Mini memory

Gadgets

My 2GB memory module arrived today (thanks Joanie!) and I installed it in all of two minutes, one of which was spent finding the right screwdriver. This machine is incredibly easy to upgrade. The keyboard will be nearly as easy to replace as the memory, though there’s a couple of persnickety little tabs I’m going to have to be careful with. The keyboard isn’t going to arrive until after Memorial day, though.

Oh, and I got VirtualBox installed without any of the finagling Michael had to do on his mini; Ubuntu 9.04 seems to have almost all the prerequisites installed already. Now I just need to figure out how to get a legal Windows CD and a drive that connects via USB– Dell makes good machines, but even they couldn’t squeeze a CD drive into this tiny box. It would have filled half the insides, even without the bigger power supply they’d have to put in.

Did I mention this thing doesn’t even have a hard drive? Well, technically it does; it’s just a solid-state one, like a USB stick. That means the machine doesn’t have to burn a lot of power spinning a stack of metal platters, which in turn means I get over four hours of battery life even with the dinky little four-cell 32WH battery Dell put into the machine. It also means there’s no need for a built-in fan, though I’m a little worried about the machine overheating and killing my battery (you do not want to get Lithium-ion batteries hot; leaving one in a car on a summer day can permanently destroy most of its capacity. For more on this see Battery University.) Ive taken to popping out the battery and running on AC only when I have a plug available; probably a bit paranoid, but I like this thing and you won’t be able to get batteries for it forever.

I sprung for the extra-big 16GB drive, which may sound small compared to normal drives, isn’t even a quarter full even with a full operating system, Open office, and a metric boatload of other programs. Put that in your cache and smoke it, Windows. If I ever start running out of space, there’s an SD card slot for more space, plus I can always use some of the metric boatload of USB sticks I’ve accumulated over the years.

And I guess I’m old, because I remember when it was totally awesome that you could get a hard drive with 20 whole megabytes on it! Like, you could never fill that up for years, man! It was the size of a brick, and weighed about the same as one too. Now a thousand times that much fits on a couple of chips, and seems like not very much room. The eighties were a long time ago, and we live in the future now.

More on the Mini

Gadgets, Programming

I mentioned that I didn’t like the keyboard on my mini, and it turns out a lot of mini-9 owners share that feeling. I was looking around on the forums at mydellmini.com last night and found out about a different keyboard you can order from Dell for fifteen bucks. Apparently by shrinking the spacebar and backspace keys by a fair bit, and slightly narrowing the others, they’ve gotten a much more normal arrangement. I tried to order it, but apparently it’s out of stock; they’re going to email me when it gets back in.

I did find out about another deal, though; they were selling 2GB memory modules for thirty bucks. Oddly enough, had I ordered my mini originally with 2GB, it would have added $50 to the price, so I grabbed the chance. I want to run Windows XP in a virtual machine on the thing, and that takes a fair chunk of RAM.

Wait, you may say, aren’t you running Windows already? Nope, though you can get the Dell Minis with Windows, it’s more expensive that way. To get the best price you need to get them with Ubuntu Linux. In case you’re not really up on the computer world, Linux is a free operating system (well, technically a group of free operating systems) very similar to Unix, which has been around since the 1970s and is still used on a lot of servers, including many here at WOU.

Linux has been around since the 1990s, but until fairly recently, you had to be a serious computer geek to get much use out of it. The Ubuntu project is one of several efforts to change that, and it’s been very successful, combining the many open-source programs and systems to build a variant of Linux that’s probably the easiest ever for non-geeks to get into.

It’s so easy that when I decided I didn’t like the somewhat idiot-proofed version of Ubuntu that came with my Mini, I was able to completely wipe and reinstall it with version 9.04, the latest and greatest, in just a couple of hours. I’m liking 9.04 (AKA “Jaunty Jackalope” in Ubuntu’s naming scheme) a lot better than the version I started with, and I only had to fix one little problem for it to work perfectly on my Mini. There are a bunch of very useful instructions available at ubuntumini.com so I didn’t have to spend hours hunting around for obscure snippets of information as I did when I tried installing other versions of Linux on other machines in the past.

Anyway, back to work. After a slow few months, I’m starting to feel like I’m getting some programming mojo back, and that feels pretty good. Hopefully things keep looking up, because I’m behind on some stuff that really needs to be finished soon.

Mini laptop

Gadgets

A couple weeks ago, Michael Ellis clued me in on a nice little deal from Dell; through their Faculty/Staff/Student purchase program, they have great prices on their mini laptops, also known as netbooks. (If that link doesn’t work, go to www.dell.com/epp and choose Higher Education from the menu.)

Just for being part of WOU, you get a 7% discount at any time, though to take advantage of it you’ll need to create a dell login and give them your V-number to prove you’re really associated with WOU. They also have $50-off deals that come and go on various systems from week to week; if you don’t see the deal on the model you want, wait a few days and look again, and repeat until you do see it. Make sure you’re logged in with your dell account, or it might not show you the deals!

You can find their netbooks on this page. I got the Mini-9, and I’m happy with it except for the narrow keyboard which has several keys in odd places. The brand-new Mini-10v is almost the same price, but with a slightly wider screen and a more normal keyboard.

I’ll probably be posting more about this thing as the days go by.

Incredibly exciting project update.

Uncategorized

It turns out the Moodle course population thing isn’t going to be used until summer, but that’s OK since it’ll be ready to go whenever they need it and meanwhile I can turn to other projects.

Right now the main ones are updating the user account deletion system, automating the resetting of guest user accounts, and setting up a system for automatic creation and changing of email aliases. All very exciting stuff, I know. I’ll take a minute so you can stop jumping up and down and get back in your chair.

Seriously, though, even though these kind of things are dull as dishwater to talk about, they are important. Updating the user account deletion process will let us clean out thousands of unused accounts from our servers, and free up a lot of space. This means we can go longer before having to buy more disk space, and it means a time savings for those of us in UCS who administer these accounts; several processes go way too slow because of the sheer number of accounts. Every minute we don’t spend waiting on pages to load is a minute we can spend solving problems for you. The guest account reset and email alias update automation will save significant time for some of us, who can then get on with other projects.

So, even though projects like this aren’t sexy and cool, they are important. Saving time and money is always a good thing. but even more so right now.

Current projects

Work Misc

OK, I’m trying to get back into this blogging thing. This month my main project has been setting up a system to automatically populate Moodle courses with the students who have registered for them. Currently, if the course has an online component in Moodle, each student has to get an enrollment code from their professor and then sign on to Moodle and enter that code to enroll in the Moodle course.

To save this extra step, I’ve developed a system that can look at a CRN entered in Moodle, and go to Banner and get the roster of students registered in that course, then create an enrollment record for them in that Moodle course. This was a little hairy to figure out because the Moodle database doesn’t just say “this student is enrolled in this course”; there’s an abstraction layer I don’t fully understand, but I did figure out how to use it to enroll a student.

I’m just waiting for the CRNs to be entered into Moodle, and then I can run the script. I’ll set ut up to run every morning for the first few weeks of the term, to catch late adds. I don’t yet have a good way to unenroll a student from a course, so the professors are going to have to handle drops on their own.

The ultimate goal is to automatically create a Moodle course component for every course listed in Banner for a given term, but that’s still a ways off. I’ll need to dissect the process by which Moodle course shells are created, and find a way to do that via a script.

The next major project is to clean up our user database before we move to the new LDAP, email and calendar servers sometime in the next few months. We have several thousand accounts ont he system for students who did not graduate but have not registered for any classes for two years; over the long term, we’re going to delete accounts when they reach that point, but the first time we do it, we’ll be getting rid of about five years’ worth at once.

This will mean cleaning out a lot of disk space, too, at least hopefully. Students already lose access to their files after they leave or graduate, but a lot of that stuff is still on the system. Graduates will still keep their email addresses, as long as they log in every couple years or so, but they won’t have an on-campus network login, or any file storage.

I feel like we’ve been running around putting out fires for so long, it’ll be really nice to actually make some progress on something like this.

Oh, and I’m on Facebook now if anybody’s into that. Just look for me by name; there are more Swartzendrubers than you might expect, but only one Ron who is listed as Western Oregon staff.

Felt like I got hit by a train

Work Misc

I’ve been fighting a low-level cold for a couple of weeks, and I thought I had it beaten, but last Thursday it came back and bought its friends. That pretty much shot my weekend, but I’m feeling better now and ready to get caught up on the stuff I got behind on from taking sick time.

Other than that, the main thing I’m working on now is a way to automatically create everybody a Moodle account, so we can link Moodle to the WOUPortal. In case you aren’t familiar with Moodle, it’s our main tool for online classes, or for adding online content to normal classes. Some of our online class stuff is still on the old WebCT server, but most of it has been moved to Moodle. To check out Moodle, go to http://online.wou.edu.

The next project is to automatically enroll students in the Moodle courses as soon as they register for the class in Wolf Web. I’ve figured out the basics of how to do this, but the tricky part will be to detect when people drop courses, and un-enroll them in Moodle.

Some progress on the blog server front!

Blogging

OK, of the four problems I noted last time, I’ve made progress on three of them. Plus I got permission to delete all empty blogs on the system and stop automatically creating a blog with every new user account. That in itself is going to make a big difference.

Luckily, I have a semi-automated procedure to create new blogs, so if anybody is offended that their empty, unused blog was wiped without their permission, I can recreate it in under a minute. Well, OK, luck has nothing to do with the fact that this procedure exists. It’s there because I created it. All these after-midnight workdays have to count for something, you know. (No I’m not whining… late nights mean I get to come in late in the afternoon. Yes, my schedule is weird. Yes, my boss is very generous and forgiving. And yes, it’s late at night and I may later regret being so glib.)

Anyway, progress on the specific problems:

  • The permissions issue was actually caused by a misconfiguration on the old server that gave it too many rights. The new one is set up correctly (and much more securely) but this means that some old blogs that were set up under the old, too-loose security rules won’t work now that things are the way they were supposed to be all along. (No, I will not explain exactly what was wrong and how it’s right now, sorry. We can’t give out detailed security info.) Anyway, I still need to go in and fix some of the blogs, but the major ones have already been taken care of.

  • The style problems happen because the upgrade didn’t change the templates on the existing blogs. The company says “User data is sacred and we never change it”, which is really just a nice way to spin “We couldn’t possibly upgrade the actual contents of your blogs without messing them up really bad.” Luckily, I found a way to upgrade the templates on an existing blog; it’s been successfully tested on two blogs, and now I need to apply this fix to everybody’s blog, except those which were so highly customized that the owner doesn’t want their templates converted to the generic MT4 versions. Those people probably aren’t going to be applying the canned styles anyway, so this problem won’t affect them.

  • The random logouts were caused by a subtle error in the code I added to the blog server to make it compatible with the WOUportal single sign-on system. I just found that and fixed it… or at least, it seems to be fixed, because I’m not getting logged out anymore. And, oh yeah, logging into the WOUportal automatically logs you into blog admin, too.

  • Then there’s the blog stats widget thing. I have no clue here, sorry. Of course, that widget didn’t even exist on the old server, so I don’t consider it a gigantic tragic loss.

Anyway, back to work….

Blog server update woes

Blogging

Known problems with our upgrade:

  • People with blogs outside their public_html folder may encounter permission errors when rebuilding (eh, they call it “publishing” now) their blog

  • If you apply a style to your blog, it will completely mess things up and your blog will look like the computer puked. (That’s the technical term, anyway)

  • You get randomly logged out when administering your blog

  • the blog stats widget doesn’t show anything

I have yet to figure out why this is. I can fix the permission errors when they are reported to me, at least. And newly created blogs won’t have any problem with styles. I just wish we didn’t have 42 million blogs on our system (well, OK, I exaggerate. It;s really a bit over 13,000, of which fewer than 500 have even one entry.)

FeH. OK, I need to get back to working on this thing instead of complaining about it.

I hate scammers

Spam/Scam

Since the security certificate on our main webserver was set to expire soon, I’ve been getting these email messages at webmaster@wou.edu saying “Reminder – SSL Certificate for wou.edu expires in 5 Days”, counting down every day until the expiry date. I didn’t pay attention to them at first, because I already knew the cert was about to expire. Then after we renewed the cert (Thanks, Summer!) the messages still kept showing up.

I took a closer look and found out that the messages don’t even come from Thawte, our usual certificate vendor, but from some place called “certstar.com”. They pretended our expiring certificate came from them, though, and told us we should renew it by clicking the handy-dandy link they provided.

Well, I wasn’t born yesterday, so I didn’t touch the link, but I was curious enough to go to their main site. It looks reasonably professional, but they don’t secure it with one of their own certificates; they got one from Comodo instead. That’s a real red flag. For all I know, they just take the money and run. Even if they have legitimate certificates to sell, it’s really slimy to send those deceptive emails to people.

I wonder how many people out there have gotten fooled?