My web hosting service, Dreamhost, happens to have a one-click-installer for Moodle. So I installed one for my own personal sandbox. In looking at the available roles, it suddenly occurred to me…. Comparing any LMS to another is like comparing an apple to an orange. The industry is like the Tower of Babel. Each product…
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?
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…
The below text is from a ticket I opened with Blackboard this morning. I used this unix command to dump a list of all supported browsers from the browserchecker.xml. grep -A 1 ‘supported=”true”‘ serverconfs/browserchecker.xml | grep descript | awk -F\> ‘{print $2}’ | awk -F\< ‘{print $1}’ The list of supported browsers does not match…
Found the Educational Technology Trends 2010 quite interesting. Especially the part which predicts yet again (still?) the death of the LMS. Both learning and learning content are moving away from traditional centripetal models, in which everything happens at set locations and is controlled at the institutional/publisher level (top-down), and moving toward centrifugal models that are…
Occasionally I’ll want to see the usernames who use something like a user-agent property or were doing something during a range of time. Rather than report all the log lines and pick them out of the data, I use this which Blackboard (or maybe BEA added). Note  we’ve added user-agents to the webserver.log. The double…
A Weblogic managed node for a development cluster failed to shutdown when our shutdown script requested. The last managed node to shutdown becomes the JMS node and triggers a rewrite of the config.xml. We have scripts in place to check for the config.xml changing and alert us. Since I am the on call this week,…