OPUS and Assessment 2 - Adding Custom Assessments
This is a follow on to the previous article on setting up assessment in OPUS, an on-line system for placement learning. You probably want to read that first. This is much more advanced and requires some technical knowledge (or someone that has that). Making New Assessments Suppose that OPUS doesn't have the assessment you want, […]
OPUS and Assessment 1 - The Basics
OPUS is a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) web application I wrote at Ulster University to manage work based learning. It has been, and is used by some other universities too. Among its features is a way to understand the assessment structure for different groups and how it can change over years in such […]
Boot problems with systemd? Check /etc/fstab
My (actually this) Debian server failed to boot after a power failure last week, it turns out the graphics card failed too, probably because of the cold and the thermal shock, but replacing the card did not allow the computer to boot. With systemd, if something happens in the boot process, despite some obviously specific […]
Manually completing a botched django migration
I wrote a lot of code for my Workload Allocation system on Friday, and had been developing it on the machine with django's built in lightweight web server, and a (default) sqlite database backend. In production I decided to use a MySQL backend in case sqlite was, well, too lite. One of the things that […]
Workload Allocation Monitoring (WAM) Prototype
I decided to start writing a workload allocation monitoring system for Higher Education. I found one written as part of a JISC project at Cambridge, but despite my experience with PHP I found it difficult to set-up, a bit crude (sorry) and hard to maintain. It was clearly very flexible, and I wanted something flexible, […]
Django, CAS authentication and Apache
I am certainly no stranger to Web Development, but I decide to really look at the Python web framework django in some detail last week to write a small web application for Workload Modelling for Academic Staff. Yes, this is a geeky, programming post. In doing so I ran into some trouble trying to get […]
OPUS and ASET, ten years on
Ten years ago today, I and a few colleagues from Ulster University presented some of our work on on-line Placement Management at the ASET conference in York. At that time our system was simply called the Placement Management System or PMS, and yes of course this led to more than a few comments. At that […]
Upgrading from Serendipity to WordPress on Debian
As you may have noticed, I have upgraded from Serendipity, which was creaking a bit, and seems to no longer be supported by Debian to WordPress. It was a moderately complex task, as I wanted to preserve backwards compatibility and a lot of content with mathematics and code. I installed the Debian package, and tried […]
Python script to randomise an m3u playlist
While I'm blogging scripts for playlist manipulation here is one I use in a nightly cron job to shuffle our playlists so that various devices playing from them have some daily variety. All disclaimers apply, it's rough and ready but WorksForMe (TM). I have an entry in my crontab like this 0 4 * * […]
Python script to add a file to a playlist
I have a number of playlists on Gondolin, which is a headless machine. I wanted to be able to easily add a given mp3 file to the playlists which are in m3u format. That means that each entry has both the filename and an extended line with some basic metadata, in particular the track length […]