Master Nerd

Two points for being a Michael!

After my trip to the CIO Forum, I became very interested in Big Data, particularly Hadoop as a processing tool.

So, I found this:

http://www.michael-noll.com/tutorials/running-hadoop-on-ubuntu-linux-single-node-cluster

written by another Michael – and very well done.  I cheated a bit and didn’t follow all of his instructions (for Java, etc…) but after 2 tries, got it all to work!

I’ve run my first two Hadoop jobs, and am now calculating some statistics for them.  Meanwhile, I’m building a two-node cluster (and will re-run jobs, gather stats), then hope to graduate to a 10+ node cluster.

Over the years, I’ve collected the retired Mac Minis, and have stored them away for some dark purpose.  This is that time.  This is their moment.  They shall rise and power Hadoop.  For free.

Anyway, off to configs.  I’ve much to do, and so little time to do it…

Fall has come and gone.  Tomorrow at this time, finals will be over and it’ll be Christmas Break!

w00t

I’m listening to Christmas music now, and thinking back on this term.  We made it through two large Banner changes.  Move in went smoothly (after we didn’t migrate away from our NAC solution).  Projects continue to get done – although perhaps at a slightly slower pace than hoped.

Frequently developer schedules are delayed by the on-going maintenance from previously built applications.  As that body of work increases, traditionally the maintenance on it also increases.  The danger appears when developers are spending more time doing maintenance than new development.
Staff turnover only exacerbates this issue, and programs are divvied up between existing and new developers to maintain someone else’s code 🙂

It has been a good term, and though I feel more behind than ever – I feel like we’ve been meeting the critical needs with a high level of customer service and system stability.

This isn’t a topic I discuss much, but it’s come up twice this week, so I thought I’d mention it.

I’ve been working with Melissa (Office of Disability Services) for some time, on making WOU’s technology more accessible.  To be very honest, I still don’t understand much more than the tip of the iceberg, but we are working together on it, and I’m learning.  We all are 🙂

This week we discuss a document provided to us to begin evaluating Access Technologies on campus.  We also recently received a Webex demonstration from a vendor who scans the website for normal stuff like broken links and misspellings – but they can also scan for Accessibility compliance (including section 508).

Next year I expect we’ll be implementing some trainings and disseminating some information for website editors and developers alike.

We have successfully completed one week of interviews for Adam’s replacement.

There are a few more interviews to do, then we’ll select our best candidates.

It will be nice to have a full crew, once again.

I put it off long enough 🙂

I finally got my health care stuff in order, signed up, registered and submitted my HEM information…

I still have some big questions, so I emailed Heather.  I’m really expecting to save a bunch of money next year on health care costs, with Providence Choice —

I expect to have significantly reduced bills at each stop, and some services will now be free 🙂

This week we learned that we would need to upgrade AR, along with FIS & HR (but not student).  Our upgrade date is in 2 weeks, and this makes testing nearly impossible.  We will do what we can during the next 2 weeks, and hope that we don’t have to push it back 2 weeks.

Welcome to Homecoming Week at WOU!

It’s been quite a week — Fireworks on wednesday, a LAN party tonight and foot-ball tomorrow…
I have the opportunity to host the LAN party, so I’m pretty excited about that!  It’s been a lot of work, but I think we have the food, the people, the location, the games, the help and the time.

It’s been … awhile since I hosted a LAN party, so it’ll be interesting to see how this one goes. 
The TF2 tourney starts at 2200.  Bring your box, and load your caffeine – it’s time to play.

What do we have in common?  InCommon!

I guess that’s probably an old joke now, but who cares 🙂

WOU has successfully registered as a member of InCommon.
We are eagerly awaiting our Certificate Service verification, as we’ll be able to issue an unlimited number of CERTs (including EV) for any/all of our web pages and applicances – with one fixed, initial cost.
SOOOOO exciting, and we’ll be able to re-organize who in the department issues the CERTs.  We’ll be able to appropriately lockdown and secure all web-logins, at basically the same cost…

It’s an exciting time, and I’m anxious to begin.

So, to date Eric has requested three unique reports/sets of data from our FIS data-warehouse.

Mind you, the WOU EDW is NOT be confused with ODS EDW (an expensive Banner product) or the EDW provided by OUS 5th-site during the reign of Connie Atchley.

This is WOU’s home-grown EDW.

At present, we have completed the answer to the first of Eric’s questions – and will be presenting that tomorrow.
We’ll also give a status on the 3rd request (which will be delivered next) and asking clarifying questions for the 2nd request.

I hope that tomorrow’s meeting will be very productive and make us feel like we’re well on-the-way to having a real milestone completed on our jouney to the WOU EDW.

Well today we had a very rousing meeting regarding Departments, and the Campus Directory.

In the past we maintained and printed a paper directory for all of campus.
It was expensive.
It was time consuming.
It was inaccurate even before it was printed.

So we built an online directory so that information could be pulled from Banner each night, and displayed for all the world to see.

Anyway, there was a great deal of communication about letting folks update their information, or request it be updated, or ….
This ended up being short-lived as that information has to sync with Banner, hence come from Banner, hence it cannot be maintained/updated/displayed separately.

So, on to departments.  You see, Banner doesn’t hold the phone # you call for a specific department.  This is something we did manually on paper.
But the digital age (as you all know) comes with it’s own challenges and idiosyncrasies.  In the end (after much discussion) we decided that we would come back to this question next week after we all gave it additional thought.