Flashes of Panic

Our home-grown grade-tracking software (written, according to department folklore, in some thousands of lines of Lisp,) was retired at the end of last semester in favor of a department installation of Moodle. (The perfectly rational reason for this was that the only person in the department who really understood the old system died last spring. Considering the time I and others spent wrestling with Sakai last year, there’s some irony in the choice of Moodle.)

We’ve decided that Moodle is too much solution for us in the class I’m TAing this spring, so we went looking for a simpler way to keep students up to date on their progress. (In any other field, handing back paper with written comments ought to be enough, but this is CS and most of the assignments never exist on paper in the first place.) It turns out that our widely-used perl utility for collecting assignment files, provide, has matching components for recording grades (profess) and displaying them to students (progress).

There’s also a utility written for checking to make sure configuration files, etc. are all set up properly. It’s referred to as a “sanity-checking” utility and is called, of course, prozac. From the manual page:

Like the real prozac, it makes provide happier in 95% of all situations, and otherwise becomes homicidal.

Now Playing: Nothing Like from God Fodder by Ned’s Atomic Dustbin

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