Free Software
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 […]

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php
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 […]

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Free Software
My first Munin plugin

Munin is a great, really useful project for monitoring all sorts of things on servers over short and long term periods, and can help identify and even warn of undue server loads. It is also appropriately and poetically named for one of Odinn's crows (so I suppose I should have written this on a Wednesday). […]

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Free Software
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 […]

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php
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 […]

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Gondolin
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 […]

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php
SimpleXML should be called BloodyAckwardXML

Another night of coding in PHP, and I've officially decided that SimpleXML utterly irritates me. I'd already discovered, much to my irritation, that is virtually impossible to handle SimpleXML objects elegantly with the Smarty template engine - but now I discover I can't even shove them in a PHP session without trouble - when you […]

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