SCCS

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.

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.

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.

Sorry about the downtime. We were having problems with a server and it crashed unexpectedly. Everything should be running fine. If not, please send us an e-mail at staff@sccs

Sorry about that; there was a power outage on campus. We’re back up and running now.

So, many of you are no doubt familiar with our old Squirrelmail interface. Ugly, hard to work with, but it does the job. Well, now, we have finally set up a newer, better, faster, stronger (well, prettier, anyway) interface: RoundCube. Check it out.

Squirrelmail will still be the default webmail for a few weeks, just so we can see if there are bugs we need to work out with RoundCube. But soon, we’ll switch which is the default. Don’t worry, both will be available into the future.

So, we had a pretty big and pretty good party last night, and to that end, got ahold of our old projector, and borrowed one from Media Services. This means that you can use the pit again, but until we get our projector fixed, the old one isn’t as high-quality.

But we have games galore on the lab machines now, including a Windows machine with a constantly growing selection. The pit requires a reservation, but the lounge is open 10am-2am every day (except Thursday, when it closes earlier).

Last Friday, the projector made a popping sound and has stopped functioning. We’ll be trying to figure out the problem in the next few days … but until it is fixed, the pit will be closed for business.

The video pit has just had a massive surge in popularity.  We’re swamped with requests to use it.  Apologies to any who we haven’t gotten back to; odds are, someone else has reserved it if you don’t hear back from us.  We’re gonna have an online reservation system up soon.  Check back here for announcements about that.

We are done the long-suffering server migration, and things are looking good.  We now have two old servers, roc and osprey, to do something with.  Playground time!

Sorry that the change took longer than expected; it always does.