I was re-entering my password into our NowTV box in the bedroom when it occurred to me. Authentication sucks on the Internet of Things (IoT). The problem is you have a simple device with minimal extras. On the NowTV you have a basic remote that looks like this: Can you imagine entering a password with a length of over 20 that’s a mixture of numbers, special characters and both upper and lower case characters?...
Cut-down version, I’m not working with SIMS anymore and I can’t pass on my work without them getting a large bill from Capita for using the business objects. Years and years ago I was working on a SIMS help desk at a Local Authority (LA). I had a school log a call asking about importing email addresses. Like many schools this school had just purchased a messaging service that allows sending emails and texts, the problem was they needed them in SIMS ....
Yesterday I went to investigate a problem someone had reported only to discover a butt load of releases As you can see, I have more releases then commits. A build was triggered by a commit, but this doesn’t explain why. I tried switching it up so it only builds when you put [build] in the commit message – which resulted in having to commit the yaml file as the feature isn’t available via the web interface, it does make sense to have this under version control....
So today I managed to move SIMS Bulk Import over to Appveyor. So what does this mean? Well it means I don’t have to worry about going over my Azure credit limit each month for starters! Appveyor has excellent support for GitHub, so each commit is automatically build, tested, and (when I enable it) a new release created. The next release will include Pupil username creation – you can blame\thank Andrew Mulholland for this, I saw his project PiNet and thought we can make this better....
Just thinking out load (because its good to get feedback) Just to expand on my tweet. I’ve lot of SSIS packages for load and building my BI warehouse (SSAS cubes), now currently I have a SQL job that has multiple steps For example Load data from Source system into Staging Build ODS intermediate tables Build Warehouse tables And this works for DataMart where they are a denormalized copy of a single source system, but when the source system, or the intermediate tables, are used multiple times, you don’t want to run them multiple times....
So in my last blog post I asked, are you ready for IPv6? The post came about when I was looking at Schools MIS data, which Graham, Joshua and myself have being look at to see who are the big movers and shakers in the Schools administration software (MIS) arena. Data is collected by what software suppliers a school uses to submit the School Census (in England) which is requested under the Freedom of Information (FOI) from Department of Education(DfE) (saving having to FOI every individual school)....
I’m currently getting bogged down with other projects and unfortunately my final sprint of SIMS Bulk Import has grind to a halt. On the plus side I managed to swash a few more bugs last month, get a code signing certificate. This will mean all future releases will be signed as coming from me which is great news, it adds a layer of confidence that the code you run is unaltered by a third party....
Tonight I was trying to get TeamCity to auto-update the version number for my SIMS Bulk Import application, however the simple AssemblyInfo Patcher just failed to work. No errors. Nothing. Then I read the manual, again… Note that this feature will work only for “standard” projects, i.e. created by means of the Visual Studio wizard, so that all the AssemblyInfo files and content have a standard location. So I created a new package which placed the AssemblyInfo....
Last night I chopped up my WIX installer project – I basically split the actual installer parts into one file – CoreMsi.wxs, the versions into a variable file – Version.wxi and the file list into a separate fragment file – SimsBulkImport.wxs. This worked. Great I thought, simple PowerShell script to generate the file list, I can even grab the main repository complied bin as a artifact dependency – got to love TeamCity....
Overview If your in the UK, the chances are your local school is using SIMS .net. Just checkout the stats on their site. 22,000 schools taking 2,500,000 children’s attendance, every day. That’s impressive. So what is SIMS .net? Well its a MIS system, but what is a MIS system? In the simplest terms its a database that holds the school records, for both students and staff. So it makes sense that you are going to want to interface with it as it’s your at your core when it comes to data sources....
I’ve finally gotten round to setting up the VDS Mythic-Beasts have kindly donated to host the API backend for one of my open-source projects. A few nights ago I enabled IPv6 and today when I went to run apt-get update it just hung saying: 0% [Connecting to gb.archive.ubuntu.com (2a01:450:10:1::10)] As they had previously worked, I suspect it’s IPv6 problem, quick google and… http://askubuntu.com/questions/272796/connecting-to-archive-ubuntu-com-takes-too-long For sites which prefer IPv4 connections change the last line to precedence ::ffff:0:0/96 100 Bingo....
Back in May (2014) I decided to start up a blog, again. I decided to keep it simple and just get a off the shelf hosting package rather then going to extremes like I normally do – configuring a VPS or even a Dedi server! I ended up going with CS New Media – it was just their lite Linux package which I signed up for 3 months. I was tempted to stick with what I know and go with Mythic-Beasts like I normally but I like to tinker and try new things so I went with CS New Media after a failed attempt to spend my dosh with NameCheap – when it came to entering my card details, it just failed to connect to “their” backend and their response was, well it works for me, try another browser – by the time I phoned them I had already tried different browsers, internet connections, computers so at that point I just walked away....