This Week's Tweaks

Friday 27 May 2011 05:06 pm

radiation v2
date is set for new system to go live on (or as near to) 1st June. v2 system now on live SPIDER (limited to dev and a couple of testers) while as much data/ content as is possible is pre-loaded. Minor bug fixes/ tweaks to stock_reports, bin_store, monitors, sealed_sources scripts. Added some migrate_x scripts to handle automation of stocks, temp stores and users [wip] once v1 system is locked.

mySettings
fixed bug that was showing error message to PG students

SCRIPT
started update to 'labels' Rx type to display a 'box' image to enhance the labelling features

PDP
bug fix in staff > pdp progress tool which was missing 'signed off' dates for certain students. Switched the 'year' from the fixed year value for the class list being used (from main) to use the actual year of study of the student. Was an issue with year 3 class that has some year 2 students in it.

Workshop jobs
updates and fixes to tool, including interface changes, search tool and general code tidying.

Migration
- web modules - attempted to package the pageLoader/builder content so it can be migrated to myPlace
- met with myPlace team to discuss translator tool. Some progress on getting the 'lab data' tool to work on a laptop install of Moodle. VLE team aiming to get a test server up soon to enable better collaborative development on the translator.

This Week's Tweaks

Friday 20 May 2011 04:44 pm

Radiation database v2
Updated 'limits' tool to have a 3rd option to allow for Safety Services bin store to have its own set of limits. Updated index page with link to this tool for dbm and ss users.

Download all/ zip fun
tracked down the culprit of the download all/ zip issue (see updated comment on last week's tweak post) - double submit + acp were causing the slow down.

Auto-evaluation questionnaires
fixed a bug allowing questionnaire owners to edit the standard evaluation 'about this class' section, when this should be limited to cluster admin only.

Postgraduate records database
updated 'reports pending' tool to allow user to filter by student year of study which allows for request like "show all year 1 students not completing quarterly report" instead of being limited to "all students in all years". Adding in option for HoD to 'approve' multiple reports [wip] and more progress on 'supervisor change request' tool [wip].

April Stats update

Friday 20 May 2011 02:36 pm

Finally got round to collating the stats for this academic session with April figures. Total page visits for April are down - April had a number of holidays (Easter bank holiday, Royal Wedding) and there has typically been less usage of SPIDER in April. We expect a slight spike in May (results, exam revision) then the quiet of the summer months. Page visits by mobile is still relatively low, with a slight reduction over the previous month but stil represents a significant proportion of the userbase(23.5%).

2010

*October login tracking started on 15/10/10
** ~15min downtime for reboot after ClamAV update

2011

sync and drop_caches

Friday 13 May 2011 04:02 pm

to clear buffer memory (pagecache, dentries and inodes):

# sync
# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

This Week's Tweaks

Friday 13 May 2011 03:58 pm

migration
All the semester 1 class materials have been archived to a format that moodle can import and handed over to the moodle team for upload onto their system.

FMT exercises
Finally got these all remarked with the new answer scheme. The feedback to students is unfinished as this wasn't wanted. A lot of the experiments failed for everyone due to incorrect design and there were ambiguities / inconsistencies / errors in the text as well as differences from the lab handbook. However these factors were all painstakingly incorporated into the marking scheme and no student was disadvantaged.The result is that the exercises aren't really in any better shape than they were before and will need reworked again if the laboratory instructions are corrected.

widgets
the widgets weren't working due to javascript conflicts with the reminders code. After stupidly trying to fix this for a while I realised that the widgets have their own reminder system so just turned reminders off if the widget was there to handle them

zip incident
on monday lunchtime spider was slowed down and more or less unusable for nearly an hour as a lot of zip processes took over most / all of the CPU. This was caused by zipping up all the content in a number of classes in a short space of time. We're not sure why this ground the system to a halt but put a workaround in place where after zipping content you need to wait thirty seconds before you can start another zip. The underlying causes of this may be fixed now as when I zipped up 20 classes as part of the migration the cpu usage only went up to ~4%.

Postgraduate Records
updated v2 of student_record to link to supervisor change request tool (still a WIP). Updated report/forms page to prevent users completing reports more than 14 days prior to the due date (leeway in to allow for leave/ holidays etc).

Posted by tim

1 comment

re: zip issue, I added in an

 if (is_file($f))

conditional before the file is passed for zipping, as although the array of files passed to the zip loop should only contain actual files (you can't add 'no file' to a class and the query to create the file list ignores empty files), this puts another (redundant) level of check in. It may be that zip was somehow trying to add a non-existant file and as a result was trying to add the growing zip file to itself, putting it into a loop with no exit?

19/5/11
Further investigation of the zip incident - turns out that the 'download all' submit button was also hyperlinked to submit target, resulting in the push of the submit calling the script 2x. Combined with the caching of acp, this was causing problems with large content download (classes with large files and/ or a large number of files) as the cache was serving the page up incomplete and causing seg faults.