Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Learning Management Sys

  • Necromancing Vista

    Warm fuzzies abound when support uses this as the last item for when something occurs. Some form of dark wizardry I know this was meant to be funny. I even found it funny. Seriously…. There is a lot of dark wizardry….

  • A More Usable Usability

    Previously I have seen usability describing ease of using a web site. These four essences of usability are interesting. I believe that to satisfy customers, a Web site must fulfill four distinct needs: Availability: A site that’s unreachable, for any reason, is useless. Responsiveness: Having reached the site, pages that download slowly are likely to…

  • BbWorld Presentation Redux Part II – Monitoring

    Much of what I might write in these posts about Vista is knowledge accumulated from the efforts of my coworkers. This is part two in a series of blog posts on our presentation at BbWorld ’07, on the behalf of the Georgia VIEW project, Maintaining Large Vista Installations (2MB PPT). Part one covered automation of…

  • On the Fourth through Sixth Loops of Ready 2 Wear

    I really have to stop listening to the same song played over and over. It may affect my thinking…. We had another node crash due to the Sun JVM issue. Our start script failed to make a file in /var so the node did not become fully operational as expected. While waiting for those with…

  • Fun With Oracle Environment Variables

    This is more or less for the next time I lose all my brain cells from not working over the weekend…. Critical Oracle variables: ORACLE_HOME ORACLE_SID Pretty much any script that deals with Oracle needs the value of these. Cron doesn’t have these variables, so use export VARIABLE to provide them to the shell. Also,…

  • BbWorld Presentation Redux Part I – Automation

    Much of what I might write in these posts about Vista is knowledge accumulated from the efforts of my coworkers. I’ve decided to do a series of blog posts on our presentation at BbWorld ’07, on the behalf of the Georgia VIEW project, Maintaining Large Vista Installations (2MB PPT). I wrote the bit about tracking…

  • Its 10:34 Do You Know Where Your Tracking Files Are?

    One of my co-workers says about tracking, “One of the big selling points to [Blackboard] Vista is the wealth of tracking data for auditing, grade challenges, and catching cheaters.” Certainly, Reports and Tracking in Blackboard’s Vista 3 is one of the more favorite tools. So making sure the data gets there is critically important. The…

  • Joke: Security Via JavaScript

    So, you are a teaching an online class. Students cheating naturally is a concern. How does one prevent them from stealing answers? Code in the online class system? Unfortunately, the makers of the learning management systems lag behind the creativity of cheaters. Plus, they can only control their systems. How do they enforce security in…

  • How Many Vista Users Do You Have this Fall?

    On the measure which pulls from the Who’s Online table, we hit ~9,970 today at the peak. It was over 9,000 from 11am to 7pm. Its been a busy day! I had expected a second peak today at around 8pm. It doesn’t look like we are going to get it.