November 21 - 23

A short week!

Everyone likes a short week.

This week I mainly worked on one project. It's a banner password reset page.

First I'll give a little background on the situation.

Our Staff uses something called INB (Internet Native Banner) to track students, report grades, report attendance, bill students and more... It's used for just about everything related to a student.

It seems that we get multiple calls a week stating that someone had has been locked out of their account or forgot their password. Users will be locked out if they guess the wrong password too many times... A lot of time was being wasted reseting accounts and resetting passwords. What could be done?

My co worker created a function to reset the banner password when I passed it certain information. I created a Web Self Service, which uses a totally seperate password where users can log in and change their password. It resets the account if it's locked.

This will be a huge help for our department and a big help for the faculty that forget their passwords. With one click (well 2 now), users can quickly reset their banner password.

Much work needed to go into this package. It seemed simple, but you have to account for all kinds of errors.

It was a great project for a short week and should be moved to production sometime soon.

November 14 -18

Somehow this week's information was lost. I'll do my best to recreate it.

This week I worked some more on PeayBay. I had to make some changes to the PeayBay query because we had a few people not show up. At the end of the week, we had a test run and even had several auctions. Unfortunately, everything didn't go smoothly. More work will have to be put into the Drupal version of PeayBay before it goes live.

I worked on some more athletics reports that were requested a while back. These were mostly simple. I did have to communicate with the requester to see what they wanted. Sometimes, you don't get the information you need. You have to fish for it.


I looked to Web Self Service some more and started working on the new Banner Reset Password Page. There will be more on that next week.

A big part of my job is learning new programs and processes. The Self Service piece above is an example of that.

Nov 7 - 11

Another week gone! This year is going by fast….

This week I worked on several small projects.

I continued to work with HR on the emails to bi-monthly staff. This process should be done by the end of next week.

I worked on transferring PeayBay to Drupal. PeayBay is an employee incentive site that our web admin built. It’s really cool. You can give points to people and then at the end of the year, bid on various items. 

Our web admin wanted to move it to Drupal, so I had to set up some processes to let him do that. He now gets a list of all eligible employees every night.

I worked created an Athletic report for the Athletics office. I worked with them to find what information they needed.

I created a report for the African American Office. Again, I had to work with them to find out all the information they wanted.

I worked on adding some more information to Housing’s Event Tracking report.

I also did various other maintenance tasks.

Event tracking has now tracked over 75 events! It looks like we have ordered more scanners too. It’s good to see something that you spent time on actually used.

Oct 31 - Nov 4

What a fun week! A lot got accomplished this week.

I started this week by training the student worker. He’s getting better and better at SQL which is good. He hadn’t had any previous experience with programming at all, so it’s really nice to see him catching on. Generally, it’s better to have experience in some kind of programing language so you can transfer your skills. The student worker also started training on Drupal which is a content management system that APSU’s website is built in. Hopefully he catches on quickly.

I also worked with HR throughout the week. We are starting to get time sheet emails sent out to semi-monthly employees. This will take a while because we have to go back and forth to make sure we have the right group, but should be done in the next couple of weeks.

I made some more individualized reports for even tracking. I’ve now had over 50 events tracked.

I also have to include the maintenance. It again took a big part of my week. I’ve been tweaking several programs to make them run better. I hope I’ll be able to work on the event tracking some more in the next couple of weeks. I need to make some additional tweaks to it.

October 24-28

This week was about research and training.

At the beginning of the week, I researched the new mobile application technology that I learned about last week. I found out how everything worked, how it compliled, what steps you had to take to start development as well as what hardware you needed to get started. I found some pretty instersting information...

It seems that if you use a product where you write one piece of code, it's going to do one of 2 things. The first is make a "custom" web browser for the OS that you compile for. This is the only code that's different between the different OS. Everything else would be written in HTML. You basically write an application to browse a website. If you are doing that, why not just make a mobile website? The only advantages to a mobile application in this sense would be push notifications and access to the camera.

The other method is for the program to be complied specifically for the OS. This requires more use of java when coding. The big problem with this method is that it doesn't perform as well as it can on each OS. If you write an application for a specific OS, the application should take advantages of all the OS's features and architecture. This isn't the case with method we learned about last week.

I also helped train our student worker. He's starting to learn SQL. I set him up a sandbox to play in that was created from an external table, then copied to a permanent one. The student worker can query and modify the table as he wishes. One quick command can restore the table to it's original condition.