Work Stuff
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The next big thing at work will be integrating our campus courseware systems into centralized databases so that students and instructors can have a single username and password across all systems. When this is done, it will be a Good Thing.
However...
The Chancellor's Office is still actively negotiating university-wide licenses for WebCT and Blackboard, and we don't know when we'll get the new LDAP-compatible versions of those products. We don't really know *whether* we'll get them (because the final cost may be too high)!
How we're supposed to draw up a plan for making them work with the rest of campus systems, therefore, is beyond me.
And guess what the campus system is that we have to make them work with... PeopleSoft! Ugh! That huge corporate system that no one ever understands, is already late and way over-budget, and looms like an iceberg on the horizon. (Someone accidentally called PeopleSoft PeopleSauce yesterday -- great slip o' the tongue!)
Anyway, the work needed to do all this system integration looks somewhat interesting in the very short term, but I wouldn't mind leaving it behind for my own stuff. I would feel pretty bad about dropping out of the project, however, because the end result is greatly needed. Right now we have numerous systems with each their own username/password needs and people constantly get them confused or forget them outright. Combining them will help people a lot.
My immediate faculty supervisors like the PHP/MySQL image database system that I developed for them, so that they can create easy-to-use on-line slideshows. I recently added a feature that they didn't know they needed: a tied-in posting system where students can discuss the slides in the slideshow. Now that they have it, they're excited about it.
And I've just made it so that they can upload a zipped file of images and the server automatically extracts each single image, creates a thumbnail version of it, and then puts it into their slideshow. They asked for that and it took a couple of days to make happen, but makes the system better. I like PHP!
However...
The Chancellor's Office is still actively negotiating university-wide licenses for WebCT and Blackboard, and we don't know when we'll get the new LDAP-compatible versions of those products. We don't really know *whether* we'll get them (because the final cost may be too high)!
How we're supposed to draw up a plan for making them work with the rest of campus systems, therefore, is beyond me.
And guess what the campus system is that we have to make them work with... PeopleSoft! Ugh! That huge corporate system that no one ever understands, is already late and way over-budget, and looms like an iceberg on the horizon. (Someone accidentally called PeopleSoft PeopleSauce yesterday -- great slip o' the tongue!)
Anyway, the work needed to do all this system integration looks somewhat interesting in the very short term, but I wouldn't mind leaving it behind for my own stuff. I would feel pretty bad about dropping out of the project, however, because the end result is greatly needed. Right now we have numerous systems with each their own username/password needs and people constantly get them confused or forget them outright. Combining them will help people a lot.
My immediate faculty supervisors like the PHP/MySQL image database system that I developed for them, so that they can create easy-to-use on-line slideshows. I recently added a feature that they didn't know they needed: a tied-in posting system where students can discuss the slides in the slideshow. Now that they have it, they're excited about it.
And I've just made it so that they can upload a zipped file of images and the server automatically extracts each single image, creates a thumbnail version of it, and then puts it into their slideshow. They asked for that and it took a couple of days to make happen, but makes the system better. I like PHP!
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