Posters, CWD and more!

4 03 2010

Last week I headed off to a conference in London called Dev8D, where I met a few hundred other developers from the HE sector (and others) and spent my time brainstorming ideas, messing about with RFID tags, mashing data together, attending workshops on the future of data representation, writing an iPhone app, learning to use the Force, drinking far too much complementary tea and coffee and fighting the mess that is the Underground on a weekend. In short, it was awesome fun. Out of it I’ve gleaned loads of useful bits and pieces which I can now use to push the bits of the University that I can get my hands on into the future with impunity, because somebody else has already done the research and I now know who.

Next up, Posters. We’re still waiting for our new development server on which the Online Services Team can develop, stage, test and show off our latest inventions. Once that’s up and running you’ll be able to have a go at breaking it and we’ll be open for feedback. Posters will also be the first production University site (albeit beta) to use our new CWD 2.0, and will also be providing data as RSS in the initial release, with JSON and XML further down the line. The ability for groups such as student societies to add posters, along with a streamlined online approval process, will be in place ready for once Posters leaves beta.

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Searching The University

18 02 2010

Part of my remit as one of the Online Service Team’s tame students is to take time now and then to step back, look at things, and work out how they could be made all-around better. An example of this has been the slow but steady march towards a common, uniform, standards-compliant styling for every web service.

All my rambling aside, I spotted a brilliant post from the BBC Internet Blog on searching the BBC. In short, their new Search+ trawls the entire BBC looking for what you’re after, and then decides what’s most relevant within context. Data representation and organisation is a big area of interest for me (the Cybernetics part of my degree has a huge focus on knowledge representation), and searching is an area in which the University, to put it bluntly, sucks.

Bits and pieces work on their own, for example the Library Catalogue searches the library fairly well, and the Phone Search tends to find who you’re looking for. Blogs has a search, although it does skim over a few things. There’s also Portal, which has a search function which alternates between sometimes giving you something relevant and sometimes picking random, outdated and irrelevant content from 5 years ago.

What’s needed is something a bit like the Awesome Bar in Firefox, simultaneously looking at a myriad of sources to find something relevant and presenting it to the user. In short, a single box in which you could type “Portal” and find the Portal, or “Nick Jackson” and find my directory entry, or “Somerville” and find his book on software engineering, or “help” and be taken to our support pages. Something which simultaneously scrubs across any data source we care to let it at, returning data as fast as possible.

Thoughts? Opinions? Do you want a single ’search the University’ box with options to narrow your search, or would you prefer to have to start by specifying what you’re after?






Answering The Flood

3 02 2010

Further to the revelation that there are students out there capable of voicing an opinion, we now have to deal with the resulting fallout. At this point I need to quote Joss, the nice man from CERD, who likened my approach to IT support to this:

Whilst I’m tempted to staple this notice to the front of the helpdesk and watch confused students ask “will you really set us on fire?”, it’s actually better to deal with stupid questions by documenting your response, on the basis that the universe never ceases to provide a constant stream of the terminally confused, people who don’t bother to read the dialog box which pops up with important information and clear instructions, and people who believe that the helpdesk are there to actually operate the computer on their behalf.

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My God, There’s Life!

3 02 2010

If you’ve been keeping track of the joy that is LUNA, you will know that this week is the first time we’ve let the new scanning process loose on a select few guinea pigs in the Courts (and inadvertently Riseholme, sorry guys!). We also busted out a revolutionary tool, never before seen at the University. No, really. I checked.

The anonymous, free-form feedback box. A single box with no prescribed questions, no survey-style questioning, and no requirement to tell us who you are (although the option is there for you to leave an email address or phone number in case you’re happy for us to get back in touch). The result is somewhat more than we expected – usually feedback mechanisms get maybe three or four responses a week, we’re currently getting in the region of 20 to 25 a day.

Most of the feedback is little to no use – we have a wide assortment of “rubbish”, “useless” and “crap” comments. A few responses seem to be from people with broken apostrophe and shift keys (“its rubbish” or “i dont see y ur doin this”). A couple have broken exclamation marks (“!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”). However, despite this noise we’ve been able to glean a few things which we wouldn’t have been able to from simply relying on the helpdesk or by asking carefully selected questions.

Keep ‘em coming, although remember that every time you say “crap” without letting us know why God kills a kitten.





Imagine…

30 01 2010

The University’s strategic plans have a lot of things along the lines of “Imagine the {person} of 2012″, I suspect with the notion of dragging departments kicking and screaming into the 21st century whether they want to come or not. Here’s the one from the Strategic Plan Overview (actually quite a good read) on what the student of 2012 should be like:

I already know the people in my apartment. The University connected us through Facebook and a few of us went out for the night before we even enrolled.

I had my timetable, accommodation, Students’ Union Guide and University Handbook all emailed to me – I even enrolled online.

I knew the competition for places was tough because of the University of Lincoln’s reputation. The facilities are fantastic, award-winning buildings right in the heart of the city.

People here think outside the box. We’ve already had lectures in some cool places. All the buildings seem to have really sociable spaces, comfy chairs, places to meet and interact. It is a 24-7 place, totally wi-fi and networked.

Our lecturer has been doing joint research at a partner university in India. She is at the forefront of her subject and she’s teaching me!

Next week we have got workplace practitioners coming to talk to us and I have even had the careers people asking me about my ‘mobile portfolio of skills’ and how I might develop them. I have got an idea for a business so I am going to talk to the people at Sparkhouse, the University’s enterprise incubator.

All this in the first few weeks.

Cool, awesome, great… you’ve invented the student of 2010 two years late!

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Feedback!

26 01 2010

I’ve got the LUNA feedback server working, after a bit of prodding and getting other helpful people to fine-tune file permissions. Hopefully I’ll be able to requisition it for a few more things LUNA related in the future, like videos walking people through remedial actions and so on. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve also been mucking around with quick concepts for a set of posters, reflecting the ‘fresh’ ICT style you may have seen in the Gateway 2 mockups. Sadly the change.lincoln.ac.uk address doesn’t exist (And 1st February is an arbitrary date, nothing’s actually happening then) but I can dream. See what you think.

'Changing...' poster for LUNA Phase 2





Today In Brief

21 01 2010

Today, I attended some training. I also have a headache, need to do some washing, and need to pack for a weekend in London (off to see the Lion King!), but that’s another issue.

Other things that happened today are good:

  • I updated the jQuery framework which lies behind LUNA and PFMPC to the latest version, giving several speed increases which will be completely unnoticeable for most people but which make my benchmark tools very happy.
  • I updated some of the CWD CSS to fix a niggling bug in IE6 and improve appearance on browsers supporting the CSS3 specification. This brings CWD to version 1.3.7.
  • I updated the HTML in PFMPC from CWD 1.2 to 1.3, bringing more cross-browser goodness, better semantically valid navigation, improved printing and a liquid layout to make best use of bigger screens.
  • I hacked some regex into the game console registration pages in LUNA, which now forces people to enter a valid MAC address when they’re registering. Unfortunately they have to enter uppercase letters (a true MAC address can be either) to keep our network access software happy, but tomorrow may include fixing this so some clever JavaScript converts it to uppercase for them.
  • I’ve got a server to play around with where I can put a nice LUNA feedback page.
  • Kirsty has managed to do some more work on the ICT team blog, so I’m seeing if this post will cross over successfully.




Another Week…

15 01 2010

This week has been one of tidying up loose ends. LUNA has had several minor HTML and typo fixes, and is currently undergoing a bit of JavaScript development wizardry to let users select their location during registration. JSON data from the server encodes how rooms, apartments and blocks are organised which is then extracted by the magic of jQuery into something usable. I’ve got the basics working (and the full thing if I generate a lot of unnecessary files), now it’s just a bit more work on extraction of arrays from within the JSON.

In other LUNA nonsense, working out which combination of technical features to use to let people provide feedback on Phase 2 changes (the compulsory anti-virus and anti-malware) is proving challenging and may lead to a new server being temporarily put together just for handling the feedback. I’m going to push for a LAMP stack, but since Lincoln is a Windows shop I’m not holding my breath.

Finally, balls are rolling on my posters project – a meeting for scoping and specification is booked where key parties can bang heads together until we get something reasonable before I begin doing hardcore implementation stuff.

Now, back to JSON.