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Admin
This just illustrates why tuition continues to increase at local universities and colleges every other semester. GROSS INCOMPETENCE and mismanagement of finances and resources. Every year I see a new report about how the university officials were low on cash its probably just that they BLEW ALL THE CASH! I could laugh a little bit at this story BUT IT MOSTLY PISSED ME OFF. Now I know why everything was so expensive during my college years.Geez.
Admin
Hmmmm.
This is depressing.
I assure everyone that no matter how inefficient and wasteful colleges are, American public schools are far far worse.
I know a guy who, as a kid, was his school's systems administrator. Evidently his school got a $1 million grant to upgrade their computers & network. So they decided to spend it adding memory to their Intel 286 PCs (when Intel 486 was the standard). After wasting a bucket of money doing that they finally figured out that they needed to upgrade the CPUs. So they bought some bastardized Intel 486 systems, but with minimum specs. So then they had to spend even more money upgrading these new Intel 486s.
Makes me want to climb a tree and fling poo at someone.
Admin
[image]
I really miss irish girl.
Admin
UMass still has that Peoplesoft system (called IRIS). The good news is that they do have course descriptions in the system now. The bad news is that they're completely separate from the UI to register for a course: you have to go into the search interface, find your courses, write down the "course number" (which is not the same as the number of the course, such as 91.503 for Fundamentals of Computer Science), and then go to the registration interface and fill in the course number.
Oh, but first, to search for courses for the term you want, you have to give it the "term number". There's another search interface for terms, which basically doesn't work; you can search by Long Description or Short Description, but, last time I tried it, I wasn't able to find any keywords that matched Fall 2008. So I left the search form blank, which gave me a list of all terms, and read through it by hand.
And I'm pretty sure the Back button is still broken; Peoplesoft has its state that knows what page you're Supposed to be on. This is also why you can't just open up the search page and the registration page side-by-side.
Admin
For what it's worth, Peoplesoft is still at it. We just switched over to a Peoplesoft-based system this year at my university (an Ivy-League institution, no less). The really shocking thing is that it's apparently no better than it was in the late 90s -- broken back buttons (every request you send is a POST), Javascript alerts about COBOL errors, load problems bringing University-critical systems to a crawl on the first day of enrollment ... ugh. I'd be happier enrolling by telephone.
Admin
It's used here at salisbury.edu also, and it blows. Everything you wrote about it is accurate.
Admin
UC Berkeley has a web interface to a touch-tone phone system for registration. You can still get “All lines are busy” errors on the web server.
Admin
Ahh, Java, the wannabe-emo kid of computer languages. If you personified it, it would only lack those thick-rimmed glasses and skin tight stripped shirt. Add those and you have Ruby.
I'm feeling so hip and edgy.
Admin
This thread reminds me so much of my old university. Fortunately I had finished all courses just before the latest and most enterprisey version came out.
I'd be sure the story was from there if not for three differences:
The old, working command line system was originally done as a programming course assignment. According to some stories, at least.
The new version did not run on a mainframe but a cluster of PCs.
Load tests were originally required but later dropped because of the costs.
The only funny part was that name of the company who implemented this monstrosity was not entirely unlike a verb for showing one's behind.
Admin
Columbia University still allocates time-slots (at the beginning of a semester) to students for class registration - i never understood why.. may be this is us..
Admin
Actually, it's more like multiple inheritance in action.
Admin
I fail to see the WTF. I thought that would be no other way to do that.
Admin
I remember hearing this story before (or at least something incredibly similar). It's killing me now that I can't think of what university it was.
Admin
Pre-PC?
Many years ago there was a brand new Community College in Edmonton Canada. There were about 2000 students spread across multiple campuses, which made for an interesting problem in timetabling – another story. The IT Department had an administrative head (with no technical knowledge), his secretary, a card punch operator and a programmer (me). Running a program required driving across town to another college (who actually had their own computer) and feeding in the box of punched cards.
On the recommendation of the (non-technical) IT Head, the guidelines were set that registration details had to be in the post to students no more than 24 hours after the registration day and results posted to the students no more than 24 hours after the department received them from the teaching staff.
So the system was designed around the highest technology available – punched cards.
The student records were built up as the applications came in. For registration the computer punched back out one card per applicant with their name and id number. As well it punched out one card per available class place.
Every class was given their pack of pre-punched cards.
When the student came through the door s/he first collected her pre-punched card then wandered around deciding what classes to take and negotiating with the relevant staff member. For each class into which s/he was accepted, s/he was given a pre-punched card for that class.
When s/he had finished registering, s/he handed over the packet of cards with their id-pre-punched card on the front and the classes in which they were to be registered following.
The registration card then just read the boxes of cards in the form of student1/class/class/student2/class/class etc. Since we were using another college's computer we worked outside hours to get fast turnaround and so usually finished by early morning (around 3am). The student printouts were in the mail and the class lists at the college admin office by 9am.
Results we did in reverse – a card was pre-punched with the student/class details and sent in batches by class to the teaching staff member. S/he marked the result in Texta on the card and returned them to us. We loaded them into a pre-programmed key punch that auto loaded each card and stopped it directly in front of the operator who then had only to hit a single key matching what had been scrawled on the card to add this information to the pre-punched card. The keypunch then auto-loaded the next card.
The computer then simply had to read and resort into student/class order then apply.
I don't know what they are using currently but I'd be willing to bet it isn't any faster or more accurate and it will have cost many thousands of times as much to build and run as the card system.
Admin
Reading this smells to classic of IBM and big biz bs.
In the 90s I was working as the Internet Developer at a company and I had a website for a newspaper the company owned. This was before CMS was a common concept so the articles were hand pasted into a .html file, with a header & footer in them. We needed to be able to search the site, so my boss (before talking to me) wanted to sound big & bad and got IBM to come in for a consulting session (iirc we had to pay them $3k just to get them to come talk to us). All the search needed to do was search all the .html files and return the pages. IBM recommended writing the search from scratch at a cost of $90k. I quickly discovered a free tool called ksearch and told my boss I could do it in 4-6hrs (to figure out the tool, set it up, test it, customize the UI for it on the website). Fortunately sanity took over (because of IBM's outrageous price) and our site was running a great search the next business day. (PS: a year later I wrote a CMS, custom search engine, dynamic bio pages for authors that had a link to every article they wrote on the site and it stood for 3yrs, it was a work of art... until I left and they outsourced web dev to a firm who rewrote the site in ColdFusion with only half the features.)
Then that same year, the company wanted to hook up more employees (eventually all) to the internet, so we needed a firewall setup. IBM came in and recommended a solution using an AS/400 (not cheap!), after reading the white paper, I found the box had a x86 emulating card to run Linux and a publicly available firewall app. After I outed this solution, we ended up going for a hardware base firewall router that cost pennies on IBM's dollar.
So yes, this is classic IBM. So next time you hear an outrageous story involving IBM, it's more like true than not.
Admin
Admin
Y'know, I remember NU's old paper-based system, and it really wasn't that bad, from the students' point of view. A few minutes picking out courses from the catalog, a few minutes of chaos in the registration room, and you were done. Of course, there was always the stress over whether you'd get the courses you wanted; but a computer system doesn't avoid that.
I suppose the administration wanted to reduce labor costs; preparing for that chaos in the registration room must've taken a lot of time. But the computer system would have to be really good to be worth it from the students' point of view.
Admin
Until this spring, course registration at my university (which shall remain nameless so as not to encourage ridicule) was done via a web-based Flash-like player (called Opal) that interfaced via telnet to an ancient mainframe. How ancient? They had to turn it off at night to save wear and tear on the machine.
It was a common joke in the Object-Oriented Programming class that every year there would be a project, such as my own, to replace it, and of course, none were ever adopted, despite the fact that they worked better, looked better, scaled better, and most importantly, could eliminate the registration time holds designed to ensure low load.
What was it replaced with? A PeopleSoft CRM which was not edited to be more university-friendly beyond changing a few strings. :facepalm:
Admin
The North Dakota university system (at least NDSU and UND) currently use PeopleSoft (with an ugly "ConnectND" theme/skin on the web interface) for this very task. All students have an "EMPLID". I can't produce tears at a high enough rate to use it very often.
Admin
Java ... that explains everything.
By the time you finish drawing up fancy diagrams, writing abstract classes, and defining interfaces, you've completely forgotten what all of it was supposed to do!
Admin
This story reminds me of the Parable of the Two Programmers.
Admin
Thanks, reminds me of some "bank job". Tactical: otherwise known as a small kludge, dirty hack
Strategic: A Behemoth of specifications, that were conceived in endless meetings, sessions and buscuit consulting and finally, went through the Vogonian process and got a sign-off. In the next "phase", a crowd of consulkers has to implement this to the letter - or be fed to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. So, they are going to implement a distributed, enterprise collaborative cluster made of kludges. And because it's "strategic", management will throw money at it, until it either runs or something else becomes the new strategic.
Admin
Heh. We still use PeopleSoft. They moved over to PeopleSoft about 3 years ago... The big advantage to me is I only have one password to use on all the different logins for the university