Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Computers

  • To Blog or to Share?

    This blog has suffered from my sharing on social media. Where I used to post every day, even just one liners to go check out a web site or a story, that activity is now all on Facebook, Twitter, Google+. HackEducation does a weekly post of news. I am thinking about doing something similar for…

  • Big Bad Blip

    I was at lunch last week when I saw pages about a failed monitoring checks on one of our sites. My coworkers were working on CE/Vista SP6 upgrades. Though it was one upgraded yesterday. When I returned to the office, I asked about it. Exactly 24 hours to the second after checking the license in…

  • Back Door Restore

    Humans make mistakes. Our clients’ administrators some times do very bad things without malicious intent. The “Deny Access” button is too close to the “Delete” one. About 160 student accounts were deleted. The hypothesis came to me that sections keep data when a student is removed. Maybe it keeps the data when a student’s account…

  • DSID-0C090334

    Working with our clients on LDAP configuration almost invariable starts with SSL certificates. Self-signed, intermediate, and take up a while. The two tools, openSSL and keytool have become my friends. Working with a network admin for the client, I finally saw the legitimate certificate correctly signed by the intermediate certificate not the self-signed. This means I…

  • Textarea Backup

    I am going through my software installed on my work computer in order to transfer to a new one. This came to my attention as something potentially relevant to others. A common problem we hear doing web-based learning management system is the web browser crashed before the user could submit a form. The complaints we…

  • HtmlSecurity.config

    If you are a CE/Vista admin, then you should probably be aware of $WLDOMAIN/serverconfs/HtmlSecurity.config. This file has the regex code for blocking inappropriate input by users to exploit forms. Say a student wants to write a mail message to another student with JavaScript to execute malicious code to hijack a session. One of the regexes…

  • Pick Up Line

    (I will never use.) My name’s Vista. Can I crash at your place tonight? Noticed at geekpickuplines. Especially funny for me because the product I run is the Blackboard Learning Management System Vista Enterprise. We just call it “Vista”. (Yes, very confusing when Windows Vista users want to know the compatibility of Vista with Vista. The…

  • Follow on Google+ Too…

    Nearly two weeks ago, Google+ launched Pages, a version of a person profile for non-people. (Google does know the Supreme Court deemed corporations people too, right? So corporations should have a person profile.) Companies desiring a social media presence have created a page in addition to their Facebook pages, Tumblr, and Twitter accounts. Over the…

  • Quarter the 2006 Price in 5 Years

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    I love it when I run across a prediction about the time of the deadline. Jakob Nielsen made one on November 20, 2006 that computers will be 1/4th their current price of $379 in five years. Five years later is November 20, 2011. That is today! In areas like North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia’s advanced countries,…