Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: support

  • Supported

    (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.…

  • Linux Adventure Part 2

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    Linux Adventure Part 1 | Linux Adventure Part 3 [SOLVED] So far into the story, I tried repairing Windows Vista which failed to actually give me a working entry into the operating system. The Linux Live CDs were non-committed forays into Knoppix, CentOS, and Ubuntu. All failed to turn on the wireless. An ethernet cord would…

  • Tracking Specific File Use

    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…

  • The Twitter Timesink

    Glenn asked: “What is it about Twitter that makes it more of a time sink than Facebook?” I consider a time sink something where I invest a high value of time for boring and poor value. My contacts mostly duplicate in Twitter what they provide in Facebook. The time I spend reading Twitter posts I’ve…

  • LC Oddities

    IMS XML for Blackboard Vista 8: Say Division1 exists. We want to create Group1 inside Division1. Ignore that Division1 already exists and write XML to create it again. Create Group1 with relationship tag info for Division1. Starting with Group1 doesn’t work unless command-line overrides starting learning context to be Division instead of Group. Luminis XML for Blackboard Vista…

  • LMS Security

    This morning there was a flurry of effort to locate an article called “Hacking WebCT.” My coworker was able to locate it. We were disappointed.  The main points of the article were: Lazy administrators make compromising user accounts easy. Lazy instructors make getting questions for assessments easy. These apply to any LMS. So, here is some…

  • Better CE/Vista Web Server Log

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    Some support tickets are more easily solved by knowing both user behavior and environment. An often helpful piece of information is what web browser they used. To add this, shut down the cluster, edit /VISTA_HOME/config/config.xml to include the cs(User-Agent), and start the cluster. This line will need to appear for every node. At startup, the…

  • Bb Suggestions

    WebCT used a suggestion form to collect product improvement ideas from the various users (instructors, instructional technologists, administrators, etc.). I’m not sure if the switch to opening enhancement request support tickets under Blackboard was something new to improve the support model overall or just a change for former WebCT customers as support integrated. Interestingly, Blackboard…

  • Another Way To RAR

    I was sent a RAR file at work. I didn’t want to install WinRAR because it wasn’t clear whether educational institutions are business or not. The PowerArchiver software worked used only pretended the capability of opening the file. A better solution might be 7-Zip? It supports RAR.