Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: Chief Information Officer

  • Blind Not Insane

    The National Federation of the Blind is upset about a movie portraying people who are blind as behaving badly. Pyyhkala, 36, of Boston, said he has read the book and seen parts of the film. He said his grievances stem from the film’s potential to sway public attitude about blindness. He said the movie exacerbates stereotypes…

  • Monopoly Fears

    Something brought up my abandoned Friendster blog, which had a link to fiftymillimeter which used to be my favorite photography site by people in Athens prior to me even moving here. Why “used to be”? Well over a year ago, they stopped posting to the site. Sad, I know. Still, I was curious, Where are…

  • CE / Vista Undocumented Workspaces

    On the WebCT Users email list (hosted by Blackboard) there is a discussion about a mysterious directory called unmarshall which suddenly appeared. We found it under similar circumstances as others by investigating why a node consumed so much disk space. Failed command-line restores end up in this unmarshall directory. Unmarshalling in Java jargon means: converting…

  • What does a CIO do?

    I guess it depends on who you ask. Well, the CIO’s thought they were most effective as classic IT-support providers. That’s basically putting PC’s on desktops. But their managers thought that CIO’s were most effective in explaining and determining the college’s technology course into the future. Managers really want their CIO’s to be “informaticists.” Wayne…

  • IMS Import Error When Node Is Down

    , ,

    This is what I got when a node was down while I attempted to do an IMS import in Blackboard CE/Vista. Failed to upload files, exiting. Cause could include invalid permission on file/directory, invalid file/directory or repository related problems The keywords permission, file, and directory in this would have sent me anywhere but to the…

  • File Conversion

    Zamzar came in useful today. Someone sent a WordPerfect document. My Windows XP didn’t know what to do with it, so I found Zamzar off my del.icio.us bookmarks and sent the file for conversion. I was able to open the file no problem. Fantastic! I can see lots of uses for this sort of thing.…

  • Anti-Malware and Blackboard Vista

    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…

  • Naked on the Net

    ,

    The typical response to a “OMG Users Don’t Have the Privacy They Think They Do” article is to never post anything online or just never visit web sites where you would post something. These seem…. Paranoid. People have an expectation of privacy. People also inherently trust web sites unless they have been burned enough in…

  • Bicentennial for the Abolition of Slave Trade to US Tomorrow

    , ,

    An Even Better Reason to Celebrate has a nice longer version of this quote from a NYT OpEd piece on tomorrow being the bicentennial for the ablution of slave trade to the United States. WE Americans live in a society awash in historical celebrations. The last few years have witnessed commemorations of the bicentennial of…