In Web Services we get a lot of support requests,  these range from bug reports, feature requests and job requests to our fans hounding us for signed autographs.  Your first point of contact with us is by emailing the IT Service Desk from Outlook or by calling #7444.  This is your time to shine!  Without clear succinct communication it makes it difficult to deliver efficient support and allocate resources.  Don’t forget, whilst you might have one issue, we’re currently dealing with tens of them, and have recently dealt with hundreds (out of tens of thousands that IT Services deal with), we can’t remember everything.

• Report one issue at a time.  This allows the issues to be prioritised individually and multiple team members can work on them at once.  It also gives the best clarity in tracking the issue.
• Writing a clear email subject.  This is crucial.
  Good: Image on homepage is broken
  Bad: broken
  Good: Multiple login failures on GO leads to white screen
  Bad: login not working
• Begin with summary.  Open with a quick summary of the problem.
• Include web links.  This one thing is almost the most important, and crucial component for us, yet is often left out leaving us to guess or have to wait chasing replies.  We’re a team dealing with thousands of web pages, we don’t always know what you’re talking about.
• Username. Another very important detail when reporting an issue, regarding a user or users, is always to include their username(s).
• Include screenshots.  A picture paints a thousand words, try and include full screenshots.   You can do this by pressing the “Print Screen” button next to “Scroll Lock” and then pasting (right click-> paste, or CTRL+V) into the email.
• Full steps to reproduce the problem.  If we can’t reproduce the problem you are having, it’s very hard for us to fix it.  Help us to help you.
• Case numbers.  If you are chasing up an issue (or a case as we often refer to them), then please, please, put that case number in the email subject.  This automagically links it with all the information about your case.  It makes our job a million times easier, no joke.  The easiest thing to do is find the email that the IT Service Desk gave you and reply to that.
  Referring to colleagues case?  Include the case number in your message!

If you work with a member of our team often, you might think it’d be better to email them directly with your request.  Don’t.  It interrupts our work in progress making it take many times longer, which prevents us from finishing it and helping you.  It also circumvents our tracking systems, so we can’t see if your issue is important and needs fixing quickly.  Having issues come in to a central place allows us to see trends and spot failures faster.  What if someone is too busy or off ill with no out of office on?  Well your issue might well remain unresolved for a very long time.

Keeping all support requests coming through the IT Service Desk allows us to work as a team, see big problems occurring and find the right information at the right time.

All this helps us to work more efficiently 🙂

Thank you for reading this far!!!

Steve

If you want to see where free computers are around campus then you’re in luck. The Edge Hill computer availability web app is up and running in some key locations around campus (@ehu.ac.uk/computers). And here it is!

Each area’s unfoldable map shows which computers are free (green is free!). We chose a salmon colour for used computers, because salmon are busy fish what with all the swimming and laying eggs. Or maybe it has something to do with being distinguishable from green for colourblind people.

Like salmon, people move around really quickly so you might find the computer you were hoping for has gone by the time you get there, and another one has appeared. So you can use the app to get a general idea of which computer area would be good to aim for. That’s why we used the signal strength indicator – so you can see at a glance your likelihood of finding a computer in that area.

That means likely.

There’s also a link to the room booking system, so feel free to come here just to book a room.

As well as showing computer usage, it also just shows where there are computers, which can be useful to new students who haven’t fully explored yet.

There’s a shiny new building overview page, that unsurprisingly gives an overview of the computers used in buildings. You might see this around screens on the campus.

There’s also a series of single map pages, just focusing on one computer area:

These single maps will be part of a slideshow shown around campus. We have one for the library which will rotate through the single maps and overview screens, so people can see at a glance where computers are being used. It should hopefully save some time in students’ days so they can so they can find a place to study more easily.

Responsive

The app is responsive – a liquid version that fills to fit the container device window – so use it on your phones and tablets as well.

And that’s it. The plan is to expand to show more computers around the campus. So go ahead and use it, and let us know what you think. Feedback is what sculpts the greatest software. So what would you change to make it better? Does it help you? Let us know.

webteam@edgehill.ac.uk

Working in a University or any organization generally leaves you supporting a lot of old code, on even older systems. As part of our web services infrastructure virtualisation project I’ve been bringing a lot of old code on to new systems. As can be seen when I got PHP 5.2.4 running on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise.

As it turns out, our code wasn’t running so smoothly on PHP 5.2.4 as Arthur Koziel points out there is a problem with Creole and PHP 5.2.4. While we didn’t have the exact same problem, his post highlighted where it could be fixed.

Our problem was that we have a third party product using a Microsoft SQL database. It either always had, or just started to spit out date time values in the following format: Nov 14 2012 07:30:00:000PM note the non standard specification of microseconds. (Not sure which way around the problem occurred because we upgraded a month or so ago, but only just got a report of the problem.)

PHP’s strtotime really doesn’t like that format, and I can see why, horrible MSSQL!

I saw that I could fix this in creole/drivers/mssql/MSSQLResultSet.php by providing an alternate getTimestamp function and using a bit of strptime and sprintf magic. Below is the code I used to fix it. This might not be the most elegant solution, but it works!


/**
* @see ResultSet::getTimestamp()
*/
public function getTimestamp($column, $format = 'Y-m-d H:i:s')
{
$idx = (is_int($column) ? $column - 1 : $column);
if (!array_key_exists($idx, $this->fields)) { throw new SQLException("Invalid resultset column: " . $column); }
if ($this->fields[$idx] === null) { return null; }

$ts = strtotime($this->fields[$idx]);
if ($ts === -1 || $ts === false) { // in PHP 5.1 return value changes to FALSE
// in PHP 5.2.4 this no longer works, MSSQL provides date time as
// Nov 14 2012 07:30:00:000PM
$tsUgly = strptime($this->fields[$idx], '%b %d %Y %I:%M:%S:000%p');
$tsNicer = sprintf('%04d-%02d-%02d %02d:%02d:%02d',
$tsUgly['tm_year'] + 1900, // This will be years since 1900, so we need to add 1900.
$tsUgly['tm_mon'] + 1, // This will be the month 0-11, so we add one.
$tsUgly['tm_mday'],
$tsUgly['tm_hour'],
$tsUgly['tm_min'],
$tsUgly['tm_sec']);
$ts = strtotime($tsNicer);
if ($ts === -1 || $ts === false) { // in PHP 5.1 return value changes to FALSE
throw new SQLException("Unable to convert value at column " . $column . " to timestamp: " . $this->fields[$idx]);
}
}
if ($format === null) {
return $ts;
}
if (strpos($format, '%') !== false) {
return strftime($format, $ts);
} else {
return date($format, $ts);
}
}


I hope that helps anyone else out there maintaining old code on newer systems. If anything it’ll help me if I come across a similar problem again!

Steve Daniels

I’ve been looking at Typekit as a web font solution for headings, quotes, and promotional text – as an experiment I’ve mocked up this Blog post using Typekit; so you can get a feel for what it’s about.

So why would we need to use it?

I’ve harped on about web font limitations before; so I’ll just say that the fonts we could use were tragic and boring. I’ve also mentioned that we used sIFR as a fix for about six months, which was too quirky and jerky.

Hypothetically we could host fonts on our server and reference them using @font-face. This way all the fonts used in the printed prospectus, could be used on the website; but there’s the complex issue of copyright to contend with.

Speak the Web

We attended Speak the Web at Leaf café in Liverpool. I was impressed by Jake Smith’s presentation Putting the Font in Front End, especially his demo of Typekit.

Typekit offers a library of fonts: you pay a subscription; you choose which fonts suit you, and they deal with the legal stuff. I was impressed by the clarity of the sign-up process, and how easy it was to set up. The font libraries are impressive; all the big type foundries are represented.

The demo I put together uses the modest library of free fonts, supplied with the Typekit trial package. They are fine as a starting point, but they generally represent the less formal side of typography.

The Downside

The only problem I have is the way different browsers render fonts:  Some render crisply in one browser; but appear pixelated or weakly defined in another. They also lose clarity at smaller sizes. Unfortunately these problems are with the fonts themselves, so even if we hosted them we’d still have the same problem.

Consequently if we get a style guide that says Garamond should be used for headings, and I refer to Typekit, check the browser samples and find that it is unreadable in Firefox, we simply can’t use it. Straight away we would be looking at alternative fonts; when we didn’t want to fudge or compromise.

To Conclude

Weighing things up – I would use Typekit because it is easy to use and well designed, and any worries about copyright could be put aside.