PatCavit.com

So it finally happened. SINC is live on both ResTek’s main web server and the Other Departments Server. With the change of one line, nay, one word it gracefully switches between using the Groups Manager or HTTPAUTH for authentication. How’s that for nifty? It may come off as kind of egotistical, but I’m really proud of new SINC. It’s by far the cleanest, best organized code I’ve written for ResTek. The integration with the Group Manager is seamless and just ridiculously easy. The interface is fantastic and the one part of the project I can’t take complete credit for, the idea was brought up in a casual conversation and I ended up just running with it.

Sorta-kinda planned upgrades are pretty limited right now, the one thing that has been mentioned is having SINC be able to export in iCal format. Certainly an interesting idea, but nothing I’m going to hurry on. More pressing concerns await, although learning the iCal format sounds like fun to me.

Speaking of pressing concerns, tonight’s meeting gave me a small list of stuff to keep me busy for a while. This is a good thing, I like being busy at work. We did “True Colors” at work tonight and low and behold, I got high marks for the personality type that considers work “play”. That was sure a surprise…

The ResTek Security Detector (I’ll call it Virus Scanner Finder until the day I die, thanks) is due for another upgrade. I just recently put out 2.0.2 which fixed a logic flaw in the Windows Update detection. Oops, that was a pretty gnarly bug to miss. The next thing to be added will be stricter version checking. Currently our setup could allow a student using a 60% (more or less) broken version to register no problem. This is obviously sub-optimal, so I’ve been tasked with implementing a system to make VSF much more persnickety. Nothing too tricky, just passing the version number to the server and giving the PHP pages the smarts necessary to return a message similar to “UPDATE NOW”. Getting that across to students is never as easy as it should be. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I am not qualified to write text that students will ever see, so I’m sure whatever the error message ends up being will be much nicer.

Quarantine Lite is off the ground and running, although there will be some rocky times ahead as features are fleshed out. One of the issues that came up tonight was that this Security Check is applied to every IP assigned to a student. Thinking about it, that makes a lot of sense if you know our current Quarantine system. The whole goal was to get users attention, and what better way than to disable internet access for every one of their devices? Unfortunately, this approach makes less sense when you’re aiming to ensure that each and every IP is secure. Due to the way that Quarantine Lite is entwined with the current registration/Quaratine system (shares logic, lots of code, error pages, etc) there’s no easy fix. For now we’re pushing ahead with a known weirdness in the implementation, simply due to time constraints. Some other interesting ideas were tossed around, and I hope we have time to get to them in another meeting.

We really need longer meetings…