Transforming Research Computing Practices in TTU’s College of Engineering

I have a cunning plan to promote some better (in my opinion) practices for research computing in TTU’s College of Engineering over the next year or two. This plan is partially derived from things I’ve already been trying to promote, and some other goals laid out by the Python Software Carpentry folks. I’d define success …

Why Should I Fill Out a Contact Form to Download FlexLM Utilities?

So some years ago, Macrovision buys FlexLM, and a few months ago, spins it off into Acresso Software. And now I’m ready to start using Cacti to monitor FlexLM license usage, but I need Linux versions of lmutil and related utilities. I could just pull them from a package that uses FlexLM, but I don’t …

Getting an email list for your class from Web For Faculty

For all the improvements Web For Faculty/Advisors may have over the old SIS system, it sure doesn’t make it easy to generate an email list from your class roll. I can see who’s in my class, click on a flagrant abuse of the HTML select element to see their permanent address, phone numbers, off-campus email …

Why Not Just Send It As Text?

This ad-laden page at about.com talks about why you might want to send emails as plain text by default (bandwidth, misbehaving HTML support in email clients, etc.). Never mind any ugly stationery you might have to look at. So I receive an email memo informing me that since some group of people had trouble printing …

To greylisting: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.

New mail server went in this afternoon. I did forget to email the few non-administrative users we have on it ahead of time. My fault. But among other things, the new server has postgrey installed for greylisting. In the first six hours, we greylisted 136 emails, and 30 got resent. So that’s roughly 100 spam …