Unusual names intrigue me. Whenever I encounter a name I don’t know, I find myself curious about the origin. Probably this comes somewhat from researching my own names which both my first and last (see the last post Legacy of a Name). Both were for obscure authors and painters people almost never know. Which lets…
There is a legacy of my name most people may not be aware. Ezra the Scribe made all the men of Israel send their foreign wives back to Persia. See, the people had been living in Babylon in Persia (now Iraq). Cyrus, founder of the Persian Empire, allowed them to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem…
Today is the day many Americans will signal (any nonverbal action or gesture that encodes a message)Â their nationalism by displaying pictures of the World Trade Center, the United State flag, NYFD logos, or yellow ribbons. Given the current climate, such signalling probably is wise as anyone like me who fails to appropriately signal can be…
After Firefox just upgraded, I noticed it did a check to on the compatibility of the Add-Ons I have. Should any be incompatible, then the add-on gets disabled. The rationale being, “Add-Ons which do not work under the current version should not be enabled.” Seems like I as the user of the software really ought…
A ticket landed at the DBA’s feet having to do with users not being able to login after logout. My first thought was it had to be the custom login page. So I recommended the Branding settings be checked that the same file id was used for both the login and logout pages. They were.…
Last week I posted on how to verify the cookie domain on nodes not just looking in the Ear file on the admin node. That same concept has another cool use: Verifying which VSTs the nodes actually have. Typically one-off updates from Blackboard has us run the updateWebctEar to replace classes in the war file.…
A couple thoughts about problems with Blackboard’s SafeAssign product. The product appears to be designed to be used by a single institution learning context from CE/Vista systems. We have an institution (InstA) which hosts collaborative programs. Faculty quite reasonably would like to use SafeAssign at InstA just like they do at their home institution (InstB). It appears…
Just finished a Oracle WebLogic Server 11g: Administration Essentials class today. So there are lots of things floating about in my head I want try. (Thankfully we have lots of development clusters for me to break beyond repair. Kidding. Sorta.) One of the common support questions Blackboard asks for those of us CE/Vista clients running…