Today's Work

Karen Keidel sent me a new version of the back of the book tablees for the phonebook. So I started working on the phonebook again. I converted the new tables to LaTeX format, except for the ERC members list. But when I ran LaTeX on the new file, it barfed. The problem is that the \head macro expects a table to have four columns. It will have to be modified to cope with tables with different numbers of columns. I also have to compare the office/division phone list in the new version of the file to the older version of the file.

The Institute has announced support for Linux and Mac OS X. So unix on a PC has now arrived at the Space Telescope.

I will be on vacation the next two week, expect me back on January 7th.

Today's Work

I spent all day trying to puzzle out the problem with the tree widget on the org browser in STLDAPManager. It seems to collapse the tree at random times. I spent equal amounts of time clicking on the interface to try to figure out what its problem is and staring at the code. I came to the conclusion the best way to solve the problem is to hide it, by setting single=0 in the tree widget. I'm testing out this fix to see if it's satisfactory.

Today's Work

Today I solved Gary Truslow's problem with internalUser. Once the fix is moved to test, he should be able to treat machines on the stsci.org subnet as external to the institute.

Today's Work

I gave a report on what I've been doing at the LDAP status meeting and I updated the Wiki with the same information. Jim reported a problem with changePassword, but I found it to be a non-issue. Steve said the printable page fix worked inconsistently. The problem was caused by the RAM cache and adding printable to the list of REQUEST variables seems to fix the problem. I also did some work on a replacement for the templating code in pagecheck.

Today's Work

I spent the day testing the changes I made to the LDAP directory product on Friday. The only problem I uncovered was that the configure form was not properly reading the list of LDAP servers. I fixed that problem. While testing I discovered that you can hose the LDAP manager if you feed it a bogus list of LDAP servers. Since it needs to connect to LDAP before it can be reconfigured, having an invalid list is an unrecoverable error. I put a simple check in the code that sets the servers so that it rejects server names that are obviously incorrect (no dot in the name) and throws an error if all are rejected. This isn't wholly satisfactory, but will do for now. I finished up by doing a little cosmetic editing on the add and configure forms. Harry tells me that there are a set of unit tests. Tomorrow I will ask his help in configuring them and run them.

Today's Work

The LDAP server started crashing every several minutes. This obviously caused a number of complaints from users. Zope seemed to handle the problem particularly badly and when I looked, I found the reason. There was no code in our LDAP manager to fail over to the backup server if the primary server went down. So I spent the day modifying the STLDAPManager product so that it uses a backup server. I wrote the code and it passes the preliminary test (it doesn't crash when you do obvious things.) The more thorough test will have to wait until Monday.

Today's Work

Jim found a rather obscure bug in changePassword. It crashes when called from the root folder and it is passed a bad user name. Fixing the bug took all day, mostly because I was editing the wrong file and wondering why my fix wasn't working.

Today's Work

I revised the script that generates the list of discrepancies to include empty fields, ran the script, and sent the results off to Steve Dignan. Then Jim Grice had a problem with CVS and I helped him straighten it out. After that I started working on a replacement for sitecheck based on the current pagecheck code.

Today's Work

I finished up coding and debugging the printable pagelink. Each page now has a link on the bottom which generates a printable version of that page. I aslo generated a list of discrepancies between the leave table and ldap.

Today's Work

I switched from working on LDAP to working some Zope calls. This morning I revised the change password page so that it requests the user name. I also modified the documentation. (How about that!) After that was squared away, I modified the standard header and footer to support a printable page option. If printable=1 is added to the url, the header and navigation on a page is excluded from it. I'm still working on the last part of the problem, some python code to generate the url for a printable version of the current page (/stsci/printable_page).