Okay. Blackboard and Linux do not get along at all. It turns out that Blackboard is currently 'unsupported' on the Linux platform. Not cool. I think Blackboard's programming team is living in the dark ages. Anyways...to the point: Fortunately, most of Blackboard's functionality is web-based, and since Firefox (all any platform) is more than capable of handling anything HTML/CSS/JavaScript, Blackboard works.......mostly. Since the Linux operating system is not 'supported', Blackboard performs a user-agent check to see if you are running Windows or Mac. If not, you cannot upload files to Blackboard. Not cool. I have tried the Firefox extension called User Agent Switcher that lets you 'spoof' your browser's identification, the version of your browser, and your operating system. For example, I could be running Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 on Linux, and using the User Agent Switcher, I could pretend to be running Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (GASP!!) on Windows Vista (GASP!!), and no website would know the difference. Isn't that wonderful? Firefox lets the user be in control, and that's what I love about it. Unfortunately, this doesn't fool Blackboard. Blackboard looks for filenames that have backslashes in them. Aha! So if I try to upload a file called myCrazyLongFileName.cpp, Blackboard won't let you upload it. But if I rename the file to be \myCrazyLongFileName.cpp, Blackboard recognizes the file. And it gets better: Blackboard strips this backslash after you upload the file. Yes!! Glorious!!
24 April 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
No (GASP!!) for OS X?
LEAVE WINDOWS ALONE, YOU BASTARD!
Blackboard is fooled by User Agent Switcher. All you have to do is create a custom user agent "mac". A short tutorial on how to do this is here: http://snyderblogs.com/2008/09/make-blackboard-and-linux-get-along/
Post a Comment