Flashes of Panic

Back in July, at the textbook company, we were talking about ways to provide a flexible quiz serving application on our web server. Simply put, instructors could build quizzes which they could then assign to their classes to take online. I’ll spare you the details, which were manifold, but one of the routes we considered following was starting with a module from the Sakai project rather than starting from scratch.

Consequently, I investigated Sakai, and determined that starting from scratch might be easier, given our server. Tomcat, Maven, JSPs, oh my aching head: I’d spend a week installing and configuring dependencies just to run the demo. (And, while open source is nice in theory, to hack Java, I should be a Java hacker. Just saying.)

Skip forward half a dozen weeks. I’m starting a GA position as a sort of support administrator for the department at my university which handles large-scale software installations, usually research-related, on the university’s clusters and research servers (henceforth, following Dorothea’s example, to be known as MPOW: My Place Of Work.) They haven’t got me 100% in the loop yet, so they throw me a smaller project to keep me busy until things pick up.

Have you guessed yet? I’m installing Sakai.