortunately took around 45 minutes to get right. Whilst I was visiting, he also fixed up coursereading pointing to test not prod which is good. This means I need to double check a few more things and we’ll be ready to

So today mum got a letter from Centrelink saying they’ll pay her money and that they’ve already paid her money which is good. However they also sent her a form which is to be returned tomorrow. Seems a bit much to hope that a letter will arrive in time, but it could be worse: it could have arrived tomorrow or even worse on Friday. Yay for Centrelink!

It strikes me that our language around problems is confused. When someone is talking about a problem they can be talking about the cause of the problem or they can be talking about the symptom of the problem.

This leads to the obvious that the symptom is treated not the cause. Removing the symptom by statement fixes the problem if you state the problem is the symptom. But that doesn’t resolve the root cause of the problem and thus it can potentially break the workaround you’ve created to remove the symptoms.

Another curiosity for the day.

So I’ve been having issues getting CNC4. Not only is it a legitimately bought copy but it was even a pre-order. It didn’t work properly so I filed a support request as you can read in my blog post entitled “CNC4 Fail”. My annoyance was that my details weren’t getting read properly. EA seem to employ many more drones and can’t be bothered particularly reading what I wrote. So I did some more work and I got some progress.

Ok, so I deleted everything in my temp folder, restarted and saw what happened. I saw the cnc4launcherupdate.exe file being created which was funky but then I received the same error message. So I deleted it, relaunched and got the same error message. Eventually after doing this repeatedly the launcher eventually loaded. Clearly you don’t a) check that the file is properly downloaded and b) prompt to redownload in this situation (given that you don’t check it to begin with it would be rather hard to do).

Once the launcher loaded I was stuck on the r1core_data_cnc4.game.rtp file not downloading properly and crashing. I am still stuck at this point.

So eventually got an update to this:

Hello there,

Thank you for contacting EA Games Support,

I sincerely apologize for inconvenience caused to you. I have checked the DXDiag of your computer the drivers are out dated please install the latest driver. In order to know your drivers open the dxdiag file and go to the “Display Devices” and check the drivers under ” Driver Date/Size” You will find how old your driver is. To correct this you have to update your computer driver, I have included the link for your convenience please go through and make necessary changes.

Should you have any further questions, please take a moment to review our Knowledge Base site at http://support.ea.com.

Sincerely,

EA Rep Austin
Electronic Arts

I’m annoyed that they’re apologising and not actually reading my responses. Drivers might be a problem but I initially a) couldn’t launch the launcher and b) the launcher can’t patch properly so it doesn’t matter what version of my display drivers I’m on, I’m not even getting there.

Seriously?

I mean, seriously? Your launcher has a flaw in it that it doesn’t validate that the download has completed successfully (even a simple MD5 sum or file size check should fix this) and then tries to run the app which fails because the file isn’t downloaded correctly.

Problem number two is what appears to be an issue that the launcher when you finally get the damn thing updated hands on downloading the r1core_data_cnc4.game.rtp file. This doesn’t appear to be an uncommon issue looking through the forum.

Don’t worry, I don’t need an answer to this. I gave up. I wanted to play the game and I got a crack. The game runs nicely and I’m progressing through the missions fine. Thanks for not reading my messages. Repeatedly.

The funny thing was that whilst I uninstalled and reinstalled the game I got a CNC4 server emulator downloaded, copied it into place, made the required changes to my hosts file and I started playing the game. It is working perfectly fine. It depresses me that I got what I couldn’t have paid for – I could have illegally downloaded the game and I would have actually been playing it faster than the legal game. As it stands the legal version isn’t still working anyway so in some respects I’m still behind by paying money. So I responded to their message with the text above and I also ticked the ” I no longer need an answer to this question.” I don’t require a response any more because it is working, just not their intended way.

Of course the sad thing is that the game is working fine and I’m enjoying it. It is a different concept that I’m trying to get my head around but it is pretty enjoyable. I haven’t had much time to go through it and I’ve only done the first few GDI missions but I’ll get there eventually. It looks like there are a few glitches which could be patched but since patching the game legally doesn’t work I guess I’ll never know.

Looks like I have a busy week ahead. Last week I was working on the death of lib1 and libblog which will have to continue to a point but it looks like not this week. Might get there but you never know. Other items ahead this week include iPhone training tomorow and DiReCt consultants up on Wednesday and Thursday. On Thursday we’ll start our catalogue reindex process again and hopefully that will continue successfully. I had some word today that we should be able to go the other way with the Virtua and library catalogue to help automate the reindexing so that we don’t have to do it all ourselves.

I had some fun with paperwork and a rather unfriendly colleague trying to be annoying. Managed to get all of the paperwork filed and shifted around the place which is good. It all ended up working out even though it was at the last minute. Nothing a bit of friendliness doesn’t help.

I was having a look at getting the JIRA jelly to notify non-users from JIRA when their issue changes. We don’t necessarily want people to be able to do anything but just be notified of changes. Creating users for everyone would seem a bit painful instead of just adding a few emails to the particular issue so that they’re notified when things happen.

To round out the afternoon I spent some time redoing the MARC loads for a new type of file and hopefully that will get properly tested tomorrow and all sorted.

Late in the afternoon I had an email from another part of the University. They wanted to attend some of the sessions to get an idea about the architecture about DiReCt since we’ve got two consultants coming up to try and work out how the system works. What I don’t get about this is that they hired the person who knows the most about the product at the University and gave them an extra two levels on top of what they were being paid. I don’t quite understand why need to get an idea when they already employ an expert already. But such is life.

The work slowly turns!

Ok, so I pre-ordered CNC4. I have pre-ordered every CNC game (except for RA3:Uprising because its digital delivery only and wasn’t available from any of the providers I like, e.g. Steam) lately such as CNC3, CNC3:Kanes Wrath and RA3. CNC4 wasn’t an exception. I enjoy the storyline so I don’t mind paying for it upfront and playing it. I also like RTS as a game style as well so it helps. I had the CNC4 Beta but it wasn’t working, I couldn’t work out why and no error messages appeared. There wasn’t anything in the debug logs to help me out either and at the time I didn’t have the spare time to work out what the problem was and file a bug report.

So CNC4 came in a few days ago, earlier because someone else managed to sell theirs earlier or something. Again, I had assignments and other stuff to do so I only tried to get it installed last night. The game installs fine without error. I go to launch it and the splash screen comes up, disappears, the CNC4.exe file sits in memory consuming around 30MB (it varies so it is doing something) and eventually I get an error message:

It looks like it can’t find something and bails out. Not sure what it can’t find or why but it can’t.

So I go to EA Support and file the following with the error dialog screenshot attached:

Starting the game the splash screen disappears and then nothing happens. After a few minutes of sitting around at 30MB of memory usage the attached dialog appears.

I then after digging around saw some instructions about dxdiag in notes, so I fire up dxdiag, hit “Save all information” and attach the resulting file with the follow message:

Attached dxdiag details.

I was having issues during the beta that I couldn’t spend enough time to resolve. I have fully uninstalled the CNC4 beta though.

These are time stamped at 5:41am and 5:43am, presumably PST (it was late at night AEST). EA promise 24 hour turn around and sure enough at 3pm on the dot I get this response:

Hi,

Thank you for contacting EA customer support.

We do apologize for the inconvenience you’re experiencing with the game.

Are you getting any error messages?

Please accomplish the following before launching the game:

1. Empty your Temp folder to prevent file conflicts. Click here for steps on emptying your Temp folder:
http://support.ea.com/cgi-bin/ea.cfg/php/enduser/olh_adp.php?p_faqid=10705

2. Please end all background tasks to prevent conflicts with other programs. Click here for steps on ending background tasks:
http://support.ea.com/cgi-bin/ea.cfg/php/enduser/olh_adp.php?p_faqid=10700

If the trouble still persists, please send us a copy of your system information which is taken from the DXDIAG program. To do this:

1) Go to Start -> Run.
2) In the box, type the following: dxdiag
3) Click ‘OK’
4) Click the ‘Save All Information’ button on the first screen of the application.
5) Then on top of the ‘Save As’ box that pops up, select Desktop (if it’s not set to save there already), then click Save.
6) Finally, attach the dxdiag.txt to your email reply.

Once we get the Dxdiag, we’ll take a look and let you know what to do from there.

If there is anything else we can help you with, please do let us know.

Thanks,

Andrews.
EA Online Support

I’m rather annoyed, and I’ve replied as follows:

Hi,

Thank you for not reading.

Don’t apologise for the inconvenience of the game not starting without reading the question or supplied information.

Yes a dialog does appear suggesting that something is valid. I’m not sure what as it isn’t that descriptive but it has a handy backtrace. That is attached already.

Removing the files in the temp folder shouldn’t make a difference as the backtrace is suggesting the file isn’t valid or potentially missing. Deleting stuff won’t make it reappear.

Stopping any background tasks will again not achieve anything as it is failing to launch something. All of my other EA games including every other single CNC game (except for RA3:Uprising because it was online only and I like having a disc even if you don’t) appear to be working fine. Even so the error message is indicating that something isn’t a valid Win32 application which suggests something filesystem related.

I have sent you the dxdiag for your reference as well as the error messsage screen shot in PNG format. As a developer I don’t believe the error is caused by either of your causes and could you please just look at the information so we can progress in fixing this problem instead of scripted support.

Cheers,

Sam

I went to reply and put that in and it sent me to a login dialog box where I put my credentials in a few times and got nowhere. Went to the root of the site and it had authenticated me. What is going on? Anyway, I had a copy for this blog so I went back to the support issue and replied with this again. 5:09pm.

Hopefully I’ll get someone responding without a copy and paste script.