I have just returned from a week of camping near Colorado Springs and am now getting back into the swing of things as we begin the push to the start of a new term. It will be different this time, as I will not have the help of Brian who was always a big help with the computing here in the department.

I am working on rolling out the new computing website. It will have a lot more information that the previous site. It will also include a sign up proceedure for requesting Bastion Host accounts here at the NWC. I have a couple of machines in the Linux lab that are not working as they should and they will be in the queue for repairs next week. I also have a couple of new servers for both faculty and the department that I need to get installed and running. I have having serious issues with one and the update of the software. Seems that the RAID controler drivers are not part of the usual ones and the new kernel will not boot. So now I will be needing to track down that problem.

I now have a bit more control over the intro labs and will assist with the upper division synoptic lab this coming academic year. So I will be spending some time with the labs of previous years/sections and compiling a hopefullly more orginized set of labs. I am wanting to create a good set of labs that will introduce many of the the meteorological concepts as well as computing skills to make it easier on students as they move through the program.

Well, it has been too long since I have posted to this blog. I really need to try and post more often. I do use Rapid Weaver as my html sofware of choice and so the upgrade toe 4.0 give me a reason to at least post one upate. So here it is.

So far I have liked the changes RW4 has made. The interface is more in tune with Leopard and it looks like it has come a fair number of new themes. Who knows, I may update the theme of this site yet again.

Well, I now have an iPhone. I am impressed and disappointed all at the same time. For the first time, I have the connivence of not carrying both a PDA and a cell phone. I love the ability to sync with either my laptop or my desktop. I miss that I cannot sync my notes and that I cannot copy and paste. The latter makes it hard to add incoming calls to the contacts list (I think since I have not really received too many calls yet).

All in all, I am impressed with the device and am looking forward to what will come out during MacWorld and see what I have missed (like 3G).

mjl

Well, I am finally done with upgrading both my MacBook Pro and my Mac Pro to Leopard. While the MBP upgrade went fairly well, I did have some problems with the Mac Pro. Not with the install, but with my personal account. X11 would not work at all. This is not good, but then again, it is not surprising since I have been upgrading and transferring my account since Mac OS X 10.1. So, I bit the bullet and went ahead with a fresh install and just moved over my files a bit at a time. I met with success and now am running 10.5 on all of my personal machines.

My only real complaint is with X11. It is still not working as well as it should and because of that fact, I will not be updating the student labs for a while. X11 is an important part of how the Apple machines are used by the students when connecting to the various linux machines in the department. I will be following the development of X11 and sending my feedback back to Apple.

Most of my other problems are more of a personal nature. Like many others, I am at a loss as to why Apple got rid of some features from previous releases of OS X. I really do not like that I cannot turn off the sidebar. I hate the opaque menu bar. I dislike the 3D dock.

What do I like. Well, NFS seems to perform better. Time Machine so far has worked well for me. I love the calendar integration with Mail making it very easy to add items to the calendar from mail. Spotlight seems to perform better as well. I finally have my virtual desktop via Spaces. What I would love to see next is that each desktop be allowed to have a different background and possibly a different screen resolution.

As I play around more with Leopard, I will be posting my opinions and comments.

mjl

Well, it has been a busy time as the SoM gets ready to host a Unidata Regional workshop to be held September 10-12. The primary focus is to be the Unidata software package called the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV). The IDV is a viewer for visualizing geoscience data. The purpose of the workshop to introduce introduce the IDV and allow for participants to actually work with the software during their instruction. I am hoping that faculty and researchers can learn more so that they can incorporate the IDV into their teaching and research.