Thank you

Every once in a great while, you must say thank you to people like Tim Skirvin for archiving those things that later on turn out to be quite funny. Thank you for being a never ending pack rat, Tim.

(This won’t be funny to anyone outside Housing, without some explanation, but that’s fine with me.)

Whee!

I love simple SQL.

select COUNT(id) as Count,FROM_UNIXTIME(MIN(oob_time_sec)) as MIN,FROM_UNIXTIME(MAX(oob_time_sec)) as MAX,INET_NTOA(ip_saddr), tcp_dport, udp_dport,icmp_type from ulog where FROM_UNIXTIME(oob_time_sec) > DATE_SUB(CURDATE(), INTERVAL 28 DAY) group by ip_saddr,tcp_dport,udp_dport order by ip_saddr;

ntconfig.pol + Group Policies = breakage

Apparently, certain settings left over from NT System Policies (ntconfig.pol) conflict so badly with Group Policy settings that the 2 never decide who wins. I just wasted two hours trying to get screen saver settings to not conflict, when the 2 are setting things in different places and something in the OS can’t decide which one takes precedence.

I guess I get to migrate all our NTConfig.pol settings over to group policies tommorrow. I’ve been putting it off until we close, and that’s passed, but we’ve got a giant conference coming in tomorrow and I’d hate to break something. Oh well.

Update: Knowledgebase article 257939 has something to say about this phenomenon.

Head em’ up and move em’ out

It’s finals week here at the University of Illinois, so campus is packed with parents hauling home the equivalent of 1/2 of one dorm room’s worth of detritus.

Moms trying to fit 3 cu. ft. fridges in the trunks of Impalas, dads sweating like hogs carrying bags of shoes and vomit stained t-shirts as their daughters stumble along, groggy either from the mass of bar-scars on the backs of their hands or finals, no one is sure. And, since the weather is so nice, the finer features of working on a college campus abound.

We’ve been taking back returned mini-hubs (and mini-switches) since Monday. 1740 items have been returned so far, but there’s still another 5400 out there. (We count the hub and the power supply as seperate items, so that’s about 2700 pairs to come in yet.) Computer labs close at 5 pm today, a few places are open for hub return tomorrow, commencement is on Sunday.

Another year gone by. Has it really been 7 years since I graduated from here?

Coddling the Millennials or Just Trying to Compete?

Via this weeks’ Carnival of Education, I read a post at Number 2 Pencil. The main jist of the post is that places of higher learning shouldn’t be building new residence halls and higher tech classrooms just because the incoming students expect it.

My question is, why not? If the school has the money available, higher tech classrooms can be beneficial to the learning experience of every student that gets to use them. But the high tech classrooms part isn’t what got my hackles up, the better quality res halls is.

Guess what? I hadn’t ever shared a bathroom or a bedroom when I went to college, nor had I ever lived without central AC. Did that stop USC from putting me, an Honors College student, into an all-female dorm with hall bathrooms and no AC whatsoever? No, it did not.

Well, guess what? (At least where I work) Housing is a self supported business, meaning we have to attract and retain customers to pay the salaries of the people that work here and to continue to provide the services that we do. This means we have to compete with an ever changing, ever upgrading market of apartment complexes and smaller landlords that are going the extra mile to get students to move out of the res halls and into their properties. While we do have somewhat of a captured market with our freshman certified housing rules, there are private facilities that are in that market as well so we can’t be too complacent.

I’m not saying that every one of our residence halls should be like a penthouse suite at a Vegas casino, but don’t you think laundry facilities should be accessible without walking to some large central laundromat? Maybe air conditioning and some carpet instead of tile floors? Remember, we are trying to increase return customers here, offering these types of amenities is just one carrot out there on the end of the stick. When was the last time you saw a Studebaker or Yugo dealership? Innovate, update, evolve or get pushed out of the market.

I lived in our facilities for 4 years as an undergraduate, and I’m happy to say that, yes, I’m probably a better person for the experience, but did I really need to sweat through those 4 or 5 weeks a year that we needed AC to get the temp down? Do our incoming students need to use a networking infrastructure (the physical wiring) that was installed in the late 1980s, well before they were born?

More Orchard Downs

Typical University methods. We’ve been talking, internally to Housing, about what to do with Orchard Downs for several years now, and now someone from higher up says this:

Dempsey said that a final decision about graduate housing would not be made until two to four years from now, and any decision about commercial or retail development would come after that.

Oh well, just as I like to tell everyone at work every time some major project comes up: “Don’t worry, we’ll all be retired before they even get started.”

Mozilla Firefox dropping .zip builds

Chase says Firefox is dropping the .zip builds. The comments on that post alone ought to be enough to get them to bring them back.
I’ve been using them since I discovered that the unattended/silent install didn’t work as advertised. They claimed to have fixed that bug, but I haven’t had time to look at it yet. I’ve gotten addicted to the easy plugin install method of just copying the contents of the previous plugins folder over to the new install and going on.
I’m handling this update using the low tech method mentioned in the forum thread: Install in new directory on one machine, copy directory to server, treat like a zip build.
That works for now.