Institutional Knowledge

The best government is that which governs least

“Like an air conditioned gypsy” and other obscure Who references.

Last week one of our mission critical systems hit a bump in the road and was offline a better part of the day. We have a web application called System Status that is used by the help desk to track the availability of such systems. Having resolved all the issues we left the building only to realize that we needed to update the System Status application to notify the help desk and end-users that the system was back online.

Three of us immediately whipped out our iPhones to access the site and change the status flag. At that moment it hit me, why on earth isn’t this optimized for mobile devices? Having found a practical place to experiment with the iUI framework, I set about creating a parallel mobile interface for System Status. This interface, which uses the iPhone interface metaphors, will allow help desk support staff to check and update the status of our systems while out in the field or away on business.

Here are a couple of screenshots to give you an idea of how the interface would look on an iPhone.

I’m about to head out for Orlando to attend EDUCAUSE 08. While it will not technically be a presentation, I will be speaking in the Unicon booth about CAS, Thursday at 11am. If you can’t make it, here is the executive summary:

CAS is awesome.

So, there it is.

I will be trying to post as much as I can here and there will undoubtedly be some commentary on twitter.

Are your LDAPS connections from perl scripts suddenly broken and you’re stuck staring at a screen with a seemingly useless error message?

is only avaliable [sic] with the XS version at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5/IO/Socket/SSL.pm, line 30

I say seemingly because you know you didn’t change anything about IO::Socket::SSL. A few Google searches will at least fill in the blank before the is and tell you that LDAPS is unhappy.

If you are running RHEL 4, you probably had to install IO::Socket::SSL from CPAN. RedHat updated Perl 5.8.5 and some modules that required the XS (interface to use compiled C libraries in modules) version of Scalar::List::Utils. I’m not sure exactly what broke, but the easiest fix is to update IO::Socket::SSL from CPAN and it will update Scalar::List::Utils and all will be well.

I know that we normally cover the technical or statistical issues here at IK, but today our campus updated our “fact sheet” and the higher ed crowd always loves to see what’s going on “over there.”

Enjoy.