Stuff Which Doesn’t Live Anywhere Else – Page 2 – Development in Jeans and a T-Shirt

Raise Shields!

Nick Jackson / September 22, 2010 / Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else

Today we’ve just finished setting up and testing our brand-new, very shiny SSL certificate for our primary Online Services support server. This means that the CWD is now ready to be used on all of the University’s secure systems, starting (hopefully later today) with a roll-out of the new wireless sign in page.

What this also means is that we’ve been able to tighten the security on Nucleus so that in future all requests must be over SSL. For those using Nucleus for things please take this as a warning – as of the end of the week all Nucleus requests over HTTP will fail.

Finally, we’re a step closer to our complete OAuth implementation! We’re still ironing out a few bugs and awaiting our security audit, but it’s getting there.

Looking At Documents Differently

Nick Jackson / July 1, 2010July 1, 2010 / Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else

I frequently have to access a variety of documents to do my job. Unfortunately a lot of these documents are stuck on the Portal, which whilst it can do a good job of being a document management system it does terribly at getting those documents out to people. Let me explain how getting a document normally works.

Visit a long Portal URI, which is usually long enough that either you’re drawing a pension by the time you’ve finished typing it or it breaks across two lines on your screen so it needs copying and pasting.
Log in, even for supposedly public documents.
Discover I’m not at a document, but at a ‘sub-portal’ for a department with a big list of things I can read.
Find what I want.
Click the item, to be taken to another page where I can click another button to download it.
Download the document.
Open Pages, since my Mac doesn’t have Word installed.
Tweak the document formatting so it looks right.
Read and enjoy.

Now, I really wish I was exaggerating there, but I’m not. What I’d like to happen is:

Visit short, sensible URI.
Read online version with a nice layout, the ability to use my own browser accessibility etc.
If I want it to download, click to get a PDF.

Let’s see how we can do that.

Continue reading “Looking At Documents Differently”

Room Bookings: Take 2

Nick Jackson / June 8, 2010 / Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else

A few of you may have tried booking rooms in the University in the past. If you have, you’ll know it’s a slow process involving a lengthy form and an even lengthier wait whilst somebody decides if you can actually book a room or not.

So, here are a few very early mockups of a brand new, very slick room bookings system which should alleviate those problems. The whole system operates on a different premise to the current one – instead of asking for a specific room (or a room with specific features) and then being booked into one by someone else, you instead begin by specifying the limits of your booking, for example time, approximate location, number of people and so on. The system then finds you rooms which match those criteria, and you can book it there and then.

The whole thing will be in blisteringly fast real time, meaning when you click a book button it’s done. It also allows for us to begin offering an even faster way to find rooms for things like group meetings. Tell us a location and approximate time, we’ll find you a room and book it in one click. Alternatively, text us a place and time and we’ll do the same thing. Or even better, if you need a room straight away, just tell us a place and we’ll find you a room in the next available slot.

This should be creeping its way into some specialist room bookings (like group rooms in the Library and Studios in the LPAC) over the summer, hopefully arriving for all bookings across the whole University some time in the next academic year.

Next on ICT…

Nick Jackson / May 24, 2010 / Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else

This is a blog post which is just as much for me as it is for you. A (very) quick round-up of what’s planned for the immediate future (defined as now until about February 2011) in ICT, or more specifically the HTML-wrangling team to which I belong.

Posters (The admin interface bit, which is mostly Alex’s baby because I’ve lost track of how the models are working)
A-Z (aka Sites Directory)
Unified Search (A very early version we can start to point the mysterious CWD search boxes at)
Postgraduate Applications (Or at least the design bit)
Core APIs (Basically a fancy way of reading stuff from the directory)
Library APIs (Both public and private)
Library Portal (It’s the library, Jim, but not as you know it)
Real-Time Room Bookings / Find-A-Room / Improved Timetable View (Codename Vremya, which is the romanisation of время, which is the Russian for “time”)
Total ReCal (A somewhat epic undertaking, powered by the nice people from JISC, to harmonise time/space representation in the University).

I think that’s it, at least for now.

Keeping an eye on things

Nick Jackson / March 19, 2010March 19, 2010 / Labs, Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else

The Status Dashboard — A very early version of one of the Status Dashboards. The numbers aren't live (or accurate), but everything else is actual real-time information.

If you’re kicking around the north-west ICT Services office you may have spotted the giant touchscreen which has appeared. This is nothing to do with me, however with it sat being idle I decided to act on some inspiration from the people at Panic and build something ICT doesn’t currently have – a live, up-to-the-minute status and monitoring system.

The Status system (To be hosted on Labs, whenever the server arrives. You will note that it’s currently offline.) is fully modular (each individual panel can behave in its own way, making its own checks and loading its own data on its own schedule, customisable (so different ‘dashboards’ can be created to serve particular needs) and flexible (it makes the best use of screen estate that it can, without relying on a fixed display resolution). It also looks quite good.

Shop For A New Logo?

Nick Jackson / March 12, 2010March 12, 2010 / CWD, Labs, Posters, Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else

This Wednesday, after much debating, debacle and delay, the new Uni Shop opened its doors 20 minutes late. The final delay apparently caused by the fact that nobody had thought to turn the tills on before the opening time.

The Uni Shop's Logo

All that aside, I’ve got to ask an important question – given the time taken, the fuss made and the money kicking around could Estates not have come up with a better logo? I mean, it’s not like we’ve got an entire faculty full of art and design students or a whole staff department focussed on marketing. Let’s have a little competition. Who can come up with something better in 10 minutes?

Now, back to ICT and what’s going on. Our shiny new development server has mostly turned up, and we’re currently kitting it out with the wide range of software we use to develop and manage our projects. Once that’s done we hope to burst onto the scene with a shiny new URL and a whole load of bits of things we’re working on for you to prod, look at and go “ooooh pretty”. We’re hoping to call this ‘Labs’, or at least something along a similar theme (we think it might be a bit close to ‘Learning Lab’) and use it for all the bits and pieces that are being tried out from the ‘official’ side of the University – new timetable tools, easier ways of doing things, work-in-progress site replacements and so-on.

First out of the door will be CWD and Posters, with a few more bits and pieces we’ve been working on in our secret computing laboratory (MAB, first floor, north-west plate) coming soon after.

Posters, CWD and more!

Nick Jackson / March 4, 2010March 7, 2010 / CWD, Labs, Open Data, Posters, Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else, Web 2.0

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.

Continue reading “Posters, CWD and more!”

Login Genius

Nick Jackson / February 4, 2010 / Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else

As you know, I love logging in to University services. I love needing to know which combination of my student ID, account ID, account ID with the “NETWORK/” prefix, email address, password and PIN I need to use. Which is why I’m such a big fan of building a reliable login system which just authenticates you once for everything.

This blog post, however, isn’t about a new login system. It’s about the current one being weird, specifically email.

Today I logged in to my email over the web using Chrome, and I shoved in my username (withouth “NETWORK/”, which is only a necessity because Internet Explorer is retarded when it comes to users not being in the domain it’s currently visiting) and password. It let me log in and worked perfectly, until I wanted to visit an external link in one of my emails.

Apparently the bit of OWA which forwards you to external URLs has logins handled differently to simply viewing your emails, and I don’t have permission to access it. No click-through of URLs for me.

Thinking this might be a byproduct of OWA not working properly in anything but Internet Explorer, I perform my ritual dance of protection and ready the talisman to ward off broken box models. I hit the email site, and log in.

Without “NETWORK\”.

It takes me a moment to realise what just happened, but it appears that the combination of IE8 and Windows 7 isn’t as retarded as previous incarnations. As in it doesn’t automatically specify a domain to authenticate against unless you tell it.

Click-through links in email don’t work, but it appears that one of our great enemies as ICT may be on the way out. I look forward to the last time I ever have to say “Just put NETWORK\ in front of it and it’ll work. Because that’s what fixes it.”.

Today In Brief

Nick Jackson / January 21, 2010January 26, 2010 / CWD, LUNA, Print From My PC, Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else

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.