Several years ago, while I worked at a medium-sized university, there was a very similar incident like what happened in Student Is Sanctioned for Creating Class-Registration Web Site. A student wanted into a full class. So he built an application to routinely check for whether a seat was available in the Student Information System. The database…
Shortly after yesterday’s Spoilers post, I ran across this on Tumblr. In case the photo below disappears or gets blocked, it says: I’m more interested in the symbols and metaphors in a novel than the actual plot. Maybe this is why I am so bad at spoiling things. The events are not so important as…
Sports:Â I bought my first DVR specifically to record the 2006 World Cup games while at work. I was in my first few months and did not feel like I could afford to take off work to catch all the games I desired. For the 2010, I tuned out of Facebook because I knew lots of…
We tend to think of memory the same as an audio-visual recording of the events in our life. Unfortunately, it is not. Memory captures snapshots which influence what we recall later. So a relatively good experience with a particularly bad ending can bias memory to recall the whole as bad. If the below video does not…
When moving hundreds of thousands of courses between WebCT Vista and Desire2Learn, keeping track of what made it through which stage seems like an obvious hindsight thing to do. I added that last bit because we started to notice where things fell between the cracks starting to pile up. The basic process… Through Oracle SQL…
Here is an attempt at a positive post with our new vendor, Desire2Learn. In the Old World, WebCT/Blackboard, my role was to develop install the application / databases, monitor for problems, automate systems to run without the need of humans, or to make it simple for humans to do. In the New World, Desire2Learn, my…
Only 8 years into running this product and I still learn something new about it. Monday there was an event. Two nodes became responsive at about the same time. The other ten nodes did their jobs and transferred session information to the nodes taking on the sessions. Most were so busy they did not respond…
E.O. Wilson on inspiring people to get into science. If the below video does not display, then try E.O. Wilson: Advice to young scientists