-
Today’s database tweak..
Well, one thing our ongoing uPortal launch has illustrated, is that contrary to popular belief, our Oracle database server does not have unlimited resources. To that end, a lot of my recent efforts have been geared towards making our installation more “database friendly”. The centerpiece of this is the connection pooling we set up on…
-
Legacy myUMBC ACLs as PAGS Groups
I think I’ve found a way (two ways, actually) to import program ACLs (from the BRCTL.PROG_USER_XREF SIS table) into uPortal as PAGS groups, so that we can publish uPortal channels with the exact same access lists as the respective areas in the legacy myUMBC. This would be a big win, particularly for an app like…
-
Connection pooling crash course
Just spent the whole day tweaking our new uPortal installation and trying to get it to stay up reliably under load. It’s coming along, but not quite there yet. First lesson: Under any kind of load, you must, absolutely must, enable database connection pooling. That’s because if you don’t, it will open enough database connections…
-
More on iDVD and DVD burning on the Mac
Well, unfortunately, it appears that iDVD doesn’t work quite as I had predicted in a previous entry. Apparently, even though it stores the encoded video between sessions, it still needs the entire uncompressed iMovie project to be able to do anything with the project. I learned this the hard way, after I had deleted some…
-
Big Portal Launch Today..
Today’s the day where we launch our new myUMBC web portal, essentially turning it loose on the unwashed masses and making the world (well, the campus at least) our big, happy beta-test community. As part of this, we’re kindly leaving the old portal around for awhile, because we anticipate stuff will be broken. The new…
-
FastCGI Weirdness
Getting some strange behavior from FastCGI regarding signal handling.. Platform is SunOS 5.10 on Intel, Perl 5.8.6, mod_fastcgi version 0.67. Seems like the FastCGI accept routine is somehow blocking the delivery of signals. If I set a handler for SIGTERM, then call FCGI::accept(), the signal is ignored until the accept routine exits (which happens when…
-
DVD Playback weirdness on the Mac
Well, I burned my second DVD today. I used the same parameters as my first disc, and the burn process was smooth (one thing I forgot.. in iMovie, when you go to auto-create an iDVD project, there’s no way to export only a subset of the actual content in iMovie. You have to physically delete…
-
Sync stuff working great
Today I gave the Mark/Space iCal sync conduit a really good workout, and it came through it without missing a beat. First off, I added the LOCATION field to the Oracle Calendar download. I’m not sure why I wasn’t pulling it down originally, I guess it was just an oversight. As a result, I now…
-
Calendar stuff is up and running
I’m now up and running with the automatic Oracle Calendar export stuff. The other day I tested the Palm sync stuff out, to make sure event deletions were propagating properly to the Palm. Initially, they weren’t. However, after I followed the instructions that I got from Mark/Space support, everything worked fine. These instructions are worth…
-
VNC at Home
Yesterday I played around a little bit with VNC (Virtual Network Computing) on our home network. VNC can be used (among other things) to pull up a remote desktop on a local machine and treat it as if you were sitting at the remote machine. One of its appeals is that it’s multi-platform, unlike similar…