Blackboard CE8 SP2 Upgrade and Scholar Powerlink

We upgraded our Blackboard Learning System CE8 to Service Pack 2 level on production yesterday afternoon. After the upgrade, the Scholar powerlink was no longer working.

The error message was:

An error occured in the communication between your Blackboard system and Scholar.
The Blackboard system clock may be incorrect.
If you continue to see this error, contact your Blackboard system administrator.

Multiple of us tested it, and we consistently received the above error.

This was really upsetting because this was one piece of the upgrade we could not test on our development cluster. We had a lot of troubles when we initially registered our development cluster onto the Blackboard's Scholar system for configuration testing, which then took away the ability of our production system to be registered. It took Blackboard technical support and their Beyond team over three months to resolve this (basically deleted the registration record of our development cluster in their database). As it turns out, Blackboard does not support both development and production clusters to be registered onto their Scholar system. Therefore we cannot test Scholar powerlink when we tested SP2 upgrade on development.

To my surprise, when I logged on our Blackboard CE8 SP2 and clicked on the Scholar link today, it worked. I immediately checked with my colleagues who helped in testing yesterday. They confirmed that it was also working for them. None of us encountered the above error any more.

It's good that it's working.

But I'm uncomfortable of not being able to understand was why it worked after we left the upgraded system overnight. Is it because some background job needed to run first so that the Scholar Powerlink would work after an upgrade? Mystery.

MMR Vaccine and Autism

A friend of mine asked me for advice on whether she should give her 1-year-old daughter the MMR vaccine since there has been so much controversy about this vaccine causing autism.  

I have done a lot of readings a year ago about vaccine and have created my own spreadsheet to organize what I have learned.  But I'm glad that I decided to do more searching tonight to see if there was any new information.  And I found this New Study Shows No Link Between MMR Vaccine and Autism article in Dr. Sears' web site.

I sent her all the information I had.  I hope she can make an educated decision for her own daughter.

Vaccine Schedule

Given so much controversy about vaccine safety, I decided I need to do my own reading, and come up with my own decision about the vaccine schedule for my baby.

My rationales are how common, and how severe the disease is, what are the ingredients contained in the vaccine and their potential side effects, whether the vaccine contains live viruses.  Also, I would try to space out all the shots, and not take any all-in-one combined shot as much as possible so that the little body does not have to handle that much drugs all at once.

Here is the planned vaccine schedule I come up with for my baby last year:

Planned Age	Disease	Brand
2 months	DTaP	Daptacel
2 months 1 week	HIB	ActHIB
2 months 1 week	HIB	ActHIB
2 months 2 weeks	Pc	Prevnar
2 months 3 weeks	Polio	IPOL
4 months	DTaP	Daptacel
4 months 1 week	HIB	ActHIB
4 months 2 weeks	Pc	Prevnar
4 months 3 weeks	Polio	IPOL
6 months	DTaP	Daptacel
6 months 1 week	HIB	ActHIB
6 months 2 weeks	Pc	Prevnar
9 months	Polio	IPOL
10 months	Flu	Fluzone (half of the single dose vial)
11 months	Flu	Fluzone (half of the single dose vial)
15 months	DTaP	Daptacel
15 months 1 week	HIB	ActHIB
15 months 2 weeks	Pc	Prevnar
17 months	Varicella	Varivax
18 months (likely later)	MMR	MMR
2 years 6 months	Hepatitus B	Recombivax HB
2 years 7 months	Hepatitus A	Harvix
3 years 6 months	Hepatitus B	Recombivax HB
3 years 7 months	Hepatitus A	Harvix
4 years 4 months	DTaP	Daptacel
4 years 4 months 1 week	Polio	IPOL
4 years 6 months	Hepatitus B	Recombivax HB
5 years 6 monhts	Varicella	Varivax
5 years 7 months (likely later)	MMR	MMR
~12 years	Tdap	Adacel
~12 years	Meningococcal	Menactra

He is almost one year old now.  I have been following this schedule most of the time with a few delays.  For example, when he got sick (from a cold), I would delay the scheduled shot until he recovers.  I have been pretty happy with it.  Therefore I'm posting it online so others can learn about it.

The majority of the information I gathered is from Dr Sears' The Vaccine Book. Other than that, it is from various web sites Google directed me to.

I urge all parents to do their own readings and come up with their own decisions on the subject.

Using Google Alerts to Check your Web Sites

I recently found Google Alerts very useful as a quick way to detect whether any of our web sites are hosting spam.  (For those who do not know, Google Alerts gives you updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your choice of query or topic. They can be in the form of email, or news feed).

What I did was, I defined several search terms such as the followings in Google Alerts.

• viagra site:yourdomain.com
  
• mortgage site:yourdomain.com
  

I chosed comprehensive search type, delivered to my email address, and once a day in the alert settings.

When Google found new entries, it would email me the summary once a day.  I can then glanced through the summary to verify if any of those entries could possibly be legitimate.  Or else, I would send that to the appropriate party to follow-up.

SQL Injection Attacks by Country of Origin

Here is a world map of SQL injection attacks by their country of origin from January to October this year. The darker the color, the higher the number of hits or percentage.



Here is a pie chart representation of the information.

Network Problem Tonight

We had a network problem tonight which affected some of our servers and applications.

It was a strange problem. I could get to our applications from home. In fact, eLearning, Skylight and the Wiki farm were all working properly. Our legacy applications showed an error which pointed to the direction of AD authentication failure. 

My colleague went in to the office and said he could not get to any of our applications at all. So, for a while, we thought there were DNS resolution problems instead. I called central ITS. They checked and confirmed that everything was working properly on their side.

We performed further tests on various part of the network. Finally we concluded that it was our firewall cluster not routing traffic properly. We rebooted them one by one, and services resumed right away.

Fortunately, eLearning (which is by far our highest usage application), Skylight Matrix Survey System, and the Wiki farm were not affected. But the rest of our legacy applications were down for about 1 hours and 20 minutes. If it happens during the finals week, and the students cannot access their materials in their last hours of revising, the impact is much more severe. 

The firewalls have been performing reliably well all along. I almost believe that they are infallible. Nothing is! We need to better prepare ourselves, have better procedure to diagnosis network problems quickly.  

Or look at it in a different angle, firewall is just one example of many possible single point of failures. We need to ask ourselves what should our operational strategy (or institutional strategy?) be to prevent single point of failures as we move forward?

Moving into Web2.0 - Delicious

Just finished our departmental retreat today about "Moving into Web2.0". I did a short story on how I am using Delicious social bookmarking service as a vehicle to help me do my job more efficiently.



I felt that the message was very well received during the presentation and demonstration. But yet during the "What are the obstacles in moving into Web2.0?" activity, many said they did not have time to experiment with various Web2.0 tools.

At least, the process of doing the presentation helps me reflect on what I'm doing and how it has been working. I feel very good about this.

Now... Challenge yourself to change some old habits, you can learn to work more efficiently. Yes, you can!