(This is an post I wrote back in November but didn’t publish…. Until now. Have fun!) Mitigated speech gets a lot of use by people trying not to offend. All too often, people who have been hurt because of mitigated speech question what isn’t being told as though the omission or gaps are intentionally deceptive.…
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…
For exactly two months now I have been working on a re-opened issue (on Oct 7, 2009) where sessions appear to die in Blackboard Vista 8.0.2 hf1. The first time this came up, Blackboard support wanted us to overhaul the session management. BIG-IP documents saying attempting this new method was a horrible idea caused us…
Saw this on Laura Gekeler’s blog: Tip: Keep a ‘last known good’ config.xml file on your admin node. Your Bb Vista cluster config.xml file | laura gekeler Very good tip! We learned this lesson a couple months into hosting Vista 8 in pre-production. She goes on to explain this file gets overwritten any time a…
A few weeks ago, we had a discussion with our clients about a rash of students submitting the wrong files for assignments. These files were all Windows shortcuts to the actual document. The instructors were unable to open the file. The students were unaware of the mistake. So confusion all around makes for unhappy situations.…
Rather than depend on end users to accurately report the browser used, I look for the user-agent in the web server logs. (Yes, I know it can be spoofed. Power users would be trying different things to resolve their own issues not coming to us.) Followers of this blog may recall I changed the Weblogic…
Yesterday Gina, a coworker, joined me for lunch. She asked about where GeorgiaVIEW‘s attention is focussed since we recently completed our upgrade to Blackboard Learning System Vista Enterprise 8. She pointed out students are the most affected by and most important constituent for any decisions we make. Yet the student point of view is almost…
CE/Vista Reports and Tracking displays summaries of activity. If an instructor seeks to know who clicked on a specific file, then Reports and Tracking falls down on the job. Course Instructor can produce a report of the raw tracking data. However, access to the role falls under the Administration tab so people running the system…