Programmers and Coffee

Pro gram mer
n. an organism that converts coffee into software.

That so describes me.

On Hold

I am currently in my office on hold waiting for a tech to pick up the phone somewhere in India. I have been working on several IT related projects; one of them being getting authentication working on the student/dorm internet.

I have worked on this before and got it working but we never enabled it because of issues with web browser behavior over self-signed certificates. Now we have purchased a certificate that should allow the authentication to work flawlessly in whatever web browsers the students are using.

Over the last weekend I visited my cousin Becky and her family and had a good time. They did not have internet, so I spent the time entertaining the kids; playing my recorder and clarinet, and just having a good time!

Exhausted IT Guy

What a day. Instead of doing my normal nerdy duties at my desk; I along with my IT cohorts spent half of yesterday and all of today doing major cleaning in IT. President Avery instigated a project involving completely cleaning the campus; disposing of all junk that has been collecting for decades. The project started on the third floor of the admin building; which is where IT is.

Before today; it was next to impossible to keep IT clean; there was just no place to store equipment and supplies so we kept it all in the hall and on the floor in our offices. All of our storage space was being used to store IT and non-IT junk and paper files. The junk and files were removed so that we can use the storage areas in our offices to put away our equipment.

All in a week

Ever have a problem that you think is going to be difficult to solve only to realize suddenly while watching a film in chapel that it is not a hard problem at all?
Ever get stumped on a problem only to come up with a solution while sleeping or in the shower?
Ever use a cigerette lighter to fix a server?

That was last week… This week I look forward to meetings, training, coding, designing, troubleshooting, more meetings, and payday.

Frozen IT guy

Yesterday we got several inches of snow, followed by hours and hours of freezing rain. Last night, that freezing rain turned to rain; making a big slippery mess. The ice on everything is about a inch thick and it is now covered with an inch of water.. making it very slippery. Administration had picked me to be the person they wake up at 5:00 in the morning to send the word out when school is closed due to weather or some natural disaster. Since I was awaken at 3 this morning from the sound of my computers screeching to a halt when we lost power ( followed by the fire alarms being triggered ); I was already wide awake by 5:00 when Brother Miles called and said do what I can to get the word out.

I trudged over to the facilities building (which had power) and posted a message on our website and sent a email to the students informing them of their new-found study time. On my way back to my apartment (I took the scenic route: up the hill which was glazed over with ice) the power came back on. I headed for the admin building to get all the systems running up in the Nerd Center.

I went home, shook off all the ice and water in my hair, and made a pot of coffee.
Time for a nap.

Sometimes its fun to google oneself.

Back in college I wrote a research paper on twins. Being a twin myself, it was an intresting topic to write about and I included my own experiance and observations from being a twin.  Apparently, some other researchers quoted me from that paper; and my perception of twinhood issues are shared among others

Let me quote from a paper I found online while googling myself:

One phenomenon which becomes an interest for twins’ studies is the speech problem experienced by identical twins. According to George Gardei, the author of The Miracle of Twins, twins are generally harder to raise than their single child counterparts. Most children learn speech and other basic skills from their parents. However, twins who share environment since they are children have tendency to learn from each other, which means that their development is slower than average. The best example of this is speech. It is very common for twins to develop their own spoken language rather than learn the language that their parents speak. Twins have a tendency to speak to each other in their language and no one else would understand what they are saying. Twins will eventually learn to speak their parent’s language, but with some difficulty, and they will most likely require speech therapy in their early school years so that they can learn to speak at the same level as the other students. 

George Gardei then continues that identical twins are usually unable to develop normal language abilities, even though they have grown up with lots of language input from peers and surroundings. It is well-known that twins are closer to each other than most brothers and sisters and twins often spend more time with each other. Parents of twins often notice that they develop special way of communicating: they invent their own words and one can often finish the other’s sentence. In exceptional circumstances, this closeness becomes more extreme: they invent a whole language of their own, as in the case of Grace and Virginia Kennedy from Georgia in the USA, who communicated so successfully in their own special language that they did not speak any English at all until after they started school. 

Read the full article
 

Now I wish I still had a copy of that paper somewehere…..

Second Semester Report Cards are done… {kids shiver with fear}

Alright students! The moment of truth is finally here! After two months of sitting at my various computers punching in code, 1000’s of lines of them I might add; your report cards are ready. The hard part is over! There is more work to be done, but that is all a walk in the park compared to what I had done these past several weeks.

Next I need to work on Transcripts. The challenge here is reporting and calculating Post Secondary grades, which are on a 5.0 grade scale. Getting that to work along with the 4.0 HS grade scale is going to interesting to say the least. There are issues in CAMS itself I need to resolve before I can even begin to write the code for the transcripts.

The whole Getting the Academy on CAMS project is about a third done. Here is what is left to do:

• HS Transcripts
• Third Quarter Report Cards (ELM, HS)
• Fourth Quarter Report Cards (ELM, HS)
• Parent Portal
• ELM Transcripts
• Attendance record and Teacher Notes on Report Cards
• Some behind the scenes and interface design.

Brain is mush

Today’s project: Figure out how CAMS stores assignments in the SQL tables.

During Christmas break I finish nearly three quarters of the first semester report cards for the High School. The original design was to calculate the q1 and q2 and the midterm exam and submit them in the transcript table…

But Rachel requested that I provide a way for the faculty to preview and edit the calculated grade if need be. So to do that, I need to redo part of my script to store the grade as an assignment in the ‘Main’ component of the class.  (Each class is divided into four courses, Q1, Q2, Exam and Main course in a semester) But first, I need to figure out how to add assignments to a class in CAMS.

I knew that the SROffer table stores the The course offering for the semester. Tests are tied into the courseid of each course that is stored in this table. My script will need to check for the SROfferID so that it will know what course to add the assignment

This is what I discovered;

Assignments are tied into the SROffer table by the SRCourseTest Table. Grades and Students are tied into the SRCourseTest table by SRCourseGrades. So I wrote some test scripts to find the IDs of a sample student and sample class to manually insert an assignment and grade into a class.

Tomorrow I will be verifying that I have the scripts down pat and hopefully get this part of the project done. Then I need to write the scripts that generate the report cards

Start of a new year

This is my first post of this new year. Since I returned home from visiting my parents I have been very busy. IT has been hammered last week by help desk tickets! I thought it would be fun to share with my readers some of the issues I dealt with this week:

• A faculty memeber could not submit an incomplete grade for a student in an independany study course. The only two grades she could submit was a F or a Q for the student.
• A $10 drop/add fee wasn’t being applied. 
• Student Portal Preview generated a SOAP error for some users. 
• A 13 year old student in the Academy was being charged college tuition on her bill.
• 3rd grade students could not be registered in thier classes.
• Logins for new students and Logins for returning students.
• and more… LOL

Not bad for the first week on 2009!

Christmas Break

I am having a good time visiting my folks up in New Hampshire. I flew in on the 23rd and thankfully had no issues with delays or cancellations. For Christmas I got clothing for which is helpful because I need news cloths.

I am also pleased that I was able to invite my friends from Maine over and spend time with them and their kids whom I am very close to. I finally got to meet their new baby daughter! Dad and I took them (minus the baby) on a ride on the backyard railroad and they went home with happy and very tired kids

I also went to the firing range with my dad and shot off all the 22LR ammo we had! It was a blast! I have not been to the range in several years.