Joel Palmius | 11 May 15:49
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Announcement: Computer Aided Surveying community site

As some of you already know, I've set up a site for collecting discussions 
and knowledge surrounding computer aided surveying in a wide sense. As of 
today, I have lifted the password protection from the site and it is now 
open for public browsing and account creation:

   http://www.computeraidedsurveying.org

Cut and pasted from the about page:

"The Computer Aided Surveying community aims to bring together disciplines
  related to surveying supported by technology. The intention is that
  developers and researchers - from computer science to psychology via
  statistics - should be able to find common interests and work together to
  build up a knowledge base around computer aided surveying."

Take a look and spread the word. :-)

   // Joel
Skickat av Joel Palmius <joel.palmius <at> miun.se>
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Joel Palmius | 3 May 15:57
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[EDITOR] jMod_Survey Editor v0.4 out

v0.4 is up for download, see below for changelog.

Homepage is at: http://gui.modsurvey.org
Screenshots at: http://gui.modsurvey.org/screenshots.php
SVN at: http://www.modsurvey.org/svn/gui/trunk

   // Joel

V0.4
----
* Implemented checking for duplicate variable names (support for
   MATRIX generated names still missing)
* Implemented checking for duplicated values inside CHOICE,
   LIST and MATRIX
* Implemented basic checking for synax sanity.

Skickat av Joel Palmius <joel.palmius <at> miun.se>
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Joel Palmius | 18 Apr 20:57
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[EDITOR] V0.3 released

I've put up v0.3 for download at http://gui.modsurvey.org.

The most interesting change here is that I've implemented the routing 
editor as well as a graphical diagram of the existing routes. Check out 
the screenshots at http://gui.modsurvey.org/screenshots.php.

   // Joel
Skickat av Joel Palmius <joel.palmius <at> miun.se>
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Joel Palmius | 10 Apr 15:08
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Report function

I've added a report function to the stable branch. In practise this is 
implemented as two new export modules; one for displaying a report about a 
single case, and one for displaying a report about the whole data.

This works for me, but could use some more testing. Also, there are a few 
eval() in there which I need to either wrap in Safe or check for dangerous
characters. Until I've done that, the report function is disabled per 
default.

The following is the instruction file now residing in docs/REPORTS.txt. 
There is an example of how it looks towards the end.

...

INSTALLING
----------
From version 3.2.6 and forward, Mod_Survey is distributed with an 
optional report function. For now, this function is not enabled
per default. To enable the function, add the following to survey.conf
near the top of the file:

   PerlSetEnv _SURVEY_EXPORT_overview "Survey::Export::OverviewReport"
   PerlSetEnv _SURVEY_EXPORT_case     "Survey::Export::CaseReport"

And change this line

   PerlSetEnv   _SURVEY_OPTIONAL_EXPORTS "browse,desc,freq,gfreq"

So that it reads

(Continue reading)

Joel Palmius | 28 Mar 14:28
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CALCULATED field

I've been tinkering a bit with calculated fields and added support for 
them through a new tag, CALCULATED. The following works in the current 
SVN:

<SURVEY TITLE="Make a mean">
   <TEXT NAME="val1" CAPTION="Insert value 1" NUMERICAL="yes" />
   <TEXT NAME="val2" CAPTION="Insert value 2" NUMERICAL="yes" />

   <CALCULATED NAME="mean" CALCULATION="($val1 + $val2) / 2" />

</SURVEY>

If entering 3 and 4 in the text fields, the data would contain a field 
"mean" with the value "3.5".

There's a bit of regexp going on in there, but I'm reasonably sure it will 
work with most simple (+-*/ and parentheses) mathematical constructs and 
integer values. Floating point values (for example multiplying a variable 
with 0.5) will bug out because of the dot being interpreted by the regular 
expression.

I need to make a thorough analysis of the security around this before 
releasing it properly, but if you feel you need it and only have trusted 
users, you can always check out the SVN.

   // Joel
Skickat av Joel Palmius <joel.palmius <at> miun.se>
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Joel Palmius | 27 Mar 15:14
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[editor] version 0.2 released

At http://gui.modsurvey.org you can find version 0.2 of the editor.

- Drag and drop implemented (although still buggy)
- Can move components around with menus
- Can delete components
- Can add pages
- Save and open project works
- Splash screen
- XML exports now viable in most parts

Maybe still too buggy to use in production, but it's rapidly approaching a 
usable state.

   // Joel
Skickat av Joel Palmius <joel.palmius <at> miun.se>
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Joel Palmius | 19 Mar 15:57
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Secret project revealed - graphical editor

People were cheering and waving swedish flags all over the world as the 
lead nerd of mod_survey announced a secret project he had been working on: 
a graphical editor for mod_survey projects!

...

Well, maybe not that dramatic, but I have in fact put up a page for a
semi-functional graphical editor at http://gui.modsurvey.org. It's a very 
pre-alpha release and lots of things aren't working yet (for example 
moving around or even deleting questions).

However, it is cute enough to look at as a concept of how an eventually 
functional editor could look.

Please take a look at it and give me some feedback, along with ideas of 
what should be added.

http://gui.modsurvey.org
http://gui.modsurvey.org/screenshots.php

   // Joel

Skickat av Joel Palmius <joel.palmius <at> miun.se>
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Joel Palmius | 14 Mar 13:27
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Off-topic concerning a web vote debacle

This is just an interesting story which is spinning around on swedish news 
sites today, added with a mod_survey opinion at the end.

In sweden, the national television has daylight information every friday. 
It's an animated sun which rises with numbers on when dawn arrives at 
three major cities, and then sets with numbers on when night starts. In a 
country as north as sweden this is interesting since dawn and dusk varies 
heavily over the year. In the northernmost city, the sun does not rise at 
all for a period during the winter.

Now, however, the guys at the national television had discovered that the 
three cities were geographically distributed in a rather unbalanced way, 
leaving a large part of sweden without relevant daylight information. Thus 
they started a web poll concerning what city should be added on the info 
to make the geographical distribution a bit better.

To start with this worked rather well, and the local news papers in the 
candidate cities campaigned for getting their readers to visit the web 
poll and vote for their city.

Yesterday the poll was shut down though, since it was discovered that two 
cities were rising drastically on the results, with some 150 votes per 
minute. Needless to say some locals had discovered how to script the 
voting.

This merits some technical analysis. Web votes have lately been gaining 
heavily in news papers: the results are related as facts and complete 
articles are built around them. No heed is taken to the shakiness of the 
underlying technology.

(Continue reading)

João Ranito | 12 Mar 11:09
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IMPORT to ARRAY

Hi all,

This is my 5th day of battle with mod_survey, and my first post here on 
this group, and i want first of all, to congratulate all the people 
involved on this project.

Long story short, my problem is this:

<IMPORT DBIDSN="dbi:mysql:database=test" DBIUSER="user" DBIPASS="user"  
DBITABLE="places" VISIBLE="yes">
    <ARRAY NAME="place" FIELD="place" />
    <ARRAY NAME="p_cap" FIELD="place_label" />
    <FILTER CRITERIA="user_id={$u_id$}" />
</IMPORT>

Running this, my Apache will say "500" after being told by MySQL to 
check for the right syntax near '}'.

u_id is ok, i checked it. It has been submitted from the previous page, 
and i can see it printed ok on this page as well.

When i replace the ARRAY by VARIABLE, i get the values of the first row 
of that query, as expected, so VARIABLE works ok with {$u_id$}.

When i replace the {$u_id$} in the FILTER by, say 1, i get all the 
results ok, filtered by that id. And yes, u_id is 1 on my tests...

So my guess is, there must be something wrong with the parsing of the 
criteria on an array import. Could this be?

(Continue reading)

Joel Palmius | 1 Mar 16:03
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3.2.5 stable released

I'm currently posting release notes and stuff, but 3.2.5 stable is now 
available with the following changelog:

Stable release 3.2.5
--------------------
* Implemented IP-based uniqueness checking in answers
* Added an up-to-date DTD for the 3.2.5 survey syntax (under webroot)
* Most exports should now work even when no data has been submitted.
   At least they won't cause a crash, even if some of them look a bit
   strange.
* Tested Mod_Survey with apache 2.2 (works without problem)
* Fixed bug with pipe sign as delimiter in delimited fields
* Permit time() localtime() and crypt() in perl snippets
* You can now disable security checking of perl snippets by setting
   _SURVEY_DISABLE_SAFE to 1 in survey.conf. This is DANGEROUS and
   very much not recommended. I won't document this feature, nor put
   it in even in commented form in survey.conf. I only add it here
   so people who know what they are doing won't have to edit code
   modules by hand.
* Flushing data will now also remove stale keys and reset the list
   of people who has answered the survey.
* Fixed uniqueness checking for when both UNIQUECOLUMS="yes" and
   UNIQUEROWS="yes" in MATRIX (ie, uniqueness checking on both axes).
   This still needs some twinking for then MUSTANSWER="yes" too.
* Display error message if VALUE is not set on a MATRIXROW when
   UNIQUECOLUMNS="yes" in a MATRIX.
* Fixed MULTI="yes" in MATRIX (crap values was remaining if going back
   one page and resubmitting)
* Because #&¤%%#! internet explorer doesn't #¤%#" support %#¤%"#! CSS
   standard some syntax changes had to be made in MATRIX:
(Continue reading)

Joel Palmius | 25 Feb 15:38
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3.2.5-pre3

I've posted 3.2.5-pre3 now. I could really use some help with testing 
this, since it is a release candidate for 3.2.5 stable. (Only thing I know 
is missing is an example for SUBMITERROR).

   // Joel

Pre-release 3.2.5-pre3
----------------------
* Added a script "genauth.pl" for generating password lists suitable
   for FILEAUTH. To run just invoke "perl genauth.pl", it will ask
   you for your preferences.
* Fixed uniqueness checking for when both UNIQUECOLUMS="yes" and
   UNIQUEROWS="yes" in MATRIX (ie, uniqueness checking on both axes).
   This still needs some twinking for then MUSTANSWER="yes" too.
* Display error message if VALUE is not set on a MATRIXROW when
   UNIQUECOLUMNS="yes" in a MATRIX.
* Fixed MULTI="yes" in MATRIX (crap values was remaining if going back
   one page and resubmitting)
* It is now possible to customize submit error message with the new
   SUBMITERROR tag.
* CUSTOM now takes a CAPTION parameter. Its only function is to be
   displayed by SUBMITERROR if applicable.
* CUSTOM now uses errorcode 2 for MUSTANSWER errors
* Updated DTD with SUBMITERROR and changes to CUSTOM.
* Added a script "docinterpreter.pl" for parsing a crude text file
   and provide a syntactically correct survey file.
Skickat av Joel Palmius <joel.palmius <at> miun.se>
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(Continue reading)


Gmane