Recently in Staff Development Category

I've finally managed to update Teamwork with current projects and also my staff development hopefuls. Yeah me!

I've realized there were quite a number of updated I needed to do since I hadn't been in there in awhile. It's fairly up to date now, and I'm going to try and stay with it. I even noted that I was added to another task put in my Mike H. (Still not quite sure why I'm on this project, but oh well.)

There are a number of annoyances with this application. Noticeably, the links at the top for project takes you to a search page, rather than a list of your projects; the subtasks need individual assignments rather than follow through from the parent with the option to edit; and it's just not a very sexy application, but maybe I just need to spend more time working with it.

I've been learning ASP using the Visual Web Developer and going through all the video tutorials available. ASP is very cool and it makes it a thousand times easier to code. Some of the things I use to do in PL/SQL Developer that took days and hundreds of lines of code has been reduced to a checkbox. You can connect to databases as well, so I can make all my database driven applications from here. It's an amazing tool, but I'm not sure we have everything here necessary to deploy ASP applications, so it will just have to be part of staff development for now.

I'm attempting to figure out a way to upload files from a web application and store them in the oracle database. So far, I don't seem to be making the great strides of advance as I'd hoped, so I've rangled Alex to help with the research. I've been testing with multiple places for the directory, with no success. Here's the code snippet I've tried:

        vfile := bfilename(vdir, 'Test.doc');
	vsize := dbms_lob.getlength(vfile);
	insert into blobfiles (myfile, fseq) values (empty_blob(), 1) returning myfile into vdoc;

        dbms_lob.fileopen(vfile);
        dbms_lob.loadfromfile(vdoc, vfile, vsize);
        dbms_lob.fileclose(vfile);

Alex suggested that maybe it's a permissions error, so I'll try to ask Ron about this. However, with different directories, I seem to be getting different errors. The latest was ORA-01460: unimplemented or unreasonable conversion request. Googleing has pulled up a whole lot of nothing, so I'm moving on to other options.

There have been quite a few posting using MySQL and PHP. Since we have both of those up here, I may just attempt to get that working and then go from there.

Considering I spend most of my days developing applications that are web based, I actually do very little web design, if any. I'm very interested in the process of create web pages from scratch, including color schemes, css, and layout. So this week during staff development, I've attempted to see if I could come up with a page that I'll eventually be able to use for an administration side of admissions online application. DHTML has it's pluses and minuses. Each browser interprets html differently, so it's difficult to get a uniform look to your page. I was attempting to get a header and footer to display at the top and bottom (I know you'd never guess that) and apparently there's no way to do that without javascript capturing the window size and modifying the table height, which was not what I wanted to hear.

I'm also trying to learn about color on the web and what color schemes and combinations appeal to people. There are quite a few color theory pages out there. I like the suggestions on choosing colors from nature photos found on http://www.mezzoblue.com. The comments posted also provided many resources of use.

I've just started with pages that I like or that have interesting layout and have been snagging bits and images. It's still a rather frustrating endeavor, but I'm sure it will get easier the more I learn about it.

This actually worked out really well for Staff Development, as I learned something new that corresponds to a task I don't normally do. I did my first migration today in TR. It was a little shaky, and I really didn't like hearing 'Gee, I've never seen that before.' from people who've been doing migrations for months now. That made me a little nervous. But it all worked out okay. I had a problem with importing contacts though. It seemed to create duplicates with ',' attached to the beginning of the contacts. When I attempted to delete them and try again, I was confronted with: Internal operation (xabp) failed. Ron removed them from ldap for me using ldap administator, but I'll leave the importing to Travis or Shaun for tomorrow.

I realized that my electronic filing system has gotten completely out of control. I decided to finally take some time and clear out old, unused files and directories, create a sorted file system that actually makes sense, and put things where I'll be able to find them. I cleaned up my home directory and my mail. It's a good thing, because I found something that I should have taken care of a month ago! Organization is so important when you have a lot of things on your plate. I may not have learned anything new, but I believe it will help me work more efficiently.

Working with Shaun, we managed to get MySQL installed and running on the Solaris 10 machine, cook, that we had built during a previous staff development project.
After downloading the package for Solaris 10, Troy assisted us with the package install:

• pkgadd -R /a1 -d mysql.pkg

I only had about 1/2 hour today due to a scheduled meeting with the writing center, so I didn't get very much accomplished. Troy did help me get my newly upgrade Solaris 10 box localized. Once jester is added to cougar's list of machines that have access to use ldap authentication, I'll be able to log in and get all my network files available on that machine. I really liked the new Java desktop, but this machine is so lacking in power that moving the mouse around caused delays when nothing was even open. I'll continue to use the CDE until an upgrade becomes available.

I also installed the Sun Update Manager per Troy's instruction and had 215 patches that needed to be downloaded and installed. That made it so much easier to manage. Unfortunately it seems to only work under Java desktop. I need to figure out from where it runs so I can use it under CDE.

This office is now starting development and learning times for about 1.5 hrs three Thursdays out of the month. Thanks to Travis for suggesting this wonderful idea and to Bill for being open to the suggestion and implementing it so quickly and giving his full support. I believe this will benefit everyone on campus, not just our ucs team.

I worked in a team with Shaun, Dale, Ron, and Joe to build a Solaris 10 box using Sparc hardware on the old cook machine. I was able to use a lot of my notes from Solaris 9 installs, so that helped. There were a few quirks along the way, of course, but it went very smooth. We have the entire install done, but now there needs to be configuration and patch updates installed. We want to put Oracle 10g on this machine for testing next week. Man pages didn't seem to work, so we'll need to fix that and then figure out how to remove unsecure services, such as finger, ftp, etc... I'm hoping we can create a flash install so I can easily rebuild my defunct machine, jester. I may try that later.

Since I'll be on vacation next week, I hope someone takes some notes about the Oracle install. I'm really interested in the db admin part.