June, eh?

Posted on by Michael

How time flies…

We are rapidly approaching yet another commencement. It has been just over a year since I moved up to ITC. It has been a good, though busy, year. Not that I wasn’t busy before – but it is a new kind of busy. I have learned soooo much. During these last 15 months I have had the chance to develop skills and receive training in many new areas. I really like to learn.

The Mac Mini cluster project is not making much progress but that will change come July (when life gets much calmer I hope). I recently acquired bright pink network cables for them all 🙂
I have piles of other equipment lying around as well, but the mini project is what I’m most excited about.

I really want to spend a lot of time this summer in my yard getting it finished up. We’ve lived there for 5+ years and it is time to finalize all the projects we started.

I’m taking an AI for games class this term. Not so much business-type-reading and lots more doing. I’m a do-er. Anyway it’s fun and my final project is coming along. It’s due next week.

I still have a lot to learn but after June thing should change pace and we should be able to buckle down and get stuff done. I’m looking forward to it!

mini FTW!

Posted on by Michael

So one of my current projects is to do a side-by-side (-by-side) comparison of Windows, Linux and Solaris running an Oracle DB. I have a few mac minis lying around (ok I’ve scooped them up every chance I get) so I’ve been trying to get each OS installed on one of my 3 identical units.

Thus far, the Solaris CD I’ve been using makes it into grub OK and starts the installer, but then loses connection … with the keyboard? Once I get started I can’t type and so can’t finish the install… very weird.

Anyway, I have high hopes of getting it going and doing some testing. In the long run I hope to install Ubuntu onto every mini I find and setup a big mini cluster (haha – get it?).

Meetings

Posted on by Michael

This week I had meetings.
Lots of meetings.
I didn’t have meetings for like 2-3 hours of the whole week.

I suppose that meetings are good. Usually we get something done 🙂

My todo list continues to grow. I just haven’t had any useful block of time to really get traction on a project. Next week should be better.

The DevTeam met yesterday. My long list of projects to research was shared with the team, and some of them took an interest in the projects that I was interested in. I hope to have some fun and interesting presentations to see as members return with completed research.

There is lots more going on that I’ll blog about as things occur.

Ubuntu and Qt

Posted on by Michael

So I’m taking CS 607 (AI for Games).
I setup Ubuntu and the Qt environment.

I needed to:
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install mesa-common-dev
sudo apt-get install libglu1-mesa-dev
sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev libSM-dev libxrender-dev libfontconfig1-dev libxext-dev

to get the projects to compile. Soon I hope to have a prebuilt VirtualBox machine image that folks could download and use to compile their openGL apps in Linux.

Microsoft Office 2007

Posted on by Michael

This is a modified excerpt of an email that I sent to a student at WOU about why we do not currently use Office 2007.

“
There are a few issues at hand here, so I’ll try to cover each. To begin, we actually purchases license of Office 2007 with new computers as we buy them (so we can migrate when its time). That’s progress, but we have quite a few older machines that haven’t been replaced lately and so don’t have 2007 licenses. To purchase office 2007 for every computer/terminal server would place us in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars arena. From a management/support perspective, we are simply unwilling (and unable from a staffing perspective) to partially deploy 2007.

Supporting two versions of the software (with users not knowing which they are using) is a nightmare. So, logically, when we move to Office 2007, we’ll migrate the entire campus at once. When that day comes, we will have to time the change in such a way as to allow training for campus members.

Students (not the mention faculty and staff) would be presented with a VERY NEW interface that honestly takes time to get used to. Macros, 3rd party integration apps and customizations would be lost and need to be supported by UCS. This is honestly hundreds of man hours for a full migration and support. Finally, some features of 2007 were meant to be instituted simultaneously with Vista (which is recommended). As we have no intent up migrating to Vista in the near future, upgrading 2007 has not been a priroity. We were also warned by articles like this one:

http://searchenterprisedesktop.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid192_gci1232198,00.html

This type of information (which we received from many sources) does not encourage us to migrate to 2007 quickly. The migration will take some real time, thought and planning. The good news is that yesterday I saw an email about the planning process that would define how and when to roll out Office 2007 to campus, so the process has begun.

I believe that most 2007 versions allow you to save your project to an older version (although some newer, advanced functionality may be lost) so that campus (and most of the world) can properly view them. In this case we had to choose between upgrading for the minority of power users (like yourself) or maintaining a level we could support for the majority of students, faculty and staff.
“

Presentation – Recorded

Posted on by Michael

Today, I recorded a presentation explaining some upcoming changes in Computing resources. In conjunction with VPS (Video Production Studio), now part of UCS, I recorded the presentation and plan to send it to campus in the next few weeks.

In the past, UCS has used videos and video tutorials to strive to educate campus members about technology. Today’s recording may very well be the beginning of a video series explaining Computing Resources and giving functional walkthrough in non-nerd-speak.

Although I’m not thrilled about having my face in such a public presentation, I guess that is the price of having a good idea – or of driving it home. I want to help WOU and make daily processes more efficient. I think we CAN help, but often education takes time. The long-term payoff is well worth it, so I hope the information provided is perceived as helpful by the campus community.

Progress

Posted on by Michael

Well lately I’ve been working on a lot of border security. Campus is safer than ever 🙂

We have some up-and-coming programmers are “Portal”-izing ServiceMatch for Disability Services. This involves migrating the security AND the layout from the current setup to a full portal integration. It is excellent experience for each of them. When they are done, I have some minor report/page mods they can do. This will help each of them to be more confident and proficient in the PL/SQL coding.

I’ll be recording a video soon explaining changes we hope to make to the allfacstaff email list. Now that UCS and VPS are in one department (Computing and Video Production), I can leverage new types of technology (online videos, podcasting, video walkthroughs, …) to help educate and support campus users. This is pretty exciting.

I’ve done hundreds of other things too, but can’t hardly remember any of them. This is the downside of blogging on a friday 😉

Lately, I’ve been…

Posted on by Michael

Lately, I’ve been doing a myriad of diversified tasks. These include: management, project management, development, maintenance, desktop support, mentoring, training, studying, feeling sick, and many other fun activities.

I find that in my new position I get less contact with the ‘end-user’ than I used to, but I also find that I define ‘end-user’ differently. I hope that my todo list begins to shift into a more manageable mess than it is now. Sometimes juggling too many tasks can be hazardous to one’s health.

Today I met with the designers of the Campus Wellness Challenge (located inside the WOUPortal), about changes and future additions. I’m excited not only about their project, but that we can begin to use our Project Management tools/processes to help manage it. It will be a great test run for some new ideas we are implementing.

Evernote

Posted on by Michael

Today I downloaded and installed Evernote. I had been using notepad to track my projects, but was suggested to give Evernote a try.

Strengths:
Evernote can take my many groups of projects/tasks and logically group them together. Those groups can be sorted by name, shortened to see more, etc…

Weaknesses:
I can’t drag and drop the categories to reorganize them. To compensate, I put ordered numbers in front of the categories then sorted by note name to order them as I desired. Still, it is odd that I could not move them up and down or sort, etc…

Not only does the desktop version allow me to stay organized, but with a single click to the Synchronize button I can synchronize my info with the web, allowing me to access the same data from a standard web browser, or via my mobile web browser. Windows-based smartphones and iPhones have a downloadable app for Evernote, but alas my new Blackberry Storm does not quality for either of those groups. However, the mobile site for evernote is sufficient for those rare times I need to browse/edit my tasklist remotely.

The program is cute and fully-featured, but I would prefer to be able to turn off unused features in an effort to conserve space to see each item of each task. As it is there is a list view option so I can view each task above and quickly jump to the details for each task/note. You can tag and search tasks. I think you can also create separate notebooks, which could be helpful if you wanted a personal todo and a work todo (for instance.

I have yet to really play with all the functionality, but am pleased at this early stage.
I’ll report more when I’ve really had the chance to put Evernote through the paces.

I learned something new today…

Posted on by Michael

Lately seems like I learn something new every day. I’ve been spending a LOT of time reading lately. Articles and websites and books and emails and just about everything.

They say the primary difference between you now and 10 years in the future is what you read.
Interesting thought. I’ll philosophize that later.

Sometimes I’m concerned that if I keep reading and learning at this pace one day I’ll have to raise my hand like the kid in that Far Side comic who says “Teacher can I go home? My brain is full.” Well it hasn’t happened yet and I’ve probably still got some time … and space.

Today a grad student came into the office needing some help. They were attempting to extract some data from a website, but the content was being shown by flash. Attempts to print the information were unsuccessful.
After some playing around I tried printing the document (via their interface) to my Adobe PDF creator. This produced a fantastic high-quality result that the student was able to print.

I was extremely pleased that I had not only solved their problem, but had learned something in the process. It gave me a moment to think, which I appreciated.