Posted by David Carter-Tod on September 13th, 2006 — Posted in Virginia, Work
My boss was in this part of the state today, and stopped by. He very kindly took our team out to lunch. We don’t exactly work in a major metropolis….it’s more a truck stop off I-81. We ate at a simple barbecue place in a standard shopping plaza (a Kroger and about 8 other stores, and that’s about all there is around there). As we were finishing up, someone looked up and said, “Oh, there’s George Bush.” My first reaction was mere confusion, and then surprise as a black SUV parked, and a secret service guy walked into the restaurant, followed by George Bush (the senior).
I quickly snapped a very bad picture using my cellphone, and then my boss and one of my co-workers, neither of whom could ever, ever be called a shrinking violet, headed over to ask if he would allow to have our picture taken with him. He very graciously did, and my boss pulled out his digital camera.
He asked if this was a “Mother and son” picture, which unintentionally gave us a bit of a laugh, and then we left him to get his lunch. It was all very low key. No huge entourage. Just him and a couple of guys basically. It did occur to me that such a picture could have cost me several thousand dollars a few years ago.
I was born and bred in England, and so really have no automatic reverence for the presidency, and I hope, no particular reverence for anyone who holds high office, so I’ve found my reaction to be a bit more subdued than my co-workers who were pretty tickled about the whole affair (although to be fair to them, not with awe). Part of me feels that the really classy thing would have been to just ignore him and let him have some lunch, and acknowledge that there was nothing special about him, that he was just a guy doing his job. In terms of the cult of celebrity, I feel a little bit that I let myself down by having the picture taken. I didn’t say anything meaningful. I just had my picture taken with him, and, considering the alternatives that didn’t really make the world a better place. I just kept an old man from his lunch.
As is usually the case, about three hours later I thought of some things I maybe would have liked to say to him, aside from my mumbled “Thank you”. Perhaps I could have told him that although I didn’t agree with a lot of the things he did while he was in office, I thought he was a pretty decent guy and I respected him, and I could have thanked him for his service both then and in earlier times. But he is no longer a public figure, I doubt he would care to hear my opinion, he’s eighty-one years old (and looking very healthy) and he probably just wanted some barbecue.
I could have said something about his son, and the war, and the country. Would it have made any difference? I doubt it. Was it my moral duty to do so? Maybe so, even if it were a whisper in a storm.
I’m surprised that an old guy having some lunch at a truck stop could confuse me so.
[update: news items here and here]
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on September 6th, 2006 — Posted in Work
We are looking for a security analyst (pdf). Where would be the best place to find a geek with a pony tail who wears darkly humorous t-shirts, and finds this funny?
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on September 6th, 2006 — Posted in Blackboard, Work
We often are called on to solve strange problems that students have with Blackboard, and I see these discussions on some of the lists all the time. A year or so ago, I pulled together a list of things to check and it has served us well.
Some are them are obvious to seasoned users, but some really are not (checking the time zone settings for example). Read on for the full list of suggestions:
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on August 24th, 2006 — Posted in Work
I probably missed this since I don’t typically pay much attention to Merlot, but Merlot looks like it finally has RSS feeds for arbritary searches and categories now (e.g. literature). It could do with a little polish, e.g. putting the search or category in the RSS feed title, and fixing the spelling of “materials”. Also, when I did a sort, it appeared to be in reverse order, although I’m less clear on how the RSS feed itself behaves - it appears to not keep track of the keywords or category.
A good step in the right direction though.
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on August 21st, 2006 — Posted in Blackboard, Work
Blackboard has a number of pending patents in addition to the recently granted one.
These were posted by Santo Nucifora to the Blackboard list out of ASU.
PUB. APP. NO. Title
1. 20060168233
Internet-based education support system and methods
2. 20060026213
Content and portal systems and associated methods
3. 20050086296
Content system and associated methods
4. 20040167822
Method and system for conducting online transactions
5. 20040030781
Internet-based education support system and method with multi-language capability
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on July 29th, 2006 — Posted in Work
Blackboard has patented “technology used for internet-based education support systems and methods”.
Frankly, they should be ashamed. It’s a tissue of fabrication. Full text here and more reaction here.
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on April 28th, 2006 — Posted in Virginia, Work
I forget sometimes that I have this soapbox. We are looking for a web developer. A 2.0 kind of developer. Here’s the job description I wrote, that was turned down:
Do you know the difference between usability testing and asking people what they think of your web site? Do you know the difference between HTML 4.0 and XHTML and do you know when to use one and not the other? Do you know what csszengarden is, how it is done, and why it matters? Do you know what a content management system is (and you do know that Frontpage isn’t one, right)? Do elegance and simplicity mean something special to you?
We need you. If you have seen some of our web sites, you know we really need you. This is the easiest job in the world because it is so easy to improve what we have. This is the hardest job in the world because we want our web presence to be great. In fact, we want it not just to be great, we want it to be world-class. We know about CMS, CSS, Javascript, Wikis, Weblogs, Web 2.0, DOM, JSP, PHP, Ruby on Rails, AJAX, (pick your own buzzwords) and we even have the skills. We just have not had time or resources to pick and choose and implement them in a coherent, planned, professional way. Now we do and that is your job, but you’ll be a key member of a team that has the skills and committment to work together to serve the students, faculty, staff and community colleges of Virginia.
Ready for a challenge and the opportunity to create amazing things?
Here’s the more mundane description we went with (pdf).
And on a serious note, I love working here, this is a great job with great people and a great opportunity to really make a difference and add a litany of skills and projects to your resume, in an enterprise that really makes a difference. I think the pay is good, as are the benefits.
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on April 14th, 2006 — Posted in Work
I’ve been working on installing Mailman at our institution. It’s been interesting and fun (I’ve been working particularly on altering the default design), but we ran into a problem that had me scratching my head for the past couple of days.
When I tried to send e-mail to a list, I got the following error in the Exim log:
Child process of mailman_transport transport returned 127 (could mean unable to exec or command does not exist)
I finally tracked the issue down with lots of help from another pair of eyes from a colleague. When you install using Redhat RPMs, mailman messages and list data are stored in /var/lib/mailman, but the binaries and other installation files are stored in /usr/lib/mailman. The Exim instructions for Mailman go like this:
# By default this is set to "/usr/local/mailman"
# On a Red Hat/Fedora system using the RPM use "/var/mailman"
# On Debian using the deb package use "/var/lib/mailman"
# This is normally the same as ~mailman
MM_HOME=/var/mailman
#
<snip>
#
# These values are derived from the ones above and should not need
# editing unless you have munged your mailman installation
#
# The path of the Mailman mail wrapper script
MM_WRAP=MM_HOME/mail/mailman
#
# The path of the list config file (used as a required file when
# verifying list addresses)
MM_LISTCHK=MM_HOME/lists/${lc::$local_part}/config.pck
See the problem? The list check on a Redhat RPM needs to point to one place (/var/lib/mailman), and the wrapper needs to point to another (/usr/lib/mailman), so one can work, but not the other - the other error we were getting was “local delivery failed” (when the MM_HOME value was set to /usr/lib/mailman the Exim mailman_router would fail because the config.pck file was actually in /var/lib/mailman) - you can also test these at the command line with /usr/sbin/exim -bt <listname>@<yourhost>.
The solution was to hard-code the list check in exim.conf:
MM_HOME=/usr/lib/mailman
...
<snip>
...
# The path of the Mailman mail wrapper script
MM_WRAP=MM_HOME/mail/mailman
#
# The path of the list config file (used as a required file when
# verifying list addresses)
MM_LISTCHK=/var/lib/mailman/lists/${lc::$local_part}/config.pck
Hopefully this will help anyone else who might run into this problem.
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on February 21st, 2006 — Posted in Blackboard, Work
We have run into some very strange performance problems with Blackboard and Internet Explorer recently. We think there is an interaction with our load balancer (which is an F5 BigIP - forget which version). We have found that Internet Explorer 6.0 will randomly slow to a crawl, where Firefox is zipping along just fine.
This appears to be a new phenomenom (February 2006), although we cannot point to an exact date, but it manifests itself as random slowdowns in IE only and it appears to be only with our Blackboard system sitting behind our F5 load balancer, not with other systems. We think it is a threading problem in the browser, but can’t really explain it. Blackboard distinguishes itself from other applications on that load balancer by having horrible HTML loaded down with images, etc, but it’s still strange.
Has anyone else seen anything like this?
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Posted by David Carter-Tod on February 12th, 2006 — Posted in Work
Earlier I wrote about Microsoft offering e-mail hosting for universities and colleges - what I wasn’t clear about was that this hosting was at the college’s domain, e.g. @email.yourcollege.edu. I think this is a big deal - with MSN, it comes with the suite of MSN tools, including spaces (weblogs, etc.).
Now Google is getting into the act with GMail for Domains
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