A poke with a sharp stick

Where to find a Security Analyst

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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ISP Troubleshooting Suggestions

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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Merlot RSS for searches

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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Blackboard’s Pending Patents

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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Blackboard’s LMS Patent

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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Web Developer Position Available in Virginia

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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Exim configuration for Mailman with Redhat RPMs

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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Blackboard, F5 (BigIP) and Internet Explorer Performance

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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My daughter on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

Posted by David Carter-Tod on February 13th, 2006 — Posted in Blacksburg, Virginia, Family

I had never watched the show until tonight, but because my daughter made an appearance on it, I watched. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition this evening. My girl was one of the dancers who danced on the canvas to make the sunflower picture.

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Google Maps for Politics: Flock Together

Posted by David Carter-Tod on February 12th, 2006 — Posted in Family

My brother, Martin, has put together a really nice site, Flock Together, to map political events using Google Maps

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