Alex Little

Since the problems with the broken internet cable in the med last week, the internet has been even slower than it’s usual snails pace! I’ve just given up on downloading a file, as the max speed I was getting was around 150 bytes/s.

Similarly, work is progressing at what feels to be an ever decreasing rate – not that it was progressing very quickly to start with! This week and next the students have their mid-term exams, so it’s going to be tricky to get anything done during this time. Actually, there’s lots that I could be doing and just getting on with myself, but unfortunately that doesn’t really help anyone, as there’s no sustainability once I’m gone. So I’m having to sit tight, which is making things a little more frustrating!

There are two main things I’m working on at the moment. Firstly to get Moodle hooked up to an SMTP server, so allowing self-registration and forum subscriptions etc. As the uni has it’s own mail system (on which I have a working email address), you may think this ought to be a fairly trivial matter, but I’ve now spent over a week trying to track down what the SMTP server name/IP is and whether or not a username/password is required. Nobody seems to know much (if anything) about it, and I’m very close to just setting up my own SMTP server, but I really want to leave that as a last resort. What I’ve managed to find is that there used to be an SMTP server, but it stopped working and no-one has fixed it yet, but still no idea of it’s address or much else!

In the meantime, in case I can’t get connected to SMTP server, I’m tracking down the list of computer science students so at least I can automatically create their accounts. Again, unsurprisingly, this hasn’t been an easy job. Our dept doesn’t have a complete list of current students, the registrar for our campus only had a list for 2nd and 3rd years. Apparently we need to get in contact with the registrar on the other campus to get a complete list of the first years.

Secondly, since I found the departments intranet site, I’m attempting to get the content from this site moved over to Moodle – as it’s mainly used for storing the course handouts/manuals etc, but just in an IIS ‘browse directory’ way. The site also has discussion boards, but these don’t appear to have been used for some time now, so again, I’d like to recreate these on Moodle – so the course content and forums can all be in one place.

Teddy, head of computer science dept, has assigned one of the new teachers, Yonas, who graduated last year, to help move the content over and to check with the teachers that the handouts etc are all up to date. So that should be a great help and ensure that there’s someone here who knows a little about the Moodle server once I leave.

So, I’ve started to move forward with some of the things on my project plan, but I doubt very much that I’ll get to the end of it within a year here! I am now getting a little used to how slowly things move here, but if I get too used to it then I’ll get too laid back and never get anything done! Fingers crossed things will improve slightly once the exams and Ethiopian Christmas are out of the way.