Fixing the WiFi and IADB plan

Today I made an unplanned visit to the site to fox the WiFi and talked to Mike Rains about what we will do when we both want to edit the IADB code at the same time.

Yesterday I got a phone call from Emma saying that the WiFi was down, we got Bob from Uni to come in and investigate. Once again the AP in HQ had lost its settings, our best guess as to what happened is that the UPS was going flat at night and as it died it was supplying dodgy power to the AP.

This morning Emma rang to tell me it happened again, so I went down to Maplins and bought a USB serial adapter so we could reprogram the APs ourselves without help from the Uni or Data Integration. I rang the Uni to ask for Bob to come out for the last time so we could confirm that we had the correct settings for the AP. The Uni ITS manager told me that they ‘were not happy about sending out Bob all the time when the kit should be being looked after by Data Integration’. Between me, Bob, a bloke from Data Integration and Emma we reprogrammed the AP and recorded the settings using screen shots of hyper terminal.

Amusingly we had to use Windows through Parallels on the Mac because the Mac does not ship with a serial terminal. Windows comes with Hyper Terminal and the USB pass-through feature of Parallels allowed us to use the USB serial adapter in Windows. So Windows saved the Macs arse, go Apple.

I briefly discussed the IADB with Mike. I need to alter the code-base so the PHP IADB will work inside the Portlet bridge. The changes I think I will need to make include the use of frames, the Java script and all of the PHP which does not work with ‘register globals off’. We agreed that we will need some way to work on the same code-base to avoid forking the IADB. The plan is to add the changes for the Portlets without breaking the code for normal browsers (similar to adding support for the Nokia N800). For us to both work on the same code we will need to either have some kind of revision control or Mike will have to stop editing the code while I work on it. We will decide what we will do when the time comes, for now at least we both know that at some point we will have to tackle this problem so it wont be a surprise.

Here is a quick snap to prove that it doesn't always rain in Silchester.