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Name Collisions

August 21, 2009 in Blackboard Vista by Ezra S F | No comments

Blackboard has a conference they call BbWorld. I noticed there are some odd tweets with the same #bbworld hashtag lately. These appear to be about a Blackberry conference to be held next month.

Collisions on names are common enough. For example, here are a couple names our clients use to brand their sites which other places also use.

My own project, GeorgiaVIEW is not immune. Some time ago I noticed the GeorgiaView Consortium (geological remote sensing) at the University of West Georgia.

I guess it is a good thing one Bbworld is in July and the other is in September.

For now I’ll just drop my RSS feed for the hashtag.


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Odd Tracking File Recording

June 8, 2009 in Blackboard Vista by Ezra S F | No comments

Every time a Vista 3 node is shut down without going through the initiated shut down process, there is a chance of incorrect data written to the tracking files (in NodeA/tracking/). Normally it leaves strange characters or partial lines at the end of the file. This is the first time I have seen it write the contents of another log instead of the tracking data.

click – 1.0 – 1244228052889 – 1135588340001 – “nova.view.usg.edu-1244227762853-6288″ – SSTU – discussion – “compiled-message-viewed” – “page name” – 558711383 -

click – 1.0 – 1244228052891 – 15.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”

2009-04-23      20:58:35        0.0030  xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx    JxH1zg4fZT1LTGcpmyNW    200     GET     /webct/libraryjs.dowebct        locale=en_US    0       “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”

Even better. The node went down on June 5th at around 3pm. The lines from the other log were from April 23rd at 8:58pm.

Why am I surprised to see new incorrect behavior? Especially when the node was really confused?


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Blackboard iPhone App

March 27, 2009 in Blackboard Vista by Ezra F | 6 comments

People have been contacting me all day about the Blackboard iPhone App. Both Blackboard and the Chronicle of Higher Education posted blogs about its release.

I find it interesting Jessica mentioned a Georgia student is the inspiration in the Bb blog post. There are over 200,000 students in Georgia who cannot use this application because it relies on Blackboard Sync which only operates for Academic Suite (Classic) products. Blackboard says the Sync product isn’t available to the CE/Vista products used by all but a few schools in the University System of Georgia.

The odds are good the poor student who needs the app can’t use it.

Also, the USG is exactly the kind of client who Blackboard says should wait and see before migrating to Learn.


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How Not To Break a Frame

January 7, 2009 in Blackboard Vista by Ezra S F | 1 comment

Correct:

<script language=”Javascript” type=”text/javascript”>
if (top != self)
{
top.location = window.location;
}
</script>

Incorrect:

<script language=”Javascript” type=”text/javascript”>
if (top != self)
{
top.location = “/webct/urw/lc18361011.tp0/logonDisplay.dowebct”;
}
</script>

The problem with incorrect is the address used here is not the address in the location bar.  The one in the location bar has the values required to login. Instead I get something which causes users to be unable to login. Example: So we send someone to http://westga.view.usg.edu. They get redirected to another address in which we provide the glicid, insId, and insName. Correct breaks the frame and gives the browser back the same address. Incorrect breaks the frame and gives the browser back a different, non-functional address. Bad. Bad. Bad.

WebCT Vista 3 used the Correct JavaScript which just passes back the addresas used. Blackbord Vista 8 for some reason changes what worked to Incorrect.

Yay for first day of classes.
:(

UPDATE 1:

It gets better… Bb Vista’s Custom Login and Institution List pages are unaffected (aka use the Vista 3 style JS). Only going to the generated logon page, loginDisplay.dowebct, has the issue.


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More IMS Import Headaches

October 20, 2008 in Blackboard Vista by Ezra S F | No comments

I got this error while trying to run an XML IMS import using the WebCT / Blackboard CE/Vista siapi.sh script…

A unit of type Institution cannot have a unit of type Campus as a child.

Guess being on vacation last week spaced my neurons. Normally, I ignore Blackboard errors as meaningless. This time I listened to the error and sent myself off in the wrong direction trying to figure out what was wrong with the typevalue element of the XML was wrong. Typevalue defines the level of the context. So while my level was set to 30 in the XML, for some reason it must be ignoring it, right?

Wrong! The problem was really that the relationship.sourcedid.source was set to “DBA IMS IMPORT USG_COL” instead of “DBA SIAPI Import USG_COL”. So it was unable to find the parent object. So the error makes no sense to me now.

Can I have my two hours back?


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Nothing We Can Do?

August 16, 2008 in Blackboard Vista by Ezra S F | No comments

A statement by a faculty member to the effect of, “There isn’t anything our IT people can do to resolve this problem. The web application is overloaded,” puts the people running the application on the defensive. The problem turned out to be resolved with changes to the local browser environment (remove all the installs of Java and replace with a single known good version). In other words, it wasn’t only because the web application was overloaded and could have been resolved by their IT people consulting the knowledge base intended to provide the information to resolve exactly this kind of stuff.

The last situation we want to have is an overloaded server before we even hit the heavy usage period.


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We Need a 4th Vista DBA / Technical Support

July 23, 2008 in Database / Oracle, Unix / Comp Languages, Work by Ezra S F | No comments

Work for OIIT!

Become our 4th DBA / technical support person for our team.

  • Located in Athens, GA (college town, UGA football)
  • $, benefits, generous leave, rare snow
  • we love open source
PDF of GeorgiaVIEW DBA position

Check out the PDF (right) for more information.

Sorry for the convoluted route to the application…

  • Click this link to go to our HR site.
  • Click the “View Job Postings / Apply for Job” link.
  • Check the “Information Instructional Tech” box.
  • Enter “learning” for the keyword and click search.
  • “Systems Support Specialist 3” is our DBA position. We also have a Business Systems Analyst position for a less technical position.

We’d love to have you.


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Page View Metric Dying

March 5, 2008 in Blackboard Vista, GeorgiaVIEW, Metrics / Statistics by Ezra S F | No comments

First Metricocracy measured hits. Pictures and other junk on pages inflated the results so Metricocracy decided on either unique visitors or page views. Now, the Metricocracy wants us to measure attention. Attention is engagement, how much time users spend on a page.

What do we really want to know? Really it is the potential value of the property. The assumption around attention is the longer someone spends on a web site, the more money that site gains in advertisement revenue. The rationale being users who barely glance at pages and spend little time on the site are not going to click ads. Does this really mean users who linger and spend large amounts of time on the site are going to click more ads?

This means to me attention is just another contrived metric which doesn’t measure what is really sought. I guess advertisement companies and the hosts brandishing them really do not want to report the click through rates?

My web browsing habits skew the attention metric way higher than it ought to be. First, I have a tendency to open several items in a window and leave them lingering. While my eyes spent a minute looking the content, the page spent minutes to hours in a window… waiting for the opportunity. Second, I actively block images from advertisement sources and block Flash except when required.

As a DBA, page views also has debatable usefulness. On the one hand we could use it because it represents a count of objects requiring calls to the database and rendering by application and web server code. Hits represent all requests for all content, simple or complex, so is more inclusive. Bandwidth throughput represents how much data is sucked out or pushed into the systems.

We DBAs also provide supporting information to the project leaders. Currently they look at the number of users or classrooms who have been active throughout the term. Attention could provide another perspective to enhance the overall picture of how much use our systems get.

Cat Finnegan, who conducts research with GeorgiaVIEW tracking data, measures learning effectiveness. To me, that is the ultimate point of this project. If students are learning with the system, then it is successful. If we can change how we do things to help them learn better, then we ought to make that change. If another product can help students learn better, then that is the system we ought to use.

Ultimately, I don’t think there is a single useful metric. Hits, unique users, page views, attention, bandwith, active users, etc., all provide a nuanced view of what is happening. I’ve used them all for different purposes.


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Dumbfounded By The Numbers

January 17, 2008 in Work by Ezra S F | No comments

Chancellor Eroll B. Davis Jr told the Georgia Board of Regents, “We grew essentially by a large university.” The USG gained 10,077 students (my alma mater has ~11,000) in a year. They calculate these fall term to fall term.

In the same fall term to fall term time period, in the same same university system, GeorgiaVIEW gained about 59,000 students (assumes 1/10th of 65,000 active user growth are instructors/designers). Its only 9x the system growth rate. It actually reflects a slowing in the growth rate for GeorgiaVIEW. Partly this is because we are fast approaching the number of potential users. Market penetration becomes more difficult when people are using it.

Fortunately, users will become more intelligent in their use over time. So, even though the number of users may plateau, because each user will use the system more, the amount of use will continue to increase.

Unfortunately, another DBA and I consider the number of users a more or less uninformative statistic. It looks good in news papers as its something the general public probably understands. Other numbers mean more for us:

  1. Hits – The count of items downloaded from the web servers. We often use hits as a measure of user activity. Unfortunately, we are only collecting this at the daily or monthly values.
  2. Who Is Online (Total / Active) – SQL pulls from the WIO table a count of all the rows (Total) and those whose time in the table is recent (Active). Both have issues… For example, users failing to logout and inflate the total. Active has weird spikes which suggests to me these tables are reaped every 1/2 hour or so.
  3. Storage – Amount of information stored by the users. For example, our storage growth is 2.23 times the previous year (slowing down from 2.25). The number of new users has largely slowed, but the amount of storage staying fairly consistent means to me the users are doing more with the system.

Amy’s presentation at BbWorld 2007 on capacity planning is a much more authoritative approach than this blog post.
:)


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Coradiant TrueSight

December 2, 2007 in Conferences, Work by Ezra S F | 5 comments

Several of us saw a demo of Coradiant Truesight yesterday (first mentioned in the BbWorld Monitoring post). Most of the demo, I spent trying to figure out the name Jeff Goldblum as one of team giving the demo had the voice and mannerisms of the actor’s characters. Had he mentioned a butterfly, then I definitely would have clapped. The other reminded me of John Hodgman.

Something I had not noticed at the time, but a reoccurring point of having Truesight is to tell our users, “Here is evidence the problem is on your end and not ours.” This assumes the users are rational or will even believe the evidence. They wish the problem never occurred (preference) and a resolution (secondarily). Preventing every problem, especially issues outside our domain, probably is outside the scope of the budget we receive. So, we are left with resolving the issues. Especially scary are the users who take evidence the problem is on their end or their ISP’s end to mean, “This is all your fault.”

Resolutions we can we offer are:

  1. Hardware change – We can replace or alter the configuration of the hardware components of the network, storage, database, or application.
  2. Software change – We can alter the configuration of the software components of the network, storage, database, or application.
  3. Request a code change from a vendor – We can work with our vendors to get a code change. These take forever to implement.
  4. Suggest a user resolve the issue -
    1. We can provide a work around (grudgingly accepted, remember the preferred wish is the problem never occurred).
    2. We suggest configuration changes the user can make to resolve the problem.

Truesight provides us information to help us try to resolve issues. Describing the information provided as “facts” was a nice touch. At Valdosta State, I gave up on users reporting the browsers accurately and captured the information from the User-Agent header. Similarly, at the USG, I’ve found users disagree ~30% of the time about the version of the browser according to the User-Agent string. Heck, they have errors in the name of the class ~40% of the time. My favorite is something took 15 minutes, but all I could find was it took four minutes. Ugh. Because Truesight is capturing the header info, it ought to be much easier to confirm what users were doing and where problems occurred more accurately than the users can describe.

After receiving all the “facts”, we still have to determine the cause. Truesight helps us understand the scope of the problem by how many users, how many web servers, and how many pages are affected by slowness to what degree. As a DBA and administrator, my job identifying cause ought to be easier, though quantifying how much easier probably is difficult to say.

Part of why: (Mostly speculation.) Problems identified as a spike in anything other than “Host” are external causes. These are causes in front of the device. Causes behind the device are “Host”. If these were more narrowly broken down, the maybe we could better determine cause. That would require knowledge web browsers typically would not know like the server processing time, query processing time, or even the health of the servers.

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