Wesley Alan Wright: Notes, Lessons, and Projects

Marcia J. Purvis, Communications Coordinator, Dept. of Animal Science , inquired

The Morgan Horse Farm has another request on the following page: 

http://asci.uvm.edu/morgan/?Page=horses/sale_horses.php&SM=horses_sub.html&view_all=true&typeID=9

When someone chooses Step 1: All , then Step 2: View All, they would like the horses listed (alphabetically) but with the UVM horses being listed first.  Is this possible?

Of course it’s possible. Took 15-20 minutes thought, and another 15 to code.

Amanda K. Waite,Web News Editor, University Communications asked:

University Communications is looking into the possibility of using data generated by Digital Measures (the new faculty reporting tool being implemented on campus) to update the experts database. We need a spreadsheet of netids, names and biography fields from the database to explore the possibility a bit more. I have access to an old expertds.dbf file, but I don’t think I can get into the current database. Would you be able to export and send me the current database in an Excel spreadsheet (or a tab or comma-delineated .txt file I can import into Excel)?

Not as easy as it sounds. First, I had to find the database, created years ago by a former web team intern. Then, I had a fight between mySQL and Excel. Several fights: treatment of carriage returns/line-feeds in database fields, and treatment of commas and quotes. Eventually, Excel conceded defeat before my powerful kung-fu dragon style.

Lucy Carrasco wrote:

I started recently as an assistant webmaster at UVM Extension and Marcus mentioned to me that you helped him with setup of the Across the Fence WordPress site.  I have a few questions regarding the database setup (the db/user/password combinations being used that I’m seeing in the config files) and was wondering if you may be able (have the time!) to shed some light on a few things for me?

UVM Extension has 8 databases, four accounts, and 4 passwords. She was confused, this prompted a history lesson

mySQL account administration has gone through 3 or 4 phases since the product was first introduced at UVM.

The first phase was the casual and early adopter era.  I manually created accounts for those that needed them. Naming conventions and passwords didn’t always follow and convention. Passwords were attempts at cute mnemonics. It was a simpler more laid back time.

Eventually, I built a self-service on-line utility to create accounts. Convention was to use requestor’s netid (small caps) as a mySQL username and same NETID in LARGE CAPS as a database name. Additional requests got same account-name/password, and database NETID_1, NETID_2, etc. New passwords were generated automatically and randomly.

This era was also marked by a separate secret script used internally by one ETS staffer to create special accounts for use with a licensed survey building product called Perseus. These accounts again used netid as account name and NETID_PERSEUS as database name. This of course introduced confusion when a particular netid was passed through both scripts.

We are now in a new era, where an authenticated netid is granted 3 accounts: netid_admin, netid_reader, and netid_writer. Databases are named NETID_WHATEVER. Passwords are assigned randomly but can be changed by the requestor.

It is important to note that all this fancy accounting using NetIDs is by convention only. mySQL accounting and administration is separate from NetID account management used for zoo, www.uvm.edu, webmail, blackboard, peoplesoft, myuvm, etc. And even https://webdm.uvm.edu/account , which is actually some pretty clever coding on the part of Scott Dellinger  of ETS to match up ‘real’ netids with 13 years of willy-nilly mySQL accounting. Scott is now the defacto DB admin, I remain involved in a variety of poorly defined support and admin roles, and I provide historical context and institutional memory.

It is also interesting to note that UVM Extension was an early adopter, getting their first uvmext/UVMEXT account/DATABASE Nov 19, 2001. This is why there are so many passwords, accounts, and databases involved.

http://www.uvm.edu/~lrg/13lunas

Tina Escaja video project. Video recording page not fitting into tiny PC screen for Living/Learning gallery show. tried to fix CSS with limited success. need to see the actual PC