Respecting the Video Pit
The SCCS Video Pit is a space filled with an awesome projector, multiple consoles and lots of games, all provided free of charge for the entire Swarthmore campus and cared for by a group of volunteers.
This morning I came down to the SCCS space to find the Video Pit completely trashed. The guitars and controllers were everywhere, batteries scattered on the floor along with some fragments of potato chips and unidentified plastic things. There was a broken swivel chair lying upside down at the bottom of the pit. On the table with the games (which was also a mess of batteries, instruction manuals, and controllers) I found a paper cup with something that looked vaguely like strawberry ice cream in it (don’t know how long that was there).
I cleaned up the equipment, vacuumed the floor, and will attempt to fix the chair once I find some superglue. I don’t really understand what could have happened to leave the guitars without their shoulder straps, the mic stand without the little plastic stand piece, and the drum set without its foam sign thingie (all these pieces were not gone, but scattered around).
I know not everyone who uses the pit leaves it trashed. But it seems that every time I come down for office hours on Sunday morning, it is a mess. I am asking that whoever is leaving stuff in disarray please stop, and everyone take a little more notice of how the space looks when you leave.
I became an SCCS admin because I like to do cool stuff with computers, not because I like to clean up other people’s messes. Again, the Video Pit is a communal space provided free of charge, and it deserves a lot more respect. Clean up after yourself! Try to leave the space in a better state than you found it. If conscience isn’t motivation enough, we do have cameras! We can do better than this.
What the Party Looked Like (or, Alex finds his SD card reader)
Our party was an unqualified success. There was pizza, there was Beatles rock band, and there were more people down here than I’ve ever seen. As proof, I offer these pictures (which were actually taken after pretty much everyone left):
Return of the Mailing Lists
As some of you have noticed, all of the mailing lists were down for a while. The problem was eventually traced to a lack of communication between the program responsible for distributing email to the lists, and another program it was relying on to filter out spam. This has been fixed, and the lists are now working again.
During the period that email was coming in to the lists but none was being sent out, an enormous queue of messages built up. After some deliberation we decided to let the server chew through them instead of throwing away all of those messages. Since, undoubtedly, many of these messages are not legitimate, this should explain any sudden spike in spam in the next few days. We are still working hard on better spam filtering. Importantly, as the server frantically distributes the tens of thousands of messages waiting in the queue, any new messages that are sent will start at the end of the line and appear not to go through. But the lists are not down — things will go through eventually. According to my calculations, the queue should be processed by Wednesday 8/19, at which point email should flow normally.
Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.
Downtime for LDAP Upgrade
This weekend we will be upgrading our infrastructure from the outdated and slightly insecure NIS to the new and improved LDAP. Expect downtime for much of the weekend. We will try to get web back up and running first. Thanks for your patience.
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!