Author Archive for Steve Daniels

ERROR 2013 (HY000): Lost connection to MySQL server during query

Published by Steve Daniels on January 21, 2010 in Infrastructure. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

If you’ve just set up a new mysqld service and your getting the above error when trying to connect over TCP (even when tunnelling in over SSH), don’t fret. The answer lies in /etc/hosts.allow. You need to add in a line similar to this:

mysqld: 192.168.0.123

This foxed me a while ago and I didn’t get round to fixing it as it wasn’t yet mission critical, however it also stopped us dead in our tracks yesterday. Thank fully to Neil in Core Services who had a moment of clarity we’re now back in business.

UPDATE:

Now I know the problem, a little more simpler Google querying led me here a 2004 post on MySQL’s access denied troubleshooting page which mentions that the cause of this is mysqld being compiled with tcp-wrapper support.

Winter bugs

Published by Steve Daniels on December 21, 2009 in Development and Web Services. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Here at Edge Hill we’ve used Trac for quite some time in Web Services. I’ve been here for more than a year and a half now and during this period the team have greatly increased their use of Trac for ticketing problems, monitoring source changes, and more recently tracking Scrum Sprint progress. While Trac is great we need more – we want more – we’re bias.

We use Confluence heavily, the Faculty of Health have it as home to many documents and information for staff, students and external partners, we’re moving our Intranet into it, we also use it as our team wiki for documentation and the like. So as you can see, we have a fair bit invested in it. Confluence is made by Atlassian and these great folks also make JIRA.

We’ve heard many great things about JIRA and seen it in action ourselves when dealing with Atlassian. We think it’s great, has good integration and with the GreenHopper it’ll help us with our Scrum agile project management!

That’s the plan anyway!

Whilst we’re at it we’re taking the opportunity to install FishEye too. This will give us some awesome insight into what we’re actually coding and allow some great collaboration and knowledge sharing without much effort at all. If your a stats junky the numbers and graphs this thing makes is awesome!

Do your use JIRA?

One project to rule them all (ala Second Life’s Linden Labs) or many little ones?

What are your favourite things about FishEye?

Your Wiki!

Published by Steve Daniels on December 14, 2009 in Infrastructure and Web Services. 2 Comments Tags: , , .


In an earlier post on our wiki I mentioned that we use Confluence from Atlassian this company has a good and steady release cycle. Currently we’re couple of versions behind the latest, but hopefully that’ll soon be addressed by a move to a new much faster server!

Some of the fixes and new features that we’ll get when we upgrade are:

  • The Widget Connector – a quick an easy way to embed content from Youtube, Flickr, etc etc.
  • Various fixes and upgrades to the Rich Text Editor
  • The Macro Browser – this is an awesome new tool that is part of the RTE that allows you to browse for useful macro’s to add features to your confluence pages in a quick and easy way
  • Various performance issues have been solved
  • The Confluence PDF export has been drastically improved, especially that you can provide a PDF CSS stylesheet
  • Office 2007 files are now fully supported, searchable and embeddable in the latest version of Confluence which is just great!

Is the wiki being used?

We’ve had over 20,000 page views in the past month and we still haven’t fully launched the system to the university at whole! That being said, the Faculty of Health whom I work for have been using it extensively over the past year at least.

A quick breakdown:

graph

Currently we’ve got about four and a half thousand pages in the wiki, with about sixteen thousand versions of these pages. That averages out to about four and a half versions of each page. There are also almost ten thousand documents attached to pages on the wiki.. Good work on editing people!

Wiki Meetings

Published by Steve Daniels on December 10, 2009 in Development and Web Services. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , .


Early on in the New Year the old Intranet here at Edge Hill will be abolished. All of its content will be available directly through GO. The platform we’re hosting this content under is called Confluence and it’s a wiki.

To the majority of people this won’t mean much right now but we’re hoping in the future it will. You’ll be able to manage your own content on GO for dissemination to colleagues you work with on a daily basis and those you work with across the university.

This new way of managing things will hopefully reduce the amount of out of date information that is out there. You shouldn’t be emailing around Word documents within the university. Because the moment you send that document it’s out of date, your recipient just doesn’t know it yet!

Lets take Meeting Agenda’s as an example. The below video describes why you shouldn’t be emailing meeting agendas and why you should start using a wiki:

The Faculty of Health is already doing stuff like this, posting meeting dates in their calendar, having agendas online, with misc documents for the meeting available on each meetings dedicated pages. You department can too!

Another brilliant use of the wiki is to keep track of action points:

These excellent videos are courtesy of Stewart Mader’s 21days you can find a lot more videos there and other extremely useful wiki related resources.

Google Apps Mail – POP/IMAP/iPhone

Published by Steve Daniels on October 30, 2009 in Development. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

As mentioned by our colleagues in Core Services first year students have been given Edge Hill University Google Mail accounts. We’re a couple of months into the semester and roll out seems to have gone OK. Students have been able to happily click on the Mail link in GO and be taken directly to their mail. On their main GO Home tab they’ll also have seen the Mail box which unfortunately wasn’t compatible with Google Mail. This has now been fixed as you can see here:

googlemailpanel

Clicking on the “Google Mail” title will take you to your inbox. But a new thing with Google Mail is that you can now click on individual emails and be taken directly to that message in your inbox.

Please note that the Google Mail box only shows you unread mail. So if you haven’t got any new messages waiting then they won’t appear.

This was all made possible due to a new development we’ve recently completed. Password syncing to Google Apps. Previously when you logged into Google Mail you either came through GO or you were redirected through GO to login. This meant that we were dealing with authentication and checking your passwords directly against our systems before handing you off to Google. Now we sync GO passwords with Google so if your not accessing your email through a web browser Google can check your password with it’s copy.

Doing this enables you to get your Google Mail in any format you like. You can now follow Google’s instructions on how to setup your client for POP, IMAP and even ActiveSync for Windows Mobile and iPhone!

When following the instructions remember that you are a Google Apps user, and that your username for this is the one shown on the top right when your accessing your Edge Hill University Google Mail account.

googleusername

Before contacting us with any problems ensure you check out Google’s very extensive Google Mail help.

Ste Daniels

GO Faster!

Published by Steve Daniels on April 27, 2009 in Development. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

The Edge Hill GO portal has recently had a couple of little updates, both of which I hope will improve your usage of it.

Until recently whenever you logged into GO you where taken to your last used Tab at this address https://go.edgehill.co.uk/. This was all well and good when the majority of people only had the one “Home” Tab.

GO Home Tab

A selection of people had also added their own custom tabs by clicking the old “New Tab” link, or now the “+” link at the end of the list of Tabs. But this behaviour wasn’t prevalent across the majority of users.

Performing Arts users have had their own Tab for a while now, and also recently Health students have had a Health Tab. Students have had the “Student Central” Tab for some time too now which contains a growing number of services.

GO Home - Student Central Tabs

Always going back to your last Tab on login meant an extra click to get back to Home. Or if you used a Tab regularly you couldn’t bookmark it’s address individually, or have multiple GO Tabs open at once in your browser. Since in my work for the Faculty of Health I will be driving them to make more and more use of GO and the services it provides I need a solution for this problem.

GO Tabs are now individually addressed in GO. This means your Home tab is always accessible at: 

https://go.edgehill.ac.uk/

Other university provided Tabs are available at addresses such as:


https://go.edgehill.ac.uk/student_central

https://go.edgehill.ac.uk/health

With custom tabs that you’ve created being available at addresses like this:

https://go.edgehill.ac.uk/tab/news

This’ll hopefully help people get to where they want to go faster :-)

Other news.. To also improve uptake of GO usage in the Faculty of Health I’ve spent a lot of time speeding up the page load times of GO. I think this is an important aspect because people just don’t use slow unresponsive systems. A few facts and figures.

Before my work a standard GO Home Tab took 2-3 seconds to load and made 34 database calls.

Since my work a standard GO Home Tab takes 0.5 seconds to load, makes 13 database calls, and uses a third less memory resources on the server, which makes for a much faster experience. (I hope at least one or two people noticed!)

Steve Daniels

GOing, GOing, GOne!

Published by Steve Daniels on January 12, 2009 in Web Services. 0 Comments Tags: .

With little fanfare old go portal has been retired. This has been a long coming event that had to take place eventually, and well, that moment has been and gone. For quite a while now there have been highly visible notices in old go for both students and staff alerting users to its impending demise.

Out with the old go:

old go

In with the new GO:

Screenshot of new GO

Now that we are no longer having to maintain two versions of the portal we can concentrate more of our resources on improving the interface of GO, its usability, and its feature set.

We welcome all feedback on this – you can even use the GO forum to provide feedback!

Hopefully soon to hit this blog will be some screenshots of work-in-progress on a new look for GO, stay tuned :-)

Steve Daniels

Question time with Dan

Published by Steve Daniels on January 6, 2009 in Conferences. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

[Note: this was written way back on the 5th of December but has been stuck in perpetual draft status till I could find a decent picture. Oh well, I couldn't. So here it is :-) ]

So yesterday was a long day indeed. But it was quite worthwhile and I’ve managed to glean a few tips, tricks and directions to go with for our Confluence install. Yesterday was the Atlassian User Group Workshop down in London town. Mike Nolan and myself made trip down courtesy of Virgin Trains, arriving just in time for a spot of lunch and then to the Bonnington on Bloomsbury Square.

The event started with the usual meet and greet where I got the opportunity to match a few faces to the names and websites that I’ve been conversing with on Twitter, JIRA and and mining for knowledge on wiki adoption. Emma Wallace from Social8 made an immediate impression on me, talking briefly about asking users the right questions and about getting the user to see that this knew way of working (on a wiki) is going to be beneficial for them, so encouraging their uptake. I received a very knowing look when I said we were working on the implementation first, and thinking more about user uptake afterwards.. this is a common mistake, a situation we hope to rectify.

I also got a chance to chat to Boo Armstrong from Get Well UK who was looking to implement Confluence, she was after peoples opinions, pitfalls and views. When I was asked what my favourite bit of Confluence was, I thought for just a moment, and then it hit me – WebDav. In a project where your taking the unwieldy jungle of a shared network drive and trying to convert people to the wonders of wiki collaboration and benefits of sexy search, giving them the ability to drag and drop their existing file structure into the wiki and build around it is a very nice feature indeed. It was also nice to chat to the Adaptavist folks since they’re only from down the road from us and they’re who we bought our Confluence from.

After the meet and greet first up was Josh Wold from Atlassian who gave a full run down of the past 6 months progress of the company and where their products where going in the future. It was quite an interesting round up and well presented.

Next was Alex Lotoczko from NYK Europe who talked about the use of their wiki’s particularly when working with the BBC on “The Box” project. My main interest was admittedly the box.. I feel more detail could have been gotten into regarding the usage of the wiki, perhaps some statistics and screenshots from the wiki itself. I got more from Stewart Mader’s post on the subject of NYK’s Confluence intranet project.

The people and personalities using the wiki are the most important aspect. Without getting them on board it’s all pointless really. Emma Wallace talked to us in great detail about people and the right questions to ask them. Are you asking the right questions? I most certainly wasn’t, but I hope to in the future. You need ask people the right questions to help them learn and understand that (hopefully) the ways of the wiki and collaboration is good for them, will enable them to work more efficiently, and win the lottery. Well maybe not the last bit, but you get the point.

Next up was what I found the most useful, and so named my blog post such! Question time with Dan was effectively what it was. It was meant to be a more open discussion, customer to customer, user to user I believe but by and large it was an open floor to ask Dan questions and tap his knowledge. I’d had a question or two answered during the meet and great about reporting and stats which I was greatly interested in so I didn’t really actively take part in this session. I was being a sponge and soaking up all the knowledge that flowed over me. There were some interesting questions being asked and some even more in the spirit of the session were asked openly to the group. All 70-80ish of us where sat around the outer edges of the room. I don’t really feel this was all that ideal and left some people not asking questions that they might have asked in a more cosy environment. The open talking was good, I just think some nice 20 people round tables would have been more conducive to open chatter about our problems and triumphs with the software.

All in all it was quite a good day and I’ll be improving our Confluence install and uptake because of it, and would definitely recommend any Atlassian products users to go along in the future.

I’ll quickly add a thank you to Oleg from Cisco who introduced me to Asahi beer after the conference.. thanks! Also that we missed the last Liverpool – London train home due to trusting the more sensibly sounding directions of a couple of local southern boys and walking quite a way away from Euston before realising in our peril we were about 250 yards from it when we asked! Getting home at 2:10 am, and into work at 8:50 show’s my dedication to the job ;-)

Steve Daniels

Internet Explorer Security Alert

Published by Steve Daniels on December 16, 2008 in Security. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

So the BBC have finally picked up the news and jumped on the bandwagon. Mass media are now telling you to switch to a more secure web browser (you know, the thing your using to view this web page with).

From the BBC:

The flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people’s computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say.

As many as 10,000 websites have been compromised since last week to take advantage of the security flow, said antivirus software maker Trend Micro.

Are you ready to make the switch? I certainly don’t want my passwords or bank account details stolen and my bank account emptied, do you?

For you home computers and laptops: Get Firefox now!

Steve Daniels

Aptana Outline Auto-Expansion Monkeyed!

Published by Steve Daniels on October 16, 2008 in Development. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

You may have seen my last post Monkeying with my outline! where I apparently managed to get Aptana automatically expanding my outline whenever I viewed a new file in the editor. Well… it didn’t quite go to plan. Long story short, the script only executed properly when it was loaded after editing in the script editor, not when Aptana loaded up at the start. Details here in the Aptana scripting forum. I was rescued by Kevin Lindsey. Above and beyond the run of the mill support, he even emailed me to let me know he’d snuck the fix into 1.2. It’s working brilliantly! So now here’s my code with the updated bits from Kevin, I’ve commented out all the println’s cause I like a clean console.

/*
 *
 * Menu: EHU > HandlerService (Auto expand outline)
 * Kudos: Ingo Muschenetz & Kevin Lindsey & Steve Daniels
 * License: EPL 1.0
 * Listener: getPartService().addPartListener(this);
 * DOM: http://localhost/com.aptana.ide.scripting
 * DOM: http://download.eclipse.org/technology/dash/update/org.eclipse.eclipsemonkey.lang.javascript
 *
 *
*/
 
function getPartService()
{
    var workbench = Packages.org.eclipse.ui.PlatformUI.getWorkbench();
    var result = null;
 
    if (workbench)
    {
        var window = null;
 
        runOnUIThread(function() {
            window = workbench.getActiveWorkbenchWindow();
 
            if (window != null)
            {
                result = window.getPartService();
                //out.println("result set to " + result);
            }
            else
            {
                //out.println("window is not defined");
            }
        });
    }
    else
    {
        //out.println("workbench is not defined");
    }
 
    //out.println("getPartService() is returning " + result);
 
    return result;
}
 
function partBroughtToTop(part)
{
  //out.println("part*()\n");
}  
 
function partClosed(part)
{
  //out.println("part*()\n");
}
 
function partDeactivated(part)
{
  //out.println("part*()\n");
}  
 
function partOpened(part)
{
  //out.println("part*()\n");
}
 
function partActivated(part)
{
  if (part.getEditorInput)
  {
    expandOutline();
  }
}
 
function partVisible(part)
{
  //out.println("part*()\n");
}
 
function partHidden(part)
{
  //out.println("part*()\n");
}
 
function expandOutline()
{
  //out.println("expandOutline()\n");
  try
  {
    //out.println("try\n");
    var editor = editors.activeEditor.textEditor;
 
    editor.getOutlinePage().getTreeViewer().expandAll();
  }
  catch (e)
  {
    //out.println("catch\n");
  }
}

Enjoy :-)

Steve Daniels