Semester Launched

The semester has launched. The past couple of weeks have been the typical flurry of activity. Over the intersession, we made a bunch of upgrades. I missed a lot of the action by visiting Phil during the first week of January, but came back just in time to be totally swamped.

We installed SSDs and RAM in the intro lab computers and updated them to Mavericks. It makes a huge difference in the performance of the computers, especially for logging in and launching applications. I'm hopeful we can do the ISB computers next.

We also decommissioned the first of our old Solaris servers. Over the next year, we will finally put them all to bed. I started using SunOS, and then Solaris, while I was still a graduate student. It was never my favorite flavor of Unix, but when I started using it, it was a standard that most packages supported well. For the past five years, it's been, well, a nightmare trying to support anything.

Finally, I reorganized the arrangement of tables in the BCRC. I had originally proposed two different arrangements, but when they originally installed the tables, they hadn't included appropriate hardware to gang the tables together both ways, so I had laid it out in circles and waited until we could fix it. They finally installed the hardware at the end of the semester and over the break, I made the change. So far, the results are extremely encouraging. The circles were good, but this is even better -- especially for teaching: it enables you to make eye contact more easily with the students while presenting. And even students working alone suggest that it "feels" like you have more space to spread out.