LUMS Registration

As always, in classic LUMS-PCO style the LUMS registration system for BSc. students opened an hour late today at 1300 hrs. It was quite thoughtful of them to fire off an email at 12:50 saying the registration would not open at 12:00 as planned. I purposely generalize when I say this, but what on Earth does a disorganized body such as LUMS hope to teach me - apart from how NOT to do things?

Their poor Windows based webservers (that shake in their boots at the prospect of 10 simultaneous connections, let alone a torrent of 900 pissed off college students wanting to register as many courses as possible) on their fantastically slow Oracle DB-backend managed to crash a total of six times in the first hour. Sitting on the LUMS campus LAN, it took me around 2 hours to sign up for 5 courses. I can only imagine how traumatic and painful it was for those unfortunate enough to try it from the outside. "First come first serve" indeed.

How hard would it be to have load balanced 4 maybe 5 servers running FastCGI along with a clustered MySQL database backend. Sure it'd be a big project to actually have a real CR System made (not the shit-ass college-project-type application they have running now), but is it really not worth it in the end to end an inconvenience to so many people? I hold the LUMS CS department as a whole at fault. While they're all off trying to find ways to get their proposals approved so they can go visit some obscure convention in Amsterdam, their skills are lying idle, in plain sight of the PCO and an entire college full of students who are in dire need of those very skills.

Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe our CS department is every bit as useless as any other that can be found in this country, and they don't want to be busy doing something that could really help people rather than be off trying to trick people into giving them lots of money (a.k.a research grants). For the love of God how hard is it for you people to stop being so insecure about your CVs and Careers and to actually do something good for no other reason than YOU CAN.

You have the poor overworked PCO on one side, hundreds of students in a rat-race to register for courses that they get on a first-come first-serve basis and the complication of limited resources (bandwidth, fast disks). Now I know these aren't life threatening issues, the world won't end if these issues aren't addressed, BUT THESE ARE THE KINDS OF ISSUES YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO SOLVE.

Bah.

On a lighter note, rum has a pretty funny post about the same issue.