Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: Java

  • Should CS Be Required?

    Each of the nearly 2,000 freshmen entering Georgia Institute of Technology each year must take a computer science course regardless of their major, says Charles Isbell, associate dean for academic affairs at the school’s College of Computing… Similar to traditional general education requirements such as philosophy or world history, the purpose of each courses is to turn out…

  • OpenSSL Handshake

    One of the questions we ask our clients initiating an engagement to help them setup external authentication from our LMS to their server is, “What is the certificate authority for your SSL certificate?” We have been burned by people purchasing certificates from authorities Java does not support. (And the support is indeed limited compared to say,…

  • Smaller Java Cache

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    One of our campus Blackboard Learning System Vista Enterprise administrators reported to have reduced the number of Java cache related issues (failed sessions) by changing the Disk Space Allotment from the 1,000 MB default down to 100 MB. This is found in the Java Control Panel > General tab > Temporary Internet Files: Settings. I…

  • New Root CA

    One of our clients introduced a new LDAP server for authentication. Like a good partner, they implemented it in the test environment, found it did not work and alerted us to the problem. They also informed us the problem would be the new Thawte Root CA was not implemented on many operating systems and applications.…

  • Weblogic Diagnostics

    I noticed one the nodes in a development cluster was down. So I started it again. The second start failed, so I ended up looking at logs to figure out why. The error in the WebCTServer.000000000.log said: weblogic.diagnostics.lifecycle.DiagnosticComponentLifecycleException: weblogic.store.PersistentStoreException: java.io.IOException: [Store:280036]Missing the file store file “WLS_DIAGNOSTICS000001.DAT” in the directory “$VISTAHOME/./servers/$NODENAME/data/store/diagnostics” So I looked to see…

  • How Not To Break a Frame

    Correct: <script language=”Javascript” type=”text/javascript”> if (top != self) { top.location = window.location; } </script> Incorrect: <script language=”Javascript” type=”text/javascript”> if (top != self) { top.location = “/webct/urw/lc18361011.tp0/logonDisplay.dowebct”; } </script> The problem with incorrect is the address used here is not the address in the location bar.  The one in the location bar has the values required…

  • Recap of Vista Stuff

    It has been a hectic week. A recap… Java certificate fix – Yesterday, August 23rd, the certificate distributed in various Java applets expired. The community discovered the issue and informed Blackboard who put out a fix for the more current products on August 15th. Many customers are leery of having such little lead time to…

  • Nothing We Can Do?

    A statement by a faculty member to the effect of, “There isn’t anything our IT people can do to resolve this problem. The web application is overloaded,” puts the people running the application on the defensive. The problem turned out to be resolved with changes to the local browser environment (remove all the installs of…

  • 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…