Frank Bitterlich

Exactly 50 years ago, on August 13, 1961, the East German dictatorial government finally admitted its failure by building the “Berlin Wall.” They actually thought that they could control the people by oppressing them, taking away their freedom, and their basic human rights – like freedom of expression. What a funny idea – nobody would consider such measures in any free country any more. Except…

… maybe some authorities in San Francisco, like the Bay Area Rapid Transport (BART), who thought it might be a good idea to shut down all mobile networks in their area to prevent a demonstration.

… or maybe the British government, who are openly considering blocking access to certain social networks and services like Twitter and Facebook, to contain the London riots.

… or maybe the Mubarak government of pre-revolution Egypt, thinking that shutting down mobile networks and blocking internet access would somehow make all these angry people go away. But that was completely different, of course… some far off, dictatorial country. That could never happen here.

Here are a few new screenshots of Eurotest 4. I´ve mostly been working on making it work right, so there´s not that much news on the UI side, but anyway…

First, there is now a way to add the right to dispense specific tokes to a role; this is necessary if you want to let certain people (say, VACC staff) dispense certain tokens (for example an “Early Retest” token). This can optionally be limited to members of those VACCs where the user holding that role is a staff member (more on that below).

As mentioned above, users can be defined to be staff for one ore more VACC. This replaces the old “Multi-VACC” option, which was an ugly hack; now we´re doing it right. If you are staff of a VACC (which has nothing to do with being a member of this VACC), and have the necessary roles, you might be able to view members of this/those VACC(s).

The “My Status” page contains a “Past Tests” section, where you can review your past performance, and access old test forms complete with the answers you gave.

Of course, they are read-only.

ET4 now has slightly more than 8.000 lines of code, not counting any frameworks I´m using. This is a huge beast, much bigger than I expected.

I did a lot of bug-fixing recently; the autosave feature for test forms now works like a charm. Role-based autorization is another important thing; you don´t want to have bugs in there. It´s now almost working to my satisfaction.

Stay tuned for more updates!

For a long time, I´ve wanted to play Angry Brids in real life. Turns out you can: