November 2012 Archives

The Codex Seraphinianus, online here. Click “Click to read”, page through, and wonder.

Today is what we in the trade call “at least” weather. It’s spitting, but at least it isn’t cold. Yesterday was cold, but at least it wasn’t raining. All British weather is “at least” weather, apart from a week of August-hot sunny days in April which make you forget that it will rain, for at least half an hour, and unpredictably, every day for the rest of the year.

Yet another Moodle cartoon, expressing my wish that Moodle plugins were programmed in an easily parameterisable functional way rather than with details hidden inside in an obscure object-oriented way.
(See Wny are there enrolment plugins instead of a function for enrolment and a function for unenrolment?
.)

Cartoon Description

The orange Michelin-man-like Moodle figure is holding a bunch of electronic boxes, each with a cable emerging from one end and a short jack-plug at the other. He is swinging them by the cables in one hand, and has the cable of another coiled round his other arm. He has his nose in the air, and is saying disdainfully “And you need to look inside every single plugin before you’ll know which unenrolment method you should call”.

Another Moodle cartoon, expressing my discovery that a function for returning data about users can return fields, such as Skype ID, that the function for creating users can never accept.
(See Why is the argument to core_user_create_users different from the result of core_user_get_users_by_id?
.)

Cartoon Description

The orange Michelin-man-like Moodle figure is disdainfully pointing at a whiteboard. He is lecturing. The whiteboard shows the specification for the inputs to the Moodle core function core_user_create_users, and the outputs to the core function core_user_get_users_by_id. The outputs contain many fields that are not in the list of inputs, such as Skype and Yahoo IDs.

Another Moodle cartoon, expressing my discovery that when you update a Web-service plugin, Moodle will only notice the change if you also update its version.php file
(see Re: Get user token.)

Cartoon Description

On the left is standing a Michelin-man-like figure. He is the same orange colour as the Moodle trademark “m”, and has a Moodle logo on his chest consisting of the “m” with a black mortarboard perched on it. His eyes are the letter “o”‘s from the trademark Moodle name. On the right is standing a programmer holding a piece of paper listing, as a services.php file, the description of a Web-service function he wants to install. The Moodle figure, who is scowling, retorts “I’m sorry, but I won’t even notice it unless it comes with a new version.php!”

Moodle is a big and complicated piece of software for teaching over the Web, which I worked on in January. I drew this cartoon to express the difficulty I was having trying to understand a built-in script that I wanted to use for copying courses (see
Re: Copy of course). I drew it on my laptop, using a mouse and the Gimp image editor.

Cartoon Description

A perplexed programmer is staring at a copy of the Moodle script used to configure and execute the restore process. He is clearly finding it difficult to understand.