Institutional Knowledge

Wherein we write down some stuff that we know.

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Entries from August 2006

What a Difference a Week Makes

August 29th, 2006 · No Comments

It took only a week for portal traffic to settle into it’s normal pattern.

Of course, it’s still quite busy. I expect an average day this semester will only have a high of 800 concurrent users. We’re still hitting just over 1,000.

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Tags: Portal

First Day: Heavy Usage

August 21st, 2006 · No Comments

Today was the first day of fall 2006 term and boy is our portal tired! The ramp up to today is interesting, so I will use pretty graphs to illustrate.

Saturday saw a fairly large uptick in traffic, but we barely broke the 400 user barrier. The most interesting thing in the Saturday graph […]

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Tags: Portal

Macroformats vs. Microformats

August 16th, 2006 · 9 Comments

Lets look at the Academic Calendar for fall 2006 for a moment. Would you rather have the page marked up with microformat hcal information, have the information available as XML (RSS & Atom), or in iCal format?

Me? I’d take XML first…but then I’m an edge case.

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Tags: Information Design · Microformats

Term Upgrade

August 15th, 2006 · No Comments

We have a nice system of “rolling restarts” that allows us to update portal servers without introducing any “real” downtime for users. We introduce a pre-upgraded server to the pool and that server takes on all new sessions. The two server already in the pool don’t get any new users and “drain” as […]

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Tags: Portal

Zeitgeist for July 2006

August 14th, 2006 · No Comments

Wherein we discover what people can’t find on their own.

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Tags: Zeitgeist

Spiders

August 8th, 2006 · 1 Comment

What does it take to clean to freakin’ windows around here? You think a university would be more concerned with how it looks to visitors as they’ve been running Summer Orientation through the breezeway for the last couple of months.

A few spiders have made their home in our windows. It’s funny and yet a little […]

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Tags: Uncategorized

Linux Kernel Audit: LTO

August 8th, 2006 · No Comments

Issue: How do I prevent the audit facility from causing system hangs when the filesystem containing the audit logs exceeds 80% utilization?

It sounds like a bad joke, doesn’t it? Sadly, no. This may be a RedHat specific issue, but either way it’s easy to disable.

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Tags: Uncategorized

Streamlining Rails

August 4th, 2006 · No Comments

Recently there has been a lot of buzz about Streamlined for Rails apps. Basically it’s smart scaffolding that understands table relationships. Again, that’s the most basic way of talking about it, but it will suffice for what we’re doing right now.

One of the things that I don’t think people understand about Streamlined is […]

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Tags: Ruby on Rails · Web Development

Web Application Development

August 2nd, 2006 · No Comments

Looks like it’s time to think up another 4-letter acronym…

The list of rejects so far:

AJAX
APPL
BACN
BASH
CCCP
CSCO
GOOG
MNKY
PERL
TUBE
USSR

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Tags: Uncategorized