Announcing: Concierge
It is perhaps a well-kept secret that SCCS has a lot of resources to offer to the community that are hidden under Tarble. With the arrival of our slick cabinet, the Media Pit is finally unlocked and available on a first-come/first-serve basis unless it’s reserved, which is done through email to staff@sccs.swarthmore.edu. Reservations of camera equipment are likewise done through email.
This system could stand improvement. Currently if you want to reserve something, there are too many round-trips over email: you have to find out if it’s available, how long you can have it, when you can pick it up, et cetera. It would be nice if there were some way, maybe a convenient web interface, where one could browse through the near future and check out what is available. Perhaps one could even put a reservation in motion right from this interface.
Good news: rather late in the semester, and very much past its due date, SCCS is launching Concierge, a brand new shiny interface for doing exactly that. We urge anyone who wants to reserve equipment in the future to use this instead of sending us an email directly.
Like any other new software, Concierge certainly has quite a few bugs and rough edges. There is a link in the upper right corner of every page for reporting bugs (note: bad explanations and missing features count as bugs). Please bear with us as we improve Concierge!
Video Pit Sound System Replacement
Last week the sound system in the Video Pit failed. We’ve received the new speaker system and are in the process of replacing the hardware. However, this replacement will take a few days and until it’s ready, the pit will be closed and locked. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but we think you’ll love the new system once it’s in place.
Server Health
Our RAID has been crashing a lot under any significant load lately. We’ve been in touch with our server vendor(Who doesn’t like Debian!) and finally, we might have fixed it for good. The latest server downtime was for a long disk diagnostics test and a firmware upgrade for our RAID controller.
Here’s to hoping we won’t be restarting anytime soon!
-SCCS Staff
Major Cleanup
After a marathon five-hour work session in SCCS yesterday, a whole bunch of new things are up.
We’ve installed our security system! With four cameras that can see in the dark, we’ll be able to watch you live from any computer anywhere! This should allow us to continue to offer our services without much fear of theft, and will help us get our video game system live.
There was a major leak in Tarble, and workbox just finished repairing it. The foul odor that was seeping through the entire basement is slowly vanishing, and is hardly noticeable outside of our server room.
We have an enormous stack of equipment in our lounge. If you want anything from it … it is yours!
New Software
We’re currently compiling a list of software to make sure is installed on all of our Macs. If you have any further suggestions, make sure to let us know!
* VLC (video player)
* Adobe CS4 (image-editing, flash, web development, etc.)
* Skype (im/voip)
* Open Office 3 (text-editing, spreadsheets, presentations)
* FireFox 3 (browser)
* Adium (im)
* Cyberduck (ftp)
* Airfoil (allow any software to play over networked speakers)
* Warcraft III + Frozen Throne (game, RTS)
* Starcraft + Broodwar (game, RTS)
* Unreal Tournament (game, FPS)
* Hamachi X (VPN creation)
* Aperture (photo editing/management)
* Audacity (audio editing)
* Switch (audio file conversion)
* Microsoft Office Suite (Text editing, presentation, and spreadsheets)
* Shakespeer (DC++ client)
* Transmission (Bit Torrent client)
* Quicksilver (app launcher+)
* IE 6 (browser, for testing)
* TextWrangler (text editor)
Power Outage Takes Down Servers
Last night, a 3+ hour long power outage struck all across campus. This also took down SCCS’s server, and our backup hard drives prevented the servers from coming back online. About an hour ago, Dougal Sutherland ‘11 manually reset them, and things should be back to normal—let us know if they aren’t.
We are also working to figure out ways to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.
New Mac Pro: Kestrel
Today, SCCS added a new computer to our flock—a Mac Pro.
Stats
One 16x SuperDrive
500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
2GB (2 x 1GB) (We’ll be adding more soon)
Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (8-core)
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB (Two dual-link DVI)
The Name
We ran a vote with a run-off. The three finalists were Roadrunner (w/ 6 votes), Puffin (w/ 3 votes), and Kestrel (w/ 4 votes). The final voting gave us:
Roadrunner: Kofi and Trilok
Puffin: Jonah, Andrew, Ryan
Kestrel: Dougal, Alex, Miles, and Will
New Camera
SCCS has acquired a second digital SLR, the Canon EOS 40D:
As is always true with SCCS equipment, it will be available for loan to any current student. It can be borrowed along with one of our two lenses (a telephoto and a wide-angle), our tripod, or our external flash system.
Lounge Re-Done
Over the past week or so, the SCCS staff completely changed the look of our lounge.
We’re working on acquiring new whiteboards, a webcam and Skype kit, upgrading our security, and more.
Our weekly meetings will be on Thursdays, 6pm-7pm. We’ll be setting office hours tomorrow.
Stop by, and let us know what you think.
Recent Issues
Some of you have been having trouble with posting to mailing lists of late. We believe we’ve solved the problem; if it happens again, let us know (staff@sccs).
As a mostly-unrelated issue, there was some downtime this afternoon. There seems to have been a hard drive-related problem with our main server — don’t worry, all the data is still there, plus we have backups. We’re still investigating, but hopefully this won’t happen again.
And another, totally-unrelated thing: I’ve changed the webmail link to go to roundcube rather than squirrelmail, since it’s a much nicer interface. There’s still another link to squirrelmail underneath it, for those of you who prefer it.