Beginning-of-Course Survey

Posted on 24 August 2010 by David Evans

Before 5pm Wednesday (25 August), please:

  1. Register for the course site.
  2. Complete the beginning-of-course survey.
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One Response to Beginning-of-Course Survey

  1. evans says:
    24 August 2010 at 11:03 pm

    Sorry for the problems with the survey earlier. If you tried it before 8:30pm today (Tuesday), there was a problem that meant you received an error when your survey was submitted. It appears to be working fine now, though, so please try again if you ran into this problem. Sorry for the trouble!

    There are (at least) two lessons here:

    1) This is the type of issue that you should post as a comment on the blog, instead of just emailing me directly. It would be helpful for other students to be able to see there is a problem before having to suffer through it themselves also!

    2) Although I’m embarrassed to start the semester off with broken software, this is also illustrative of the things that can go wrong with software when it is deployed (although I’m not making excuses here, since I definitely should have tested it better). When I tested the survey process script, it all worked fine. Then, I made the mistake of updating the course files in a way that moved the file where the survey responses are written to. Without this file, the survey processing script fails, hence the error you saw. Even if you test software on the right inputs, other aspects of the environment can break it.

    Sorry for the trouble to those who tried to submit the survey earlier! Please try again and let me know (or post on the blog!) if you run into any problems.