Another one of those old articles I started but didn’t finish / publish at the time. This was originally composed April 12th. Thinking about this article I read over the weekend, specifically this point. Closed and proprietary systems are not about learning they are about management. If we want to engage students in learning on…
Sorry, this was originally supposed to be published a few weeks ago. I’m just getting around to posting it. – Ezra Tests after applet patch in development reported chat failures. Chat uses an applet, so I was concerned and investigated the problem. The usual culprits were not affected. setEnv.sh had WEBCT_CONFIG_OPTIONS set to start chat on…
My hosting service, Dreamhost, announced they would be upgrading every one off PHP4. Only people using old software would get bitten. I’ve kept my software current, so I wasn’t worried. Only this of all eight domains started showing an HTTP 500 error (Internal Server Error). I dreaded having to go through and determine why. Turns…
There is a a story about a nine year old gaining administrator access to his school’s system to change passwords and home work assignments. [Blackboard] disputes local reports that the installation of its technology at the school was hacked. “It was actually not a hack, unless you consider the fact that the 9-year-old took the…
Notepad++ is my Windows text editor. Work has a site license for UltraEdit. I bought a personal license for EditPlus back in 2002-ish. Notepad++ does what I need it to do without having to track down a license key. This week I started getting this error when it starts. Load langs.xml failed! Apparently this happens…
I noticed today comment spammers are getting craftier. Some of the comments I approved I now believe to be comment spam. Perhaps they are probing to later deliver the real deal? They use the name of people who legitimately commented. Because the scammer cannot see the real email commenter’s address, they use a different one…
Came into work early. I was paged just as I was waking up, so I thought it would be easier to deal with the issue first thing from my desk as to deal with it then restart getting ready for going into the office. I didn’t plan on getting greeted with a message I’ve never…
My favorite quotes: “[Blackboard is] a one-stop shop where students can come and get absolutely any access to me, any access to the teaching assistants.” — Philip Wirtz “[Open source] classroom management systems [like Sakai and Moodle] are becoming increasingly popular because they allow schools to adapt the software to meet their needs.” “Even though…
We run ten web sites running Vista 8.0.3 hf1 where the installs are 99% automated by internally developed scripts. In discussing removing some old monitoring, we discovered one of them has on average 20 times more of the BEA-101017 error than the others. So I went looking for what is causing so many of these…