Category: Blackboard Vista


  • Yesterday was the 100th day of the year, so I figured I would figure out my progress with those pesky resolutions. Complete unfinished novel series. I finished the Harry Potter series. I am simultaneously working on the Sword of Truth and Ender series. The Shadow Rising was such an awful book I gave up on…

  • For over a month now my team has been heads down to provide some sandbox environments for the University System of Georgia Learning Management System Transition Task Force. The evaluators are looking at a sandbox for each contender. Various technical teams are also determining how the product fits with our experience and our operations. Growing…

  • Last week about this time both Blackboard Mobile Learn and SafeAssign were experiencing an outage. Both were resolved by the afternoon. However, Support Bulletins, how I have come to expect to receive notifications about Blackboard issues came only for SafeAssign. I complained about this to my support representative by CC’ing him on an internal message.…

  • Why Ten

    The question of why we run ten clusters came up recently. Off the top of my head, the answer was okay. Here is my more thoughtful response. Whenever I have been in a conversation with a BEA (more recently Oracle) person on Weblogic, the number of nodes we run has invariably surprised them. Major banks…

  • New Root CA

    One of our clients introduced a new LDAP server for authentication. Like a good partner, they implemented it in the test environment, found it did not work and alerted us to the problem. They also informed us the problem would be the new Thawte Root CA was not implemented on many operating systems and applications.…

  • A security guy at a campus wanted our web server log file in the CSV format. The original file has lines which look something like: machine.usg.edu: webserver.log13646,2010-11-30        11:08:32        0.0010  999.999.999.999    b7tPM1hTgGYMn90bLTM1    200     GET     /webct/urw/lc987189066271.tp1333853785371/blank.html    –       262     “Mozilla/5.0…

  • What are the questions you would bring up to Ray?

  • I listened in on the first town hall meeting for our USG LMS Transition Task Force on Thursday. There are 3 more town halls this week and a final one December 9th. It sounds like the task force is looking for what items are non-negotiable, extremely important, nice to have. Here are the non-negotiable items…

  • The answer to the differences between the wiki and browserchecker.xml according to Blackboard? It is very much intentional to leave unsupported browsers in the browserchecker.xml just in case those unsupported browsers do still work. Also in the answer was that in general only the two most recent stable browsers will be kept as supported. Since…