Alex Harries's diary

... I'm trying a little something with Southampton Uni (@soton.ac.uk) e-mail address holders and our registration system.

There's a prize of a fluffy toffee from the tumble dryer to the first person to spot what I've done. Little hint: it's to do with UPSU.net guest accounts... ;)

I'm playing helldesk geek while we're issuing NUS cards for the next fortnight. Yesterday was the first day, and I spent most of it running around - headless poultry-style - arranging furniture and crowd barriers, checking the water cooler, and printing off a range of posters to make sure no-one turns up to the NUS issue desk without everything they need.

Ten minutes before we opened, somebody noticed that our photo booth - which used to live opposite the Copy Shop - hadn't returned from its summer holidays, so the nearest place to get passport pics is Southsea station. A bit of a walk...

Naturally, almost everybody who came up yesterday seemed to have ignored the advice posters and asked us a range of questions which the posters answered, including "Can I use last year's card?" (Nope, the poster says it must be your 2006 card). "How do I register?" (The poster says UPSU.net - you should trust it). "What's my e-mail address?" (Wh-... ?!), and of course the classic "Why do I need to bring a toothbrush?"

Ok, I feel I should explain something here. When you're rushing out a poster explaining what people need to do and bring to get an NUS card at silly-o-clock on a Monday morning, having had far too little sleep, you can be forgiven for feeling a little mischievous. Which is why point 7 at the bottom of poster asks, "[Have you] remembered your toothbrush?".

To the 19 International students who enquired with wide-eyed confusion in the Sabb office, I would like to offer my sincerest apologies for the confusion caused by my own brand of "humour" (which could also be referred to as moron-ness). And to the staff of Balfour's, the sudden rush on toothbrushes shouldn't be taken as indication that Portsmouth is going to become a thriving toothbrush sales region...

So the NUS Registration system has been online for about a week. 301 people have registered or updated their accounts, but naturally there have been a couple teething troubles which I'm working through now.

• One problem is that some people have reported problems when creating a sign-in name - the new registration system checks a list of (currently) around 300 offensive and reserved words, and if one of them appears anywhere in the new name, the system comes back and says it's reserved. For example, "superstitious" comtains a three-letter reference to the female form, so it wouldn't be acceptable.
  
  I currently can't reproduce a problem where some people are saying they're unable to enter any sign in names at all that are allowed, so I'm at a bit of a loss to suggest what they should do, or where to look in the code. Fingers crossed it's PEBKAC, but it'll probably be something horrifically complex knowing my luck ;o)
• The other problem is that a number of people (currently about one in ten) upgrading their accounts are receiving an error saying we weren't able to upgrade their accounts.
  
  It looks like the cause of this is the registration system losing track of their account ID somewhere in the registration process. Again, this is probably something horrifically complex, but it's very odd that their ID - which should be set in their user cookie when they sign in (which they have to do to upgrade an existing account) is suddenly unavailable. I can only assume (at his point) that they are being signed out at some point during the registration process.

The two problems are a bit odd, but hopefully we'll get around them. If you've been affected by these problems, or any other with the registration process, I'm very sorry - please post a comment below detailing what's gone wrong. I won't publish them, but I will look into them (so please leave a contact e-mail address), or you can e-mail us the normal way from this webpage.

... but happy.

Bar a couple of display issues and a distinct lack of any robust testing, the NUS registration system is finally finished.

Well, kinda.

I've completed the framework - and the 30-odd documentation pages to support it - which lets you sign up and create an account on UPSU.net. It's taken me almost two months, and around 5,000 lines of code - most of which I have no idea how I wrote it - and naturally there are bound to be some horrific bugs which will just annoy everybody.

New features this year are two extra types of account - the NUS Extra account, and a guest (website-only) account. The latter is available to anybody with an @port.ac.uk e-mail address, and you can start using the account just as soon as you've confirmed your e-mail address. I know of at least one person who will be overjoyed that he doesn't have to buy an NUS card to use the site now, and I'm hoping this will encourage a great deal more students to get involved on UPSU.net over the next year. Mind you, we need to market the website even more heavily to help that to happen.

Because I haven't completely tested the system, I'm going to delay the opening of the registration system until Monday - it's worked fine in testing (and boy have I tested it!) but that's not enough evidence for me to be happy about unleashing it on the student population yet.

I'm about to head off to bed - I have court in a little under 5 hours - but before I go, I ought to give a nod in the direction of my bosses Fraggy, Steve Baker and Rena Ellis, who have trusted me to actually be doing some work during the last couple of months despite my not actually having shown a great deal of evidence.

Hopefully everything will go ok tomorrow in the demonstration walk-throughs. We'll have to see...

The next job is to finish the NUS card issue system, but that doesn't have to be ready for another month, thank foooook...

Bring on Freshers' Fortnight is all I can say - at least I'll have a credible excuse to be found paralytic under a DJ booth ;o) /al

I'm off to start a bit of jury service today, so keep an eye on the site for me. The key's under the mat. Remember to flush, and keep the plants watered.

I'll write about the new NUS registration system soon if I don't manage to land myself in contempt of court first.

C ya! /al