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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…
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The never-ending basement plumbing project drags on
I finally got back to working on my endless plumbing project today. A couple weeks back, I pressure tested the new branch I ran for the outside sillcock. To do this, I soldered a female adapter onto a 12″ length of pipe, screwed a quick-connect air coupling into it, and attached the other end to…
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Stupid hard-starting generator
We have this generator, that we bought a few years back to use during power outages. It spends 99.9% of its time sitting in the garage gathering dust (much like the snowblower). Every few months, I start the thing up and run it for 20 minutes or so, just to make sure it will work…
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CGenericXSLT channels, parameters, and Local Connection Contexts
I’m a bit strapped for time today, but I did take a quick look at this, to see if it looks doable. In a nutshell.. I’d like to use a local connection context to do legacy authentication and obtain an encr string to pass to various legacy backed services. This would allow me to create…
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Update on calendar stuff
I haven’t done much with my calendar stuff recently, for a couple of reasons; one being that work has been crazy and I haven’t had much time to hack on it, and another being that it’s all working without a hitch. I don’t even have to think about the Oracle Calendar stuff; my cron job…
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That time of year again.
Well, it’s time once again to start working on taxes. And once again I find myself using H&R Block’s Taxcut Product. This year, they’ve gone the consumer-friendly route of including the state product with their Taxcut Deluxe package, so you don’t have to purchase it and request a rebate. Good move on their part. Once…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…