Institutional Knowledge

Fixing 0x80004005 Between Outlook and SharePoint

pberry — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:06:14 +0000

Symptom

You connect a SharePoint calendar to Outlook and during Send/Receive it fails with the ever so helpful message “Contact your SharePoint administrator.”

The Fix

There are items in your list that do not have date information. Calendar events must have start and end time information. Check your items and either fix or delete the items with missing information.

3D models in Google Earth

sjungling — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:27:04 +0000

3D models of campus buildings have begun to appear in Google Earth. Currently there are four of the more classical buildings:

Kendall Hall
Trinity Hall
Meriam Library
Performing Arts Center

Fedora EPEL and RHEL

pberry — Mon, 11 May 2009 16:41:32 +0000

Using RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has many advantages, which nobody really cares about. What people want is a system where they can install the most common, yet “unsupported” packages. Fedora Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) does just this very thing.

If you’re using RHEL you probably work in an environment where you don’t have root and the sysadmin will not just let you install random stuff you compiled, assuming gcc is installed at all. Even if you do have an area to install something from source, you’re now stuck with maintaining it. Enter EPEL, a community effort to take Fedora packages and make them available for RHEL 4 and 5. The list of packages is quite impressive, including painful things like php-mssql (for connecting PHP to Microsoft SQLServer).

Apart from providing packages, what it really provides is a sustainable way for your sysadmin to install and maintain packages that RedHat Network doesn’t provide. The basic setup is that your sysadmin installs a configuration RPM, which drops in the yum repository file and the GPG key used to verify the packages, and then just use yum like they normally would.

So, no more installing git from source.

Motivating people

sjungling — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 04:50:18 +0000

Include people at every step of the process
Treat people as individuals
Recognize & encourage superior work

Motivation can never be forced. People have to want to do a good job

Starting to Communicate

sjungling — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 04:29:12 +0000

Make communications a top priority
Be open to other people: above, below, and beside you on the org. chart
Create a receptive environment

Communications is built on trusting relationships

Design by Committee

sjungling — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:11:51 +0000

By the time everyone on the committee has strongly influenced the colours, the functions, the placement of content, and every other detail, you’ll be left with a lifeless, senseless, overloaded site, and a powerful headache. — Mark Boulton

Thoreauian view of the web

sjungling — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:07:36 +0000

The best government is that which governs least

Goin’ Mobile

sjungling — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:17:32 +0000

“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.

Live from EDUCAUSE ‘08

pberry — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:46:35 +0000

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.

HOWTO: Fix Broken RHEL 4 and Perl LDAPS Connections

pberry — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:06:25 +0000

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.