Django, CAS authentication and Apache
I am certainly no stranger to Web Development, but I decide to really look at the Python web framework django in some detail last week to write a small web application for Workload Modelling for Academic Staff. Yes, this is a geeky, programming post. In doing so I ran into some trouble trying to get […]
OPUS and ASET, ten years on
Ten years ago today, I and a few colleagues from Ulster University presented some of our work on on-line Placement Management at the ASET conference in York. At that time our system was simply called the Placement Management System or PMS, and yes of course this led to more than a few comments. At that […]
Python script to randomise an m3u playlist
While I'm blogging scripts for playlist manipulation here is one I use in a nightly cron job to shuffle our playlists so that various devices playing from them have some daily variety. All disclaimers apply, it's rough and ready but WorksForMe (TM). I have an entry in my crontab like this 0 4 * * […]
Python script to add a file to a playlist
I have a number of playlists on Gondolin, which is a headless machine. I wanted to be able to easily add a given mp3 file to the playlists which are in m3u format. That means that each entry has both the filename and an extended line with some basic metadata, in particular the track length […]
Migration from Savane to Redmine
I am admin for a server at work foss.ulster.ac.uk to host our open source development work. It used to run on GNU Savane, but despite several efforts, that project is clearly dead in the ditch. So having to change the underlying system, I decided to move to Redmine (you can see some previous discussion here). […]
Garbage collecting sessions in PHP
In PHP, sessions are by default stored in a file in a directory. Sessions can be specifically destroyed from within the code, for example when users logout explicitly, but frequently they do not. As a result session files tend to hang around, and cause the problem of how to clean them up. The standard way […]
Importing data from lots of systems with PHP and Regular Expressions
Preamble: I found this article sitting as a draft for several years (2009), so the software release it mentions was years ago! But I figured I'd finally proof read and release the article since the problem it addresses is still a real one. On Friday I released version 4.1.0 of OPUS which has been in […]
Geany and other Development Tools
I've tried lots of programming editors and ides over the years, obviously in Unix and Linux this is a Holy War, particularly between the advocates of vi and emacs. It is common for both groups to suggest that the other editor is hopelessly over-complex or clumsy. I think there's some truth in that, because essentially, […]
Fixing truncated printing with Firefox
A while ago, I discovered that my current main development project OPUS had an odd problem when printing out of a gecko based browser. It would print the first page, whether in portrait or landscape, and if there was more content, it would be abruptly truncated and the second page would contain merely the footer […]
Drupal Login Problems
So, in order to post that rant about PHP and SimpleXML I had to fix a problem that seems to have spontaneously arisen with Drupal (this content management system). For some reason it wasn't persisting login information, at least from firefox (sorry - iceweasel here on my Debian system). It's interesting to note, reading about […]