Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: WebCT

  • Mail Delivery Background Jobs

    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…

  • OrgCode Duplicate Filter

    I was asked to work my “Unix magic”. The problem? Duplicate courses were spooled and converted from the WebCT format to the Desire2Learn. The conversion process creates an import file using the WebCT SourcedId.Id as the OrgCode. The first time the OrgCode is used, it creates a course. The next and subsequent times, it duplicates…

  • One of Many

    The Learning Management System (LMS) has been a despised technology by some ever since I started working with one, WebCT, in 1999. At the time it was deemed crappy technology that had to improve or die. So today in 2012, about 13 years later, I have to roll my eyes at the pundits writing about…

  • Why Ten

    The question of why we run ten clusters came up recently. Off the top of my head, the answer was okay. Here is my more thoughtful response. Whenever I have been in a conversation with a BEA (more recently Oracle) person on Weblogic, the number of nodes we run has invariably surprised them. Major banks…

  • Apples to Oranges

    My web hosting service, Dreamhost, happens to have a one-click-installer for Moodle. So I installed one for my own personal sandbox. In looking at the available roles, it suddenly occurred to me…. Comparing any LMS to another is like comparing an apple to an orange. The industry is like the Tower of Babel. Each product…

  • Another Way to Verify Cookie Domain

    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…

  • xmllint

    This Linux tool is my new best friend. We get thousands of XML files from our clients for loading user, class, and enrollment information. Some of these clients customize our software or write their own software for generating the XML. This means we frequently get oddities in the files which cause problems. Thankfully I am…

  • Weblogic Diagnostics

    I noticed one the nodes in a development cluster was down. So I started it again. The second start failed, so I ended up looking at logs to figure out why. The error in the WebCTServer.000000000.log said: weblogic.diagnostics.lifecycle.DiagnosticComponentLifecycleException: weblogic.store.PersistentStoreException: java.io.IOException: [Store:280036]Missing the file store file “WLS_DIAGNOSTICS000001.DAT” in the directory “$VISTAHOME/./servers/$NODENAME/data/store/diagnostics” So I looked to see…

  • Open Schema

    If Blackboard opens up the schema for Vista 8, then maybe I’ll feel more comfortable sharing the reporting SQL I use. Ron Santos has a good PowerPoint on SQL for reports at Simon Frasier University.