One of the tools people have for seeking a new job is their social networks and increasingly the online ones. LinkedIn seems to be the popular social network for this. (BTW, I’m glad to give recommendations for anyone I’ve worked with and seeking a job there.)

I can’t say that I would know what everyone in my Facebook “friends” list does. A possible solution is for Facebook to provide a filter displaying current employer and position similar to its phone book filter for the friends page. Users can only see phone numbers both entered and selected to be available, so similar permission-based exposing work information ought to apply.

Until then, it appears one can click on position and employer to search who else lists them. One can also edit the cp= variable in the URL. Change “System” in the example below to “Photographer”.

Example URL: http://www.facebook.com/search/?cp=System&o=2048

The o= appears to be the kind of page, so that should remain 2048 for “People”.

If your search term uses spaces, then use a plus sign (“+”) or ascii code (“%20″) to represent the space.

Example: System+Support+Specialist

I’m sure there are better ideas out there.

Both think the problem must be the other’s fault. Because you know… Their product is perfect. They never have design issues. Ever. So it must be someone else’s fault.

Problem 1:

Upon loading the zip package into the CE/Vista SCORM module, the end user saw:

The SCORM package is not compliant with SCORM Ver 1.2 Conformance Requirements. All supporting schemas must be at the root of the package; the following schemas were not found at the root: [adlcp_rootv1p2.xsd, imscp_rootv1p1p2.xsd, imsmd_rootv1p2p1.xsd] As a result, the package may not perform as desired. Are you sure you want to continue?

I actually feel bad for not immediately recognizing this meant these XSD files needed to be in the zip file.  Blackboard ought to feel bad for having the response this means the imsmanifest.xml in the file was written for a more current version of SCORM than the rather ancient 1.2. I could understand that response if specific items in the file are only relevant in the current version. I don’t understand that response when the same file which works with Vista 3 (created about the same time as SCORM 1.2) works and Vista 8 doesn’t. Sounds more like something changed in Vista 8 to make it more strict.

Fixing the missing XSDs files resulted in a new error:

The SCORM package could not be imported because it does not comply with one or more specifications within the package. The following error was produced: **Parsing Error** Line: 7 Message: cvc-complex-type.2.4.c: The matching wildcard is strict, but no declaration can be found for element ‘lom’. Please inform the SCORM vendor and try again once the problem has been resolved.

Is it wrong to be excited about an error? Dropping the problematic items from the imsmanifest.xml file produces new errors. After five iterations, I don’t seem to be making much progress.

Problem 2:

This SCORM module simply passes to an HTML file with JavaScript some variables to send the user off to the QuestionMark site. It should not this big of a deal.

Somehow Vista 8 is calling the file where it doesn’t exist for the QuestionMark SCORM module but not other modules.

QuestionMark addres:

/webct/scorm/viewer/perceptionSCO.htm?call=scorm&
session=9999999999999999&
href=https://ondemand.questionmark.com/delivery/session.php&
lang=-&customerid=mcg

Known good SCORM module address:

/webct/RelativeResourceManager/999999999999/filename.html

The number after RelativeResourceManager typically can be found under “View File Information” in the file manager. The file name after the number is the name of a file in the zip. Copying the address for the known good let me view it. At this point it seemed logical I could just build the address to the QuestionMark zip manually and see it as a designer (maybe not as a student). Unfortunately, this gives me system exception errors.

Last Solutions:

In trying to solve two problems with one stone, I took the imsmanifest.xml for the known good SCORM module and just changed the href= for resource and file to use the perceptionSCO.html file name for QuestionMark. Still failed to find the file.

BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT…

I removed all the variables after the perceptionSCO.htm. Now Vista finds the file. It gives me errors about not having the values in those variables, but it found it.

This is stupid.

Go on…. I’ll wait.

Remember the one on Scoble and Facebook? Good. For a while, I fastidiously ensured my number of friends stayed below 150 because I took the idea of Dunbar’s number as a life strategy. Then I let it slip to 200 which I pared back down to 150. My laziness let it hit 500.

It appears Robin Dunbar is now studying Facebook users to see ‘if the “Facebook effect” has stretched the size of social groupings.’ He says despite the large number of friends people only interact with about 150 of them. Maybe like most of psychology, the subjects are college students who supposedly are almost all on Facebook. In the real world, most of the people with which I have regular interaction, exactly those Dunbar’s number covers, are not my Facebook friends.

My Facebook friends instead are my information buffet. Social networks are how we keep in touch with what is happening in the world. My information technology friends provide me what is happening in my career field. My photography friends provide me with useful tips for a big hobby. Also, the bigger our social network, the more opportunities for help from or being consequential strangers. Social networks are a strategy not a replication of the brain.

The term “friends” used by Facebook, I think, is a brilliant marketing ploy. People would much rather show up as my friend than my contact.

The possibilities are:

1. Browser: Use a different one which doesn’t complain.
2. Settings: When it comes to security settings, I’m hesitant to recommend thousands of users change them without being extremely sure doing so is safe. Seems to me having it ignore the issue exposes users to danger. Rumor is also Windows Updates can revert the settings back to defaults.
3. Content: Change how the content is delivered to avoid the issue.

The content is being put inside HTML files rather than using the Web Link tool to open a new window with the video. Even using a Web Link tool to show the content inside the same window causes the IE complaint.

All three will cause a ton of work to address the issues. In my opinion wrangling designers ought to require the least amount of work of the three. Though I guess that would depend on the popularity of IE and neediness of the users.

Say what? We had over 22,000 active sections last term? We have 40 institutions and dozens of professional designers and thousands of faculty designing their own classes. Cryptic emails about being frustrated with Vista means I have to contact the sender, find out what institution, class, problem happened and send that to an institution person who has to figure out which designer to direct it. I’m too far removed to be useful for these requests.

Solutions:

1. CE/Vista ought to keep a broken link report. It would record to a log in the Designer Tools reporting which addresses resulted in errors and a list of the referrers, how many times requests came from each referrer. This gives designers something they can use to address the problems. Maybe give the designers the ability to reset the log on a page when they think they have fixed it. Give them an icon in the class list to see when there are unhandled cases.
2. Assuming the above is too hard, this mailto link should be a form recording the learning context involved, referring page, browser, user, and file which failed the request. The message could go to the mail tool for the designers.

Since Facebook copied the Twitter Retweet feature, I was looking for something worthy of letting all the others I know see. Somehow I was surprised to find my News Feed was missing about half the Links my contacts posted? My first reaction was to put My Friends’ Links in Thunderbird’s RSS Reader (where I put my feeds I don’t want strangers subscribing in Google Reader). Then it dawned on me.

At the bottom of the News Feed is an Edit Options link. A while back there were Facebook chain-statuses about editing the settings here because it controls which of my friends I see. On the first page, one can put how many of my friends I can see vs which I don’t. Also, there is an option for explicitly naming which I will see.

It seems I set specific names which at one time was everyone. However, as I added new people, I never went back and added the new people. All these new people were the ones posting the missing links. Doh! So, I’ve set Facebook to show me the top 9999 people. (The highest it will go.) I’m hoping this will fix it.

This led to this gem:

For the first time, many of us Google converts feel like the cloud, where Google wants us to organize our personal and professional digital lives, is less secure than that encrypted hard drive under the desk.

Sounds like Douglas Rushkoff didn’t understand the Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, or even GeorgiaVIEW for which I work didn’t invent impenetrable computer systems for developing the cloud systems. There are best practices which may or may not be followed. There are code improvements to counter known security holes which may or may not be applied. Personally, I think the public is doing well just to be informed there was a security breach.

Security isn’t about absolutely preventing someone from getting the data. It is about placing stumbling blocks in the way to make attempting to get the data so difficult the perpetrator moves on to an easier target. An extremely determined person or group could unwind the layers of the best security.

Gmail does encourage encryption of POP3 and SMTP. I wonder though how much communication between email servers operates through encrypted SMTP? In general, I figured email to be sent via plain text. Which is why if something is sensitive or super important, email might not be the best medium through which to transmit it.

Mitigated speech gets a lot of use by people trying not to offend. All too often, people who have been hurt because of mitigated speech question what isn’t being told as though the omission or gaps are intentionally deceptive.

What are or are not supported browsers came up again. The trick here is the mitigated speech used with the levels of support. I assume the intent is clarity.

• Certified – supported with complete testing done.
• Compatible – supported with some testing done.
• Provisional – supported with some testing done before official release.

Certified is taken as supported by all parties. Compatible and Provisional are interpreted as not supported because the complete testing has yet to be done. I think Blackboard’s intent was to mark them as supported but qualify how customers might encounter issues due to not fully testing. This means Blackboard is interested in learning about the problems encountered in order to address them.

At least that is my interpolation. Mmmmmm the Kool-Aid is good.

Most of my LJ posts are protected. For this site, I’d rather have them set to private. So the section of Wordpress (Tools > Import > LiveJournal) saying this seemed relevant:

If you have any entries on LiveJournal which are marked as private, they will be password-protected when they are imported so that only people who know the password can see them.

If you don’t enter a password, ALL ENTRIES from your LiveJournal will be imported as public posts in WordPress.

Password protected seemed better than not, so I set a 30 character long password, and the form accepted all 30. When the password didn’t work, I logged in as the administrator user and looked at Publish > Visibility > Password protected Password. Turns out Wordpress only accepted the first 20 characters. The box here also takes 30 characters until it is saved which only takes the first 20.

In my opinion, web forms in general should prevent the user from entering more characters than the application or database will take. Passwords are very exact, so forms for creating them definitely should not allow extraneous characters.

siapi output says:

error invoking method in adapter, message is: cvc-complex-type.2.3: Element ‘extension’ cannot have character [children], because the type’s content type is element-only.

Means the wrong type between luminis and ims was used. I created a files.properties file which sets the import type based on the name of the file. For the luminis type, the persons records are in persons1.xml. For the ims type, the persons records are in ims_users1.xml.

Message is : Authorization denied

User trying to import the file must be an institution administrator. I probably created the import user but did not enroll it as an admin. What I get for moving too fast.

This means we frequently get oddities in the files which cause problems. Thankfully I am not the person who has to verify these files are good. I just get to answer the questions that person has about why a particular file failed to load.

The CE/Vista import process will stop if its validator finds invalid XML. Unfortunately, the error “An exception occurred while obtaining error messages.  See webct.log” doesn’t sound like invalid XML.

Usage is pretty simple:

xmllint –valid /path/to/file.xml | head

1. If the file is valid, then the whole file is in the output.
2. If there are warnings, then they precede the whole file.
3. If there are errors, then only the errors are displayed.

I use head here because our files can be up to 15MB, so this prevents the whole file from going on the screen for the first two situations.

I discovered this in researching how to handle the first situation below. It came up again today. So this has been useful to catch errors in the client supplied files where the file failed to load.

1: parser error : XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document
 <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

162: parser error : EntityRef: expecting ‘;’
<long>College of Engineering &amp&#059; CIS</long>

(Bolded the errors.) The number before the colon is the line number. The carat it uses to indicate where on the line an error occurred isn’t accurate, so I ignore it.

My hope is to get this integrated into our processes to validate these files before they are loaded and save ourselves headaches the next morning.

The only problem I have so far discovered is Tag the Net doesn’t appear to work. The error:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class services_json in /home/path/wplog/wp-includes/class-json.php on line 115

Looks like Wordpress distributed a new class-json.php. Back in Simple Tags 1.6.5, this specific error was supposedly fixed. My guess is something about Wordpress 2.9 re-broke it.

HP says:

We are working with our partners to learn more. The technology we use is built on standard algorithms that measure the difference in intensity of contrast between the eyes and the upper cheek and nose. We believe that the camera might have difficulty “seeing” contrast in conditions where there is insufficient foreground lighting. Voodoo Blog

… and…

It has been reported that lighting conditions can affect the performance of the face tracking feature. To improve performance of the face tracking feature try to increase the light to the face while decreasing the amount of light in the background. HP Support

When skin is dark, there isn’t much of a contrast between the eyes and upper cheek in anything other than studio lighting. Sounds like HP’s partners didn’t do much testing for real world conditions. Even my Canon SD800IS camera has a face auto detection feature which seems to have a hard time when dark skinned faces are in shadow. Here is where it is good not to be black enough.

P.S. Did you notice how he almost called Wanda his wife. Freudian miscegenation?

Making the Linux switch meant leaving Chrome behind unless I went for the unstable version. I was willing to wait for a beta. I just expected to wait a few more months. Whew.

So far so good!

This is a personal weblog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer.

The first time this came up, Blackboard support wanted us to overhaul the session management. BIG-IP documents saying attempting this new method was a horrible idea caused us never to get on board. We agreed to conduct dupe.pl tests which showed there wasn’t a problem with session spray, which the solution was designed to resolve. Stonewalled, we closed the ticket when the institution reporting it didn’t have any cases to provide us.

So our client with the issue asked us to resume work on it. The key information they provided me was their users hit the /webct/logonDisplay.dowebct. Since they use Single-Sign On (SSO) from a portal, no users should ever hit this page. From investigating these cases, I was able to find a number of cases of users hitting /webct/displayAssessment.dowebct or /webct/displayAssessmentIntro.dowebct with the guest user.

See, the guest user exists at the domain learning context. Users appear as guest before they login or as the logout. They should not appear as guest when taking a quiz.

So I provided this information to Blackboard with the web server logs. They wanted more cases, so I provided more. More clients reported the issue, so I had plenty of sources. Plus it pointed to this problem affecting at least 4 if not all clusters.

Next, our TSM left, so we were provide a new person unused to us. It took just the first note to make a huge mistake. “Provide us all the logs from all the nodes.” At 5GB of logs times 14 nodes in a cluster, 70GB of information for an event which took up maybe 10KB seems like overkill. So… No. I like to think of my self as proficient at system administration, which means I can gather whatever logs you desire.

Now we come to the second mistake. Please refrain from asking me questions already explained in the ticket. Sure, the ticket has a large amount of information. However, if I can remember what is in the ticket, then so can the people working it.

Unfortunately I had to answer a question about replicating this with: it was based on my log trolling not actual cases of students complaining. My mistake was not going to the clients to find a description of the problem. Therefore, Blackboard wanted a WebEx so I could explain the same one sentence repetitively. *headesk* We agreed on me getting a case where a user could explain the problem.

As luck would have it, I got just a case a few days later. So I captured the web server log information and sent it along with the user description. My laziness resulted in me not trimming the log set down to the period of the error. Therefore, this log set showed a user1 login, user2 login, then user1 login again. Blackboard responded this might be a case of sporadic shifting users. Hello! I guess these folks are not used to seeing the SSO login to be able to know the session shifted to another user because… it… logged… in?

By pulling the entries from the f5 log showing the client IP address, Blackboard now wants us to implement a configuration change to the f5 to reflect the browser’s IP in our web server log. Getting such a change isn’t easy for us. Don’t say this is the only way to get client IPs when I… have… sent… you… client IPs. We’ve been at this impasse for 3 weeks. So I get to have another WebEx where I explain the same thing I’ve already written. *headesk*

Maybe it is finally time to ask the people if they are at all familiar with the known issue which sounds like the issue?

VST-3898: When taking an assessment the session is not kept alive. The student’s session times out forcing the student to restart the assessment or makes them unable to complete the assessment.

We plan to implement the upgrade which resolves this issue next week. So, I am hoping this does resolve it. Also, I am tempted to just close this ticket. Should the institutions find they are still having problems in January when the students have had a few quizzes fail, then I might have forgotten how utterly completely useless Blackboard has been on this issue.

All I ask is:

1. Know the information in the ticket so I don’t have to copy and paste from the same ticket.
2. Don’t ask for all the logs. Tell me what logs you want to view.
3. Don’t tell me something is the only way when I’ve already shown you another way. I’m not an idiot.
4. Don’t ask me if the f5 log has the cookie when the entries I’ve already sent you don’t have it.

Tip: Keep a ‘last known good’ config.xml file on your admin node.
Your Bb Vista cluster config.xml file | laura gekeler

Very good tip! We learned this lesson a couple months into hosting Vista 8 in pre-production.

She goes on to explain this file gets overwritten any time a change in Weblogic is made. Sometimes these changes are (un)intentionally made by an administrator using the console. Sometimes Weblogic detects problematic conditions and makes the change itself. When these changes create problematic conditions, then the last known good version saved us from having to go make the changes ourselves and potentially miss something.

In our cases of problems, a single node failing to shutdown after the JMS node was shutdown caused Weblogic to rewrite who should be the JMS node. It also caused a jumbling of the user preferred server stanzas. We now monitor for these problems and page ourselves to warn us about the problem so we can address it immediately rather than let our clients discover the problem a few days later. (I also somewhat mentioned this in the Forcing Weblogic’s Config.xml post.)

The times I’ve done this I didn’t go as far as Laura. I just…

1. Stop all the nodes in the cluster.
2. Copy the current version from $WEBLOGIC_DOMAIN/config/config.xml to /home/<user>.
3. Copy the last known version from /pathto/lastknownversion/config.xml to $WEBLOGIC_DOMAIN/config/.
4. Use “touch $WEBLOGIC_DOMAIN/REFRESH” on each managed node.

I am now curious about why she wanted new server directories or a new Vista_WLSstore database table?

After work and much ridicule from a coworker over this Ubuntu mess, I come home to play some more on this wireless mess. I was even somewhat leaning towards giving the firmware cutter stuff a try. After all, it is just a card, right? I could get another miniPCI card in a pinch, right?

I looked at dmesg and syslog but there were few mentions of the card. So back to research… Lo, the BCM4312 I thought was supported was actually 14e4:4312 when what I have is a 14e4:4315 which is “in progress”. WTF does that mean? Without a date on the page, how do I know how long ago that was?

Now, purely farting around I clicked the Network Tools to turn off the wired connection only to see a list of wireless networks. It was easy to setup the network and get online.

Huh.

Yeah, computers hate me.

So far into the story, I tried repairing Windows Vista which failed to actually give me a working entry into the operating system. The Linux Live CDs were non-committed forays into Knoppix, CentOS, and Ubuntu. All failed to turn on the wireless. An ethernet cord would have gotten me online.

So I was stuck with pretty much a brick.

My next step was to venture out to the store and buy a hard drive. The Ubuntu CD included an installer, so I used it to install a local copy. Continued research revealed my problem probably was the fact my computer came with a Broadcom 4312 card. (My brother said my problem was trying use wireless with Linux.)

Without an ethernet connection, I ended up installing Linux STA drivers from source by downloading them and transferring them by FTP.  No good. Multiple times. I never got it to recognize them. Other options called for installing a firmware update on the wireless card. The idea of a firmware update to the wireless card making me stuck on Linux worries me.

Thankfully I got home to where I have ethernet cords. By this point, I had so completely hosed things, so I reinstalled Ubuntu to start over fresh. Now seeing the Internet through the LAN, Ubuntu offered me “restricted” hardware drivers. The b43 set didn’t do anything. The STA set did enable the Wireless option. Even dhclient referenced eth2! However, the wifi status light doesn’t turn on when I enable wireless. Ugh. So the drivers work better but not enough to get it working.

Also, (based on the time stamp of the file I was able to find in a backup of the problem laptop) I haven’t connected a computer to my home network since February, so I didn’t remember what was the password for the network. Finding which computer or external drive contained the information took a few hours. Yay for backups.

Linux Adventure Part 1 | Linux Adventure Part 3 [SOLVED]

Monday night, I shutdown the laptop. Microsoft Vista Automatic Updates said it was working on some updates post-logout. Rather than babysit, I went to bed. I should have babysat it.

The next morning, Tuesday, starting the computer told me I had a corrupted or missing \boot\BCD. The Boot Configuration Data file is pretty important, as without one the Windows operating system doesn’t even give me a command prompt. After some research I found out I needed my Windows installation DVD only 250 miles away. This caused me so much distress I even forgot I had a spare computer with me.

So I decided to download a Linux Live CD and use that while stuck away from home. At least I would be able to research the problem and possibly fix it later. The first Live CD I tried was a downloaded iso flavor called Knoppix, I remembered from many years ago. Ick. Knoppix Adriane is intended for the visually impaired slipped by me, so the computer reading everything got annoying extremely quickly. Finally turned off the reading stuff, but I had a new problem. Wireless wasn’t working.

… And I was out of CD-Rs.

So a newer memory was a few years ago, a friend with a barely functioning Macintosh LC III (pictured right) wanted to get her stuff off it. She brought it up again a few times since, the most recent occasion to ask me to explain why her Windows computer cannot just read 3.5″ floppies from the Mac without any computer-ese. A coworker mentioned a Live CD of CentOS could mount the drive and transfer the data.

So, I downloaded an iso of the CentOS Live CD while I went to the store to get some disks to burn. While starting up CentOS, I downloaded Ubuntu just in case this second Live CD failed. It was a good thing because the CentOS Live CD was prettier without any improvement in getting on the wireless.

Nor was the Ubuntu Live CD any better.

By this point, I had found a site offering a torrent to a Vista Recovery CD. The quandary was to go back to Windows or stick with Linux. The recovery CD off a random web site could just not work or at worst infect the non-functioning computer. So I installed BitTorrent and downloaded the recovery CD. I tried the Startup Repair, System Restore, and Command Prompt (to manually rebuild the booter). Since this failed, I decided Windows Vista was dead.

So I started looking into how to make Ubuntu work for me.

Linux Adventure Part 2 | Linux Adventure Part 3 [SOLVED]