Category: Computers


  • 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…

  • VM(Night)Mare

    So, I need to install software on a couple servers which don’t exist. They are virtual: VMWare ESX. I can see and login to the web site. However, its frustrating to consistently get a working console. I get a partial page with “Error on page.” Going to the error reveals: Browser#ResponseReceived(): invalid content type text/html…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • UPDATED: The below content is outdated due to being ancient. This post will stick around to help people get to the new version: Live HTTP Headers Equivalent for IE or Edge 2016 … … … … … … … … … … I looove the Live HTTP Headers extension for Firefox. (Yes, I will marry it…

  • Overvirtualization

    A side project of mine is to support my organization’s load testing efforts. In determining whether what we have is enough, I found myself talking about “virtual users” who are going to be generated by injectors on “virtual servers”. So now I am wondering, Do I even exist? Maybe not?

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…