Our university, where I spent 11 years of my life, like any other university, has its own corporate website http://kture.kharkov.ua and corporate email in the domain of the same name. Surely from the title of the post and the first paragraph you’ve already figured out what I’m going to write about.

So, I am deeply convinced that a university that claims it will produce a student who will become the future Bill Gates and outshine “Microsoft” should first invest money in developing key infrastructure: the website, email, internet access, and other IT services.

Over these ten years, I don’t remember the university website ever giving me any joy. The design changed many times; at rectorate meetings the importance of keeping information up to date was often emphasized. In the end, we have a site in broken English with spelling mistakes. The key date in the website’s development was April 18, 2008. On that very day, the last news item was entered using the CMS’s built-in tools. After that day, all news items were entered manually, directly into the HTML code of the front page. Someone, to be fair, tried to maintain a separate news archive (also manually), but stopped doing that after September 17, 2009.

If you have time to spare, you can take a walk through the sites of various faculties and departments. You can see all kinds of things there.

The mailbox is limited in size. If I’m not mistaken, the quota for an ordinary instructor is 10-20 megabytes. When the mailbox fills up, the sender gets a “disk quota exceeded” bounce, and the message is not saved. What to do after that, how to get in touch with a person whose mailbox is full, is unclear. Supposedly there is an administrative (not technical, but paper-based) ban on accessing the mailbox from outside the university walls. That is, while at home or on a business trip you are deprived of access to your mailbox. If you’ve gone away for a week and people have been actively sending you mail during that time, then the thing this paragraph began with will happen.

About five years ago I discovered that it was possible to get access to the mail after all. I looked through the email headers and found that they were being sent from the address mg.kture.kharkov.ua. Opening that address in a browser, I saw the mail web-face. In principle, that was enough. A few weeks ago that address stopped working. After a brief exchange with the administrator, I was once again told that there is no access from outside. I climbed into the headers again and saw that the address had changed to mail.kture.kharkov.ua. I went there and was again able to use my mailbox. But the happiness did not last long. This time the admin beat me.

knure_mail_forbidden

Please don’t write to me at kture.kharkov.ua anymore, because I rarely have classes, and going to the university every day just to check mail is stupid.

Rumors have reached me that the monthly traffic to our department has a 3 GB limit. There are more than 20 staff members in the department. That comes out to 150 megabytes per person per month. That is, 7.5 megabytes per day. And there are also more than 30 computers in the department. They need to be updated regularly. We all know what happens to unupdated operating systems.

I hope that with the development of the Microsoft Innovation Center at KhNURE, our university will be filled with innovations.