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IE and XML miscellany
Well, I learned something new about IE today. If you use an empty-element tag in a <script> declaration, for example: <script language=”javascript” src=”/foo/bar.js”/> It breaks IE. Apparently, IE doesn’t treat the trailing slash as a close tag, and treats the rest of the page as an inline script. Firefox, as expected, has no problems with…
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The Eternal PlacePro Struggle.
Well, I spent most of the day fixing our PlacePro single signon. Again. PlacePro is the ultimate example of why I hate doing single signon to remote webapps on third-party sites. It’s a pain doing it in the first place, and when it’s done, it becomes an ongoing maintenance hassle. When it works, it’s nice,…
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Web Proxy channels and cw_person parameter
CWebProxy provides a channel parameter called cw_person, which is a comma-separated list of person attributes. If this parameter is set, CWebProxy is supposed to fetch the listed attributes and pass them to the back-end web application as CGI parameters. This is a potentially handy feature, because then we can develop “smart” unauthenticated apps which present…
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Draft Schedule of Classes
Just a quick note on the UMBC web schedule of classes thing… There’s a “draft” version of the schedule of classes, that the registrar occasionally likes to populate. The URL of this version is http://www.umbc.edu/aboutumbc/newschedule. Access to this page is controlled by a simple .htaccess file. There’s a single username and password that the registrar…
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$#%!!? FAR
It’s Faculty Annual Report (FAR) season again. Last year, FAR season was not fun. The FAR mysteriously “lost” a bunch of faculty reports (my theory was that it never saved them in the first place, but I digress), and many unfun hijinks ensued. The author of FAR still works here, but he’s been sucked into…
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Student IDs, and making the portal work for users who don’t have them
First: The facts of life. UMBC has the concept of a “student ID number.” This number is used in SIS as the primary key for almost every table. All students have these IDs, as do faculty members who teach courses, etc. uPortal itself does not use or require this number to do its work. The…
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The hassle^H^H^H^H^H^Hlegacy of PINs at UMBC
So, we have this new campus portal at UMBC. And for the most part, the launch has gone pretty well. As part of this whole thing, we’re rethinking some of our old, outdated business processes and changing the way they work under the new portal. One of these is the PIN (Personal ID Number). Waaaaay…
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Affinities affinities affinities…
As expected, the whole uPortal affinity thing is really drawing folks out of the woodwork. For those of you who came in late, uPortal uses a totally different scheme from the old portal to determine who sees what content. Let’s take the “Faculty Options” channel as an example: Portal You see faculty options if… old…
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Stalking the infinite loop
Today began with an effort to track down the infinite loop which is causing the java process to munch CPU cycles on the portal server. The problem seems to be spreading.. when I checked this morning around 6:30am, there were 4 looping threads on uportal1 and 5 on uportal2. I’ve tracked down the offending loop,…
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Relaunch day
First “real” test (i.e. University open for business, people hitting portal) for our re-launch of uPortal today. It went up Sunday. Issue #1: I see that we still have the problem of the JVM going up to 100% CPU utilization occasionally. It was like that this morning when I signed on around 7:30am. Portal was…