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Out with GUIDs.. in with Campus IDs
OK, policy decision for our up-and-coming launch of uPortal 2.5.. I’m going to stop using the LDAP GUID as the uPortal ‘unique username’, and use the new UMBC Campus ID instead. Background: Every uPortal user gets an entry in uPortal’s user table, UP_USER. This table contains (among other things) a numeric ID for primary key,…
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Funny CVS Snafu
First the good news… we’ve decided to go to uPortal 2.5 for the fall, and switch from the buggy Aggregated Layout Manager (ALM) to the purportedly-much-better Distributed Layout Manager (DLM). I’ll be counting the days until ALM is history. With that in mind, I pulled down a fresh copy of uPortal 2.5.2 and created a…
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Portal Meltdowns
We had another portal meltdown this morning. I figure I’ll keep a “meltdown log” of sorts to record notes, etc. Hopefully it’ll help me get to the bottom of this. Background: Every so often, the portal becomes unresponsive. There seems to be no correlation to system load (high demand etc). For example, spring final exams…
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Today’s PAGS tweak
Today I fixed the latest crop of users with portal-access issues: Previous students who took a semester off, or never completed a degree, who want to use myUMBC to register or retrieve a transcript. These students do not have a student affiliation in LDAP, because they’re not “current” students. They also lack an alumni attribute…
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Portal session management tweak
I’ve decided to work a little harder to make myUMBC work for more users. Of course, the ulterior motive is to save work for myself and the help desk. Actually, sometimes my entire job seems geared towards doing things to save myself work. I guess once I’m completely successful, I’ll be able to just sit…
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SSN Remediation: One Step Closer
We’re one step closer to the happy world of SSN Remediation. Our development SIS database is now using the HP-ID, which is the new primary key we’ve designated to replace the SSN in SIS. HP-IDs look distinctly familiar: They’re 9-digit numbers just like SSNs. That way, we cleverly avoid having to rewrite most of the…
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Sorting Tables with Javascript
I just wanted to take a minute to plug Standardista Table Sorting, a nifty set of Javascript routines that automagically sorts rows in HTML tables. I was recently asked to add row sorting to myUMBC’s class list function, and my first thought was to do it in Javascript, which would give the end user instant…
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SSN Remediation Can’t Come Soon Enough..
This June, we’re finally, finally going to stop using SSN as a primary key at UMBC, and frankly, the big day can’t come soon enough. And it’s not for the reasons you’d think. Yeah, there are a lot of privacy and liability issues at stake, but putting that aside, it causes us nothing but headaches.…
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Adding content to Perl myUMBC codebase
Urrgh. I added new functionality to the Perl myUMBC codebase today, and I had forgotten what a pain it was. You know things are bad when you wrote the code, and you have to spend an hour trying to recall how it works. Since it looks like the Perl stuff is going to be around…
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XML myUMBC
The new era has begun… Today I hacked our legacy myUMBC portal code to generate XML output for the registration eligibility function. The goal is to eventually get away from the big, monolithic app and separate the business logic from the presentation. Registration eligibility was a good place to start, because (1) it’s a simple…