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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Categories : CWD, Labs, Open Data, Posters, Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else, Web 2.0

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.

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Categories : CWD, LUNA, Print From My PC, Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else

Unifying the Look

7 11 2009

During the saga of getting Print from My PC working, I had to build some pages to help people set the whole thing up. Predictably, this included clobbering some HTML and CSS around (and for the record, I still hate ASP with a burning passion).

Online Services already has an online ‘look’ which is visible on the Gateway, which seems to be used wherever possible. The trouble is, the entire layout and design is based on some very old HTML and CSS (and an inexplicable reliance on JavaScript, which I’ll ignore for now). Each individual subset of the online services provided by the University has a subtly different stylesheet and a different way of doing things, so for Print for My PC I decided to mostly scrap the existing code and start from scratch.

The result is visually almost identical, although in a few places it sports crisper lines and cleaner finishes. However, behind the scenes the CSS is smaller, faster, slicker, more standards compliant, provides better support for assistive technologies, makes greater use of flexible positioning and so on. There’s a ’standard’ stylesheet to provide the unified look, and then an individual ‘tweaks’ stylesheet for some PFMPC specific colour adjustments. Finally, PFMPC makes use of some common JavaScript scripts to handle the nice lightbox effect for popup images.

Why am I blogging about this? Well, firstly this is a blog which in part aims to let you look behind the scenes at what’s happening. Secondly and most importantly, however, the code is specifically designed to be incredibly portable between various services. I envision there being yet another subdomain (sorry!) such as common.lincoln.ac.uk, which exists purely to store objects shared by all services. The stylesheets, the images, the scripts. The result once properly implemented would be ultimately beneficial – it would improve caching, reducing hits to services. It would enforce consistent appearance. Applying a code or styling fix would need to be done once and would be replicated to all services using it. Finally and most importantly, it would get people into the mindset of “data should only exist once” which is a key part of the Web 2.0 way.

Still, mindless code changes for such a minor improvement would be senseless. Which is why I’m going to suggest the following: create common.lincoln.ac.uk, add the resources to it, and when new services are created or services are updated make them use the common resources. It’ll be slow, but it’ll be worth it.


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Categories : Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else, Web 2.0

Seriously? Permission Fail.

19 10 2009

I’ve just been flicking through the Daily Alerts for my staff account (It’s almost as mind numbing as the one for Students, but sometimes contains information which has a use outside of the land of marketing).

Today I decided to make use of the link telling me to find out what was going to be on the menu in the Atrium this week. I duly clicked the link and was whisked off to Portal and prompted to log in. At this point my devious mind went “hold up a second, will this work if I’m a student?”. Being the investigative sort, I plugged in my student account details to see what would happen and was promptly refused access. My staff account works fine, and will happily tell me what I can enjoy for dessert this week.

From this I can only guess that the information on the menu is so highly secretive that students aren’t permitted to see it lest they go wild with desire for the honey glazed pork steak (Wednesday), the lemon Bakewell (Tuesday) or the Thai fishcake with sweet chilli sauce (Thursday). Or they could stand outside the servery and just read the entire menu for the week on the board. Go look, it’s on a bit of orange paper.

As a side note, the link which actually came through the email included some elements specifying that I should be in edit mode. Thankfully Portal has the sense to ignore this if I don’t have permission to edit, but can people please remember to sanitise links before sharing them?

Update: Thanks to Dave, all students can now enjoy reading about the full range of meals on offer.


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Categories : Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else

Windows Doesn’t Do It Right

22 09 2009

It turns out that the Windows implementation of IPP lacks a crucial component in relaying its status to the client - it doesn’t tell it when printing has been done. Instead it replies with the technical equivalent of “I don’t understand what you just said”.

This is all well and good, except that the clever client will then go “Oh, OK” and file the print job away to be tried again later. In the case of Ubuntu this is an automatic retrying, sending the page to the printer every so often. The printer receives and prints the page, but once again cannot tell the client it’s done. Into the queue once more, to be retried yet again.

If you don’t manually remove the print job from the queue this will go on forever. Clearly not good when you print your file from home and forget about it, foolishly logging into SafeCom and hitting “Print All Documents” then wondering why it’s producing 500 copies of that witty sign for your room door and using all your credit.

Evidently, this is not the correct way to be going about printing. I’ll get to work on a solution, probably involving a weird hybrid of CUPS, IPP, SMB and LPR authenticating against an LDAP/AD mashup.


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Categories : Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else