6A
NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAS
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2006
TECHNOLOGY
Information services adjusts system for future heavy traffic
Computer hardware problems that led to the failure of the KU student system in August have spurred Information Services to invest more in the computer systems so that the same error does not occur again.
The student system includes software used in enrollment, fee payments, financial aid, recruiting and admissions information, transcript records, grades, graduation records and more. Allison Lopez,
Like many students, Rebecca Blackburn, Fort Leavenworth sophomore, has experienced problems with KU online applications. At the beginning of the semester the surge of users logging on to enroll was slowing the system, which didn't have the capacity to handle the number of users. As a transfer student, Blackburn said she has also had problems navigating Enroll and Pay. "I know it was worse before, but it's still kind of annoying," she said.
spokeswoman for Information Services, said that when so many people were using the different functions of the system,the amount of traffic outdid the capacity.
Mindy Ricketts/KANSAN Photo Illustration
The student administration
system, which includes Enroll and Pay, was upgraded during the summer. During enrollment, the system was still having problems with capacity, causing slow performance.
"Our goal is that we never experience a similar failure."
Several factors, including some hardware that was damaged during the microburst in March, caused the slowness in the system.
software modules that included millions of lines of code.
Lopez said the student system was a series of about 10 different large
"All of these modules serve different functions, but all basically talk to each other, so that each student's information is stored in one, huge record," Lopez said.
MARLESA RONEY
Vice provost of student success
Terry Peterson, Overland Park
"The first ten days of the fall semester are always the most taxing on the system," she said. "The crash was unacceptable. That is not the KU experience we want students to have"
senior, works in Anschutz Library and said that complaints slowly declined as the semester progressed.
"We were getting a lot of complaints in the first few
weeks," he said. "Mostly people were having trouble accessing Blackboard and Enroll and Pay"
Peterson said it was not unusual for there to be a lot of problems at the beginning of the semester, when programmers try to adapt software to students who are adjusting to it.
"It's also rough when the time comes around for a password change." Peterson said.
Marlesa Roney, vice provost of student success, said though some departments were still catching up after Aug. 15, there hadn't been a
recurrence of the problems. Spring enrollment, which is set to begin in October, however, has the office preparing for more slow-downs.
"Our goal is that we never experience a similar failure," she said.
be contacted at bsmith@kansan.
com.
Kansan staff writer Ben Smith can
— Edited by Natalie Johnson
CRIME
Missing woman tells abduction story, eight years later
BY VERONIKA OLEKSYN ASSOCIATED PRESS
VIENNA, Austria — A young woman abducted 8/12 years ago told Austrian TV viewers Wednesday of her anger and frustration that she hadn't simply crossed the street to avoid her kidnapper or gone to school with her mother on the morning she was seized.
"The first time I didn't see the cellar room at all because it was pitch black. No lamp was screwed in. He only brought that after several minutes or half an hour," Kampusch told public broadcaster ORF in a televised interview that gave Austrians their first glimpse of the young woman whose abduction has riveted a nation.
Repeatedly shutting her still-sensitive eyes against the glare of TV lights, Natascha Kampusch, now 18, recalled her first horrific minutes inside the dingy, windowless cell beneath her captor's garage where she was held for years.
She recalled how she sometimes threw water bottles at the wall in frustration and despair and occasionally also pounded it with her fists.
Ronald Zak/Associated Press
A street vendor displays the Austrian daily newspaper Kronen Zeitung and the weekly magazine News with a picture of Natascha Kampusch on the front pages, in downtown Vienna, Wednesday. The young Austrian woman who was imprisoned for 8 1/2 years in an underground cell gave interviews to News magazine. Austrian daily newspaper Kronen Zeitung and Austrian television.
"I was very distressed and very angry, and I was angry that I didn't cross to the other side of the street and that I didn't go to school with my mother. It was awful," Kampusch said.
said.
Kampusch bolted to freedom Aug. 23 while her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil, was distracted by a cell phone call. The 44-year-old communications technician killed himself within hours of her escape by jumping in front of a commuter train.
The wheezing sound of a ventilator that pumped air into her windowless room was "unbearable," she
She said she would have "gone crazy" if Priklopil had not occasionally allowed her upstairs, although those trips did not start until six months after she was abducted from the street as a freckle-faced 10-year-old.
Earlier Wednesday, the weekly magazine News and the mass-circulation daily Kronen Zeitung published separate interviews in which Kampusch said she "thought only of escape" during her entire ordeal and had once tried to jump out of Priklopli's car.
When Priklopil took her out on errands, "he always wanted me to walk in front of him, not behind him," apparently to minimize the chances of her escaping, she said.
Kampusch told the newspaper how she had tried to leap from Prilkopil's car, but he "held me back and then speed away."
saying by News. "I always felt like a poor chicken in a hen house. You saw on TV how small my cell was — it was a place to despair."
The magazine printed a large color photograph of a pensive-looking Kampusch on its cover, showing her with piercing blue eyes and a pink scarf covering part of her strawberry blond hair. In the TV interview, she wore a loose, glittery purple blouse and the scarf.
Since her escape, Kampusch said she slipped away incognito to enjoy some ice cream.
She did not specify when that escape attempt occurred, saying only that she felt "it was much too risky" to try it again because she feared Priloklpil would kill her if she failed.
"It was nice to smile at people, and no one recognized me," she said, dabbing with a tissue at her eyes.
But she said that didn't stop her from dreaming about beheading him with an ax.
The magazine said it interviewed Kampusch at Vienna's General Hospital, where a cardiologist examined her for possible heart trouble. She said she had suffered during her captivity from heart palpitations that at times made her dizzy and blurred her vision. It was unclear whether she has been diagnosed with any chronic problems.
"I always had the thought. Surely I didn't come into the world so I could be locked up and my life completely ruined," Kampusch was quoted as
from her captor's house in suburban Strassholt "completely spontaneous."
Kampusch also said she often did not get enough to eat. Another Austrian magazine, Profil, had reported that at the time of her escape she weighed just 92 pounds — the same weight when she was taken on March 2, 1998, while walking to school.
"I was there behind the gate to the garden and I felt dizzy. I realized for the first time how weak I really was," she said.
But Kampusch added that she felt well enough — "physically, mentally and no heart problems" — to make a run for it.
Kampusch called her escape
which questions to answer and had refused to be asked anything intimate. Police have said she may have had sexual contact with her captor, but have refused to elaborate.
Once she had run out onto the street, "I saw a window open and someone busy in a kitchen, and I asked the woman to call the police," she said. At first, she said, the woman refused to let her inside: "She didn't want me to step on her lawn."
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Kampusch told News she regret- ted that Priklopil committed suicide, "because he could have explained so much more to me and to the police," but added that she no longer wished to talk about him.
ORF said Kampusch had decided
She said she wants to complete her high school education and is considering a range of possible careers, including journalism, psychology, acting and art, and that she has not yet decided whether to write a book about her ordeal.
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Kampusch also told the magazine she loved her parents, who divorced after she was taken, and denied there was any controversy. Psychologists treating her have said she has been in touch with her mother, but has not asked for her father since they were briefly reunited after her escape.
"It was worse for them than it was for me. They thought I was dead," she said.
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