Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: developer

  • Truncate Table

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    Earlier in the week I picked on a DBA at UGA for wanting to use truncate learning_context. Overheard at the office a developer used truncate and caused those DBAs to recover the data. Ugh.

  • Off the Twitter Timeline: Clunky WebCT

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    Summize provides a great way to troll for what people are saying. Beyond just searching for a term, it provides RSS feeds for terms. I follow several, such Blackboard and WebCT. The WebCT one netted me the following tweet: annoyed with how clunky webct can be at times – it had to have been designed…

  • Upgrade, Upgrade, Upgrade

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    Be more secure! Upgrade today. Want better functionality? Upgrade today. Save a developer! Upgrade today. The save a developer thing is the impetus for this post. The upgrade today mantra annoys me. Software rarely spends enough time in alpha and beta cycles to to identify all the issues. People have been so burned by using…

  • WordPress Error: This file cannot be used on its own.

    In posting a comment to a friend’s WordPress blog, it came up with the error: Error: This file cannot be used on its own. I was responding to a comment, so I doubted that he broke his blog between making a comment and my response. So I went looking though my own install. Essentially, at…

  • A Soliloquy Remake

    True? To update or not to update, that is the question; Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The freezes and crashes of sloppy code, Or to take arms against a sea of developers, And by opposing, end them. I know… It’s bad…

  • User Interface v. SQL Reports and Tracking

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    Blackboard Vista tracks student activity. This tracking data is viewed as a critical feature of Vista. Our instructors depended on the information until we revoked their ability to run reports themselves due to performance issues. Campus administrators can still generate reports (though some still fail). We doubt the solution to this is Blackboard improving the…

  • BbWorld 2008 Call for Proposals

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    Last year, we three DBAs submitted three proposals thinking one might be accepted. All three were. Its daunting to think of something because we are behind the times. We run Vista 3.0.7 while almost everyone else is at least on 4.1.x or higher. Also, we ended up changing our presentations last year because we were…

  • RE 2007: Administering Sakai

    . Timeline: Oct 2006: Faculty committee selected Sakai over Blackboard Vista Jan 2007: Developed a roll-out plan. Jun 2007: Pilot Aug 2007: Production Still: Some classes still running on CE4.1, being phased out of use. Needs – no more than 5% of code custom written by GA Tech or professional services. Integration with Banner. Grade…

  • RE 2007: Top Ten Disruptive Trends

    Rock Eagle 2007 Keynote – David Cearley, Gartner Way too many unfamiliar acronyms an terminology. It moved really fast without spending much time to explain anything. Disruptive trends selected by timing, speed, and likelihood. Multricore to fabric – Core on processors will double every two years through 2015. Applications will have to adapt to multi-cores.…