Category: Computers


  • Just finished a Oracle WebLogic Server 11g: Administration Essentials class today. So there are lots of things floating about in my head I want try. (Thankfully we have lots of development clusters for me to break beyond repair. Kidding. Sorta.) One of the common support questions Blackboard asks for those of us CE/Vista clients running…

  • A good error message in my opinion provides enough information for the user or administrator to determine likely cause. It doesn’t have to be THE cause. Just something I can try changing and see if the problem disappears. For a while now, Outlook was telling me the “Operation Failed” in a toaster pop-up. O… kay….…

  • Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers. Not trusting a single sample, I tested fifteen writing samples including stories and blog posts (excluding those with block quotes). The Cory Doctorow result was the…

  • One of the common complaints instructors have about CE/Vista is the Tracking reports don’t have recent enough data. They are shown this for selecting the date range. Including here the most recent time the tracking was processed (which the application already displays to the server administrator in background jobs) would help the instructor know whether…

  • How Google Works

    A few basics of Search Engine Optimization came up at brunch a couple weekends ago. A few of the key points were that its not just important to have good information, but one has to have good metadata, good incoming links to raise authority, and no nefarious techniques. When I saw this, I immediate thought…

  • Earlier today, Blackboard announced the keynote will be given by Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U as the DevCon keynote. It continues the tradition of ironic keynote speakers in even years: 2008 Michael Wesch who spoke on how the traditional one-to-many classroom model isn’t good for helping students learn. The two LMS products Blackboard makes…

  • The upgrade to WordPress 3.0 doesn’t appear to have broken anything? Good. It pointed out my Tarski theme was a point revision behind. That has also been upgraded. No apparent problems. No need to go mess with code. That makes me verrrry happy.

  • There was an interesting question the other day about a student claiming CE/Vista lost the draft a student wrote. The administrator, Michael Scalero, wanted to know how we “administrators recover or assist users in gaining access to the content that the students (or instructors) have saved”. Part of my response was, Besides, CE/Vista isn’t designed for administrators…

  • It’s like the Electronic Frontier Foundation is Captain Obvious? It says web-sites fingerprint browsers to identify the users. The website anonymously logged the configuration and version information from each participant’s operating system, browser, and browser plug-ins — information that websites routinely access each time you visit — and compared that information to a database of…