Massey on Tony Andrew Meyer

Dr? No.

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:10:21 +1200

I finally withdrew from my PhD today (probably many people thought that this had happened some time ago).

In the beginning…

The story really starts in 1999. I started working consistently while studying, and also got rather bored with the study that I was doing. I also got involved in the Students’ Association - first lightly, then pretty heavily. As a result, at the end of 2000, I was about 1.5 papers short of finishing my BSc and BBS. I needed to do half a semester of work, and so I decided to go those at the same time as a Postgraduate Diploma in Science (these went along with running for ASA President). The ASA job didn’t work out, but I did finish the last undergrad stuff I needed to do, and rather unexpectedly found that I really enjoyed the postgrad study. I was able to do all the papers for the postgrad diploma along with the undergrad work, except for the double-paper research project, in that year. That meant that the next year started off with finishing off the research project - normally half of a semester’s load, but since I didn’t have anything else to be doing, I poured in a whole semester’s effort into it. That left me at the middle of the year with everything complete.

Massey Weirdness

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:11:31 +1200

While looking through links for my previous post, I found this one - which caught my eye in particular because it has my old postal address (also weird - Google maps used to show the house, but now I can’t see it, even though the neighbours are there, and so is the lake. Has the imagery got older?!). I’m not sure why I’m listed here (pretty much everything else seems to be a business, although I didn’t look thoroughly) - maybe from when I was providing theatrical services to Massey, although I did that under “Underground Services” (the theatre was named the Underground Theatre). The information at the top seems to always be about veterinary products, but maybe that has something to do with the flashing (good grief!) “test site” at the top of the page. I would think that Massey would have the skills available, somewhere, to make test sites (and, really, the purchasing system in general) hidden from the public and from Google.

Massey University: out of touch with the real world

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:37:15 +1200

A policy on passwords like the one that Massey University has is worse than no policy at all. Of course, when I was there, they forced students to have a four-digit number as their password, despite the fact that doing so violated their own policy, so I guess it’s expected that this will be ignored. Particularly bad parts: passwords should

Contain both upper and lower case characters [and] at least one digit and one punctuation character.

Quoting and flormat=flowed

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 11:04:54 +1200

A few days back, Hawk Wings had an interesting post about Why Mail.app quotes the way it does. The post linked to the “format=flowed FAQ”, which is a great piece that explains how format=flowed quoting works, and why it is a good idea. I’ll update my page about good quoting practice (and the corresponding post) to include some of the material from there, and a reference to it.

technorati tags: email, quoting

Tools

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 11:28:57 +1200

(Moved over from my Massey site. Future entries will be separate, but in the Tools category). These are the tools that I regularly use, and which I would obviously recommend: Coding

Python is my preferred programming language.
Mark Hammond’s pywin32 extensions for Python are invaluable, especially the PythonWin IDE.
py2exe is perfect for creating Python executables.
Inno Setup is a great, free, installer builder for Windows.
SpamBayes is the best spam filter there is .
Kodos is fantastic for testing/creating regular expressions (particularly ones to be used in Python). [more]
wxPython is my preferred Python GUI development library.

Editors I’ve given up on the editors I was using, and for the moment, I’m just using PythonWin for everything. The search may resume… PhD Research

After Hours Sign-in Books

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:52:35 +1200

A recent Massey Albany announcement:

As part of our Health & Safety requirement it has been necessary to provide after hour sign in books in all multi-storey buildings on campus.These have now been put in place and can be found either by the after hour entry doors or in the case of the Quad A and Atrium buildings close to the lift. Please make yourself familiar with the location of the books and ensure that all staff and visitors entering and leaving the building after hours sign the book. Remember they are in place for your safety and in the unlikely event of an emergency they will assist security or emergency services in determining who is in the building.

Stability of email addresses

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:32:17 +1200

Massey’s ITS department have been at it again (see also the comments about their security blunder earlier this year - somewhat patched up now). Ever since email began, it has been customary for an email address to take the form username@domain - for example, I have a username “ta-meyer” with which I log into Ihug, and so I have an email address ta-meyer@ihug.co.nz. Massey (staff) usernames typically come in the form initial(s)surname (e.g. my name is Tony Andrew Meyer, so my username is “tameyer”). As such, you would expect my Massey email address to be tameyer@massey.ac.nz (just as you find my web page by putting Massey’s address, then a tilde (for ‘home’) then my username, to get http://www.massey.ac.nz/~tameyer). Until some time in the last week, you would have been right. You could also have used t.a.meyer@massey.ac.nz (note the dots), but it didn’t really make as much sense (“t.a.meyer” is no good as a username, anywhere at Massey), and is more difficult for people to remember. Just recently, however, mail to username@massey.ac.nz (e.g. tameyer@massey.ac.nz) has started to bounce with an “unknown user” error. So what? At first glance, this isn’t too much of a problem. Some bureaucrat somewhere likes to have dots in their email (maybe their name is Sam Ted Upid or something ), and decides that it’s too confusing to have more than one valid way to do it (in some ways, a valid point). So we all start using dots more. The problem is that this is not expected behaviour, and a change from what has worked in the past. As such, there are people who will be using the username@massey.ac.nz form of address to contact people at Massey. All their mail will bounce. And not just bounce. It will bounce with a “no such user” error, without any indication of why this might be. The thing about email addresses, at least today, is that they need to be stable. That’s why I’m still with Ihug - because I can’t lose my ta-meyer@ihug.co.nz address. Clever people know that they could just do a search with (e.g.) Google and find a valid address for me, but not all people are clever (and somewhat fewer than you might think in an university environment <0.5 wink>). Worse is that to log in to the email (POP3) server, you need to use your username (i.e. no dots) - the dotted version does not work. This flies in the face of established practice. It’s not a problem for Exchange users, because they authenticate in a whole different way, and that covers the majority of Massey staff, but it will be for others. Worse, still, is that ITS’s own help pages give instructions for setting up your mail client (e.g. Eudora) that are now just plain wrong! Since you have to log in with your username (no dots), you need to enter in a reply address (with dots) or your return address will just be (as you would expect) username@massey.ac.nz. The solution The obvious solution is just to go back to how it was, when the system worked like to expected it to. However, if there’s too much red tape blocking the way (just like you would expect in an university environment), then there was a correct way to go about doing this: Tell everyone that it’s going to happen, a long time (at least several months) in advance. Someone from the helpdesk told me that they thought that there was notification, and there’s a slim possibility that that’s true. However, I archive all my mail (for work with SpamBayes), and there’s no sign of a message to massey-all or albany-all there. I read Massey News, too, and don’t recall seeing anything there. I even read the notices on the staffroom notice board, and saw nothing there either. Colleagues that I’ve mentioned it to aren’t aware of it either, so it’s not just me. If there was notificiation, it seems pretty likely that it was insufficient. Enhance the bounce message. At the moment it looks the same as if you emailed madeupaddress3467@massey.ac.nz. The recipient has no idea that the reason their mail is no longer getting through is because of an internal change. All that is required is adding a little note to the bounce message (about 2 minutes work) that explains the situation, and suggests trying the address with dots added in the appropriate positions. So what am I doing about it? Well, the first thing that I’m doing is that I’m going to avoid using my Massey address wherever possible. Which means I trawl through all my web pages and change those, and so on. I’ll give out a good address (my gmail tony.meyer@gmail.com address, I expect) to people at conferences, and so on. The Massey system has a not-particularly-good spam filter, so I get to be certain that I avoid that, and a doesn’t-actually-work message release system for blocked messages, and avoiding that will be nice, too. And when I leave Massey in a year and a half, as I almost certainly will, at least there isn’t much mail to follow me. I contacted the helpdesk about this. I was told that all emails have to use the dotted version, and that someone would be in touch. There’s a slim chance that things might be resolved (as above). If not, then last time the director of ITS told me to take problems to the head of ITS at Albany, so I’ll do that and see if it gets anywhere. And I suppose I’ll just let those that I know know, so that they can also correct their email addresses, if possible.

Email Quoting

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:21:28 +1200

Like many people, I deal with a lot of email every day. Something that makes it much easier to deal with is when people quote properly. Here are some guidelines (originally prepared for 139.177 / 119.177) for effective email quoting. Quoting works best if you work with plain text email and not HTML - many people prefer this, anyway, so it’s a good idea to stick with it unless you have a good reason not to. There are many varients of good quoting styles, only one of which is presented here. It doesn’t really matter which you use, as long as you use one. Why you should quote properly To put it most briefly, RFC1855 (Netiquette Guidelines) states that: