Author: Ezra S F


  • First Metricocracy measured hits. Pictures and other junk on pages inflated the results so Metricocracy decided on either unique visitors or page views. Now, the Metricocracy wants us to measure attention. Attention is engagement, how much time users spend on a page. What do we really want to know? Really it is the potential value…

  • Gary Gygax passed away last night. I haven’t played in years. 🙁

  • When naming files, I would make a file with today’s time stamp 20080304. My brain was confused for a second when it saw 13012008. There are not thirteen months! Oh…. I have to use ls -latr to get the list in chronological order instead of just ls. Month-day-year I can understand (old habits die hard).…

  • More on concerns with editAssignmentSubmission.dowebct on Blackboard Vista nodes. Found an error in the exceptions logs tied to one of the transactions: Error occurred maintaining selective release status-Learning Object Id It gets better…. The assignment in question? Not using selective release. Yeah. There is an error for an assessment. Hopefully it is just the assignments…

  • Yesterday a Blackboard Vista node went unresponsive but recovered. Then a second and third did the same. This was odd as only the test which logs into the node reported a failure. Normally, in severe unresponsive cases the Weblogic monitor either reports either one of the parameters we watch is very high or fails because…

  • There is a slight difference between FriendFeed and an RSS aggregator? According to the site, “FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing.” It is using the RSS feeds of the various sites. So, like an RSS aggregator, FF pulls information from…

  • Do ultimatums really work? The recent Screen Writers’ Guild delivered an ultimatum that all their members would stop work unless the production studios met their demands. Months of non-work before both sides… What? Compromised…. Apparently the “kids” on Facebook has a ton of ideas about what ultimatums ought to be issued.

  • Tier1 support was contacted by a student to report a problem with a quiz. Some sort of anti-malware software complained about code in the quiz. Tier1 support replicated the issue. Their software identified it as belonging to MyWebSearch. Very bad news. Tier2 support suggested the student remove the MyWebSearch toolbar. Tier1 escalated to Tier3 who…

  • Quick Enough?

    Overheard in cube land… Analyst: Quick question which I think will have a quick answer. DBA: Okay. Analyst: Can we– DBA: No! Is that quick enough? It was humor. Both laughed.