Two days of DevCon complete. Lots and Lots of good Meaty Sessions.  There was a great all day session yesterday on Performance tuning called Deploying a Highly Scalable and Available Blackboard System by Stephen Feldman. Will get in to more detail when I return home and fine tune this Blog post. Gearing up now for the Kick-OFF of the BBWorld portion of the conference with a Keynote from Greg Mortenson author of the book "Three Cups of Tea".

For the most part very smooth flying. The first landing was a little shaky when it felt we either blew a tire or never had one to begin with. Then the second leg the pilot discontinued in flight service and the asked the attendants to sit also and prepare for a bumpy ride. We have arrived safe and sound at the Gaylord Palms. It is a beautiful facility with its own gator pit (pictures to follow). Had breakfast and settling in for the first session of the day DIY U - with Anya Kamenetz. 

 I've been pretty bad about posting here, I'm going to strive to do better. I give up on the idea of just posting new, unique, and insightful stuff.  I'm gonna go for a good, old fashioned, blog rant!  Ok.. subject for the day - the iPad.

 Very cool little bit of tech that probably is totally game changing. Revolutionary, Apple says.  We'll see.  I've had a bit of time on them, quite impressed. I really think they will be perfect for consuming content, and to a degree creating content as well. Thats all  the computer power most folks will ever need.

 I heard somewhere that people were needing to get from the ground floor to the third floor metaphorically, and we geeks gave them a jet fighter to get there...   what they really needed was an elevator!  In my years of supporting tech,  I've noticed that most users, God love 'em, really don't "get" it...  they go through the motions, they basically know some behaviors that get their work done, but they have no idea what they are really doing.  

So heres the meat of the rant.  People malign the iPad for many reasons, but I've heard two mentioned often - no file system that you can see at least, and no printing.  At first as a techie, I thought  - Apple this is stupid, omg this isn' t a real computer!   Thinking as a techie...  which most vendors do.  Ok.  No file system - GOOD!  Many users don't know how to navigate and place and retrieve files anyway!  Go ahead and abstract it away, thats a good thing for the user.   The biggie, no printing.   As mentioned, I have many years of tech support and the scars, mental and physical to prove it...  The problems that deeply scar my psyche are from dealing with PRINTING!!!!   WHY DO WE STILL NEED TO PRINT STUFF????   Sorry for yelling...  anyhow, no printing, GOOD!!!  There are dozens of ways to get information shared with others.  We should try to end printing on other platforms as well!  

By now you realize the depth of depravity my tortured tech soul is capable of...  this may be a rant, but think about it.  I'm sure the file system "Problem"  and the printing "Problem" will be addressed soon.  My $.02 - it's ok as it is.

Glenn Weibe and I have been chosen to present at BB World 2010. In my 10+ years of working with BB this is the first BB World I have been able to attend. I am uber excited. We are we have been building a Blackboard Consortium of Schools. In an effort to make BB more Financially viable to small to medium size k-12 schools and community colleges. This arrangement is a win-win-win.  Our School are able to buy one of the most powerful and user friendly LMS's in production, Blackboard wins as we grow the program (no lost clients), and we win in both exposure and a little money. I will discuss more as we close in.  Stay tuned.

Pete

If you are ever tasked with updating the VMware tools in a linux guest from the command line, it is best to execute the installer from the console.  If you update the tools from a remote connection via ssh, the install will fail because the installer restarts the network service (unless you run the installer in the background by appending "&" to the end of the command).

After my mistake became clear, I opened vcenter and ran the installer from the console, hoping it would pick up where it stopped.  Some of the VMware tools files were still lingering in the system and installer displayed and error which stated it could not find vmware-uninstall.pl. 

So here is the easy fix... simply remove the /etc/vmware-tools directory (or /etc/vmware) and re-run install-install.pl.  Just make sure to do it from the console. :)