Hot Topics

David Schlater - had to put up a new security certificate, and heard reports from users that older versions of Java seem to have a problem with it. A pop-up tells some users that the certificate is not known. The solution seems to be moving to the newest version of Java. Asked if anyone else was hearing from users about this.

Amita Mahajan - asked about course preview page in Vista. She was able to create a page and wondered whether anyone knows how to create a direct link to the page. It's available while in Vista, but the link inside Vista doesn't work from outside. David Schlater had an answer: In file manager, in public folder, use action link on file and do preview - grab url up to end of file name.


Matt followed up on an action item regarding WebDAV. He explained that he had to be intentionally vague: Zytos is the content management system of Learn, which Blackboard has used historically. Bb purchased Zytos. Blackboard will make drag and drop feature of moving folders from local computer to the Bb Learn content area. A future file transfer feature looks very easy for instructors to move the content to Bb Learn with a future release.

Kevin O'Brien - wanted to know the maximum number of characters of the full pathname of the link to content embedded in a file. Pete Boysen Googled it - 4096 on Linux. Joe Jacobson explained the 3-2 Tree that determines the algorythm for the file name size, dependent on the size of the file structure. 32,000 for NFS. Joe provided the following information and link:

Hard drives store data on the platters using this algorithm:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-3_tree
This is a simple version of it, and when you’re talking about hard drives the numbers are much larger. It’s a very flat binary tree… and its easy to think of it like platters and sectors making up the data and child nodes of the tree. At any rate, the OS formats the track of a platter into sectors that are some power of 2 (for binary searching). Typically these are 255 or 512 bytes. This is where the limits on file name (or on the disk its location) come from.



Helena - asked about difficulties restoring crosslistings after moving from Vista 8.0.2 to Vista 8.0.3. In contrast, moving a crosslisting in Vista 3 to Vista 8.0.3 works. Asked if anyone else experienced this. Mary Holmes reported having the same difficulty with crosslistings in 8.0.1 that she tried to move manually to 8.0.3.




Round Table

Bryan Withers - a professor copied a section into a new section and he then couldn't upload PDFs and images. Might be an issue with moving Learning Modules from one course to another: he had heard that he should NOT to copy the course content but rather export and import the modules. Others reported not having problems with copying courses. Exporting and importing LMs only moves limited content and instructors would have to do some rebuilding.

Cheryl McCann - just listening today. looking to move to SP3 soon.

David Schlater - semester started Monday, and things are good. Matt asked about section growth, and David reported that Banner show 763 sections, down 813 sections last Spring. Mary asked about the alert icon for Discussions on 8.0.3, and David reported that he had turned that setting off. Discussion followed about how to turn off the Show New Items feature. Mary asked if the alerts are working for courses created in 8.0.3 and forward and courses from previous versions won't. John Porter researched the question and the answer appears to be that all courses in 8.0.3 will be corrected.

Joe Jacobson - nothing this week.

Marinne Kline, Nick Dean - still trying to maintain and courses started this week; live integration is still not working with managed hosting. Having to run integrations manually.

Pete Boysen, Randy Dalhoff - nothing new this week.

Sam McCool - reported quickly about changes to new hardware.

Tim Lambert - posted in the Chat, "I'm having an error reporting problem with my batched siapi files so I have to leave. I"ll try again next week. Cheers folks."

Karen Tan - posted to Chat, "Things are good here at UMOL. I have to take off early now. Talk to you all soon."


Mary Holmes reported that Ferris is dropping Webex as of tomorrow and consequently, she has not scheduled the September meetings. Ferris is moving to Adobe Connect, and will investigate setting up the meeting on Connect.

Tracy Tolliver - quick update classes started on Monday, 1500-1600 sections and enrollment increases - 140,000. Everything going well. Big issue is making all pandemic planning operational. Reports of H1N1 virus. 60% of enrollment is present on system, but most the plan's focus is on supporting instructors through a pandemic.