From A to B

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Moving house has been a reasonably smooth operation, however the moving of the Tencompetence site turned out to throw up a nasty failure at the same time as me being out of action.

It turned out that ELROND had performed an automatic software update and rebooted itself. ARWEN (which is a virtual server sitting on top of Elrond) had then refused to come back up as VMWare had declared itself out-of-date. As such the Tencompetence site several bits of stuff aimed at the Design for Learning support site (the PHPbb Forum mainly) had gone off.

Then there was the issue of exactly what I’m supposed to be doing with the Design for Learning stuff – the request was for “something to show JISC” and had been verbally agreed that I’d set up a forum and a wiki. It was supposed to be done by Friday 16th… I’d got the forum up (but the server was down) and it took several phone calls and me being dragged in to the office on the Thursday to get as far as a new holding page. On Monday this week I got the mediawiki installation sorted and have since re-cast the entry page as a redirect into the wiki.

The D4L stuff is now all here: http://web.cetis.org.uk/designforlearning

Notes for internal purposes are on the intrawiki: Design for Learning Support

Moving Tencompetence

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The last few days have involved quite a lot of work moving the Drupal instance intended for the new Tencompetence site from the “Elrond” server on to a new and shiny virtual server called “arwen” with a view to it going live for production use. This is the same server which we are intending to use for the new cetis site, so much of the software installed and buttons tweaked will be of long-term benefit to the whole organisation. There is a page in the internal cetis wiki detailing exactly how the machine has been set up.

Mostly this has gone smoothly but I’ve had a few gotchas along the way. The most catastrophic of which was that after moving it and it looking like everything was working, it started throwing errors when adding new content. It turned out that it had lost all the “Auto Increment” settings in the database and I had to go through table-by-table and fix them. Also (and this will hopefully not matter too much) the collation has got set to Latin-1 Swedish when it should be UTF-8 General. I’m going to try and fix this in a global change later in the week. Clearly I must have missed ticking a couple of boxes when exporting the database from Elrond. I really hate file-encoding issues…

UPDATE: There was an issue with attachments – some funkyness with mimetypes was causing word documents to get an extra .txt appended to the filename. This was fixed by adding the following lines to the bottom of php.ini
[mime_magic]
mime_magic.debug = Off
mime_magic.magicfile = “/usr/share/file/magic.mime”

Also, cron jobs were not happening, causing the aggregator to fail. Two things needed doing, adding a file to /etc/cron.hourly/ containing:
#!/bin/bash
curl -s http://localhost/tenc/cron.php > /dev/null
exit 0
…which calls the script on the hour. However there was also a problem causing PHPs fsockopen command to fail with a “permission denied” message. After a lot of hunting around it turned out that the SELinux security policy of the host machine (Fedora Core 5) was blocking the creation of sockets. I turned it off and all is now running sweetly.

This morning (16 June) the URL was switched over at the OUNL end. This has gone more-or-less fine however there are some funky redirects going on for people who are still pointing at the old server. A line needs editing in the drupal configuration to make the site refer to itself by name rather than ip address… I’ll do this towards the end of the day I think once everyone is pointing in the right direction.

CETIS Site Redevelopment: A proposal

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CETIS (Custom PHP)
Mainly: A lightweight aggregation of the various blogs
Events aggregation

CETIS Blogs (WordPress-µ)
Individual (and group) blogs for all cetis staff members
Also includes general contact info for public use, staff profiles etc
Items may be public or internal-only or private
Items can be associated with the relevant Community and/or Team
Items may be elevated to front page status.

CETIS Communities (MediaWiki)
A big wiki for the SIGS – covering specs
Can be contributed to by sig participants

CETIS Events (Custom PHP??)
Events/calendaring – single click sign-up for registered users!
Covers Public Cetis events, registration
Private CETIS calendaring
Aggregated events from elsewhere

CETIS Intranet
Internal groupware – work planning, project management
TEAM views of what is going on – team blogs
Private wikis? (MediaWiki)
Staff management
Events/calendaring (again)
Control centre for it all…

Other requrements
Common authentication!

???E-Framework???

??? HOSTED STACKS FOR PROJECTS ???
A blog, a wiki, a tracker, a subversion
TRAC and Subversion and WordPress?
Or they do it themselves

??? PROJECT DIRECTORY ???
Based on my database??
Tracks all the projects and aggregates their blogs
can be contributed to by members
Tracks standards used
Full-on doap support

Implications for old sites

CETIS
Move to new structure
Deal with old content – zope.cetis.org.uk
redirections and THIS IS OLD messages

ELF
mostly archived
Framework moved into big e-framework
PROJECTS and so forth moved into hosted stacks
and/or project/software/standards directory

elearning Focus
Move to wordpress/wiki
old articles to be moved

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Reference model meeting

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Earlier in the week I had a good meeting with the reference model projects in Brum – pretty much trying to take up the task of defining services from the brick-adopters meeting only with an obvious focus on the e-framework and the Definitions papers and templates. There was some quite animated discussion of how the template (for Service Genre) as it stands seems rather heavy and that a more lightweight version should be produced – skipping any unnecessary or un-knowable elements. I’ve got recordings of it which I mean to chop into bits and post somewhere soon. As a follow up the projects have been asked to crystallise their thoughts on what is wrong with the e-framework definitions and template at the moment – and to fill in templates for two services by the end of the month.

New cetis site mockups

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I’ve been working with Scott on some mockups for the new cetis site as we see it. The general concept is to give everyone a blog using wordpress MU which in turn drives a very lightweight front page. This will not make full sense until combined with Scott’s set of diagrams – but hopefully the mockups will give you an idea of what we have in mind.

Front Page

Community (SIG) page

The Sig sites are served by a “CETIS Communities” wiki – shared between the sigs so for example discussion of a given spec will be all in one place. Provided by mediawiki.

Personal Blog

The missing piece of this at the moment is an events handling system. Ideally this would be integrated with the user-registration for one-click sign-up to meetings – how nifty would that be!