I swear, it took me 10 minutes to get access to TTU-WLAN-1 from the top floor of Brown Hall today. At least one other WAP not shown above was on channel 11 earlier — I think its name was “Free Internet Access”.  So there are 5 networks running on channel 1 (one scrolled off the top of the window) which I assume aren’t running in some kind of infrastructure mode, 4 obviously separate named networks on channel 6, and 2-3 on channel 11.

I’m just guessing from this Google result for multiple access points one channel that this isn’t the best way to organize things.

By comparison, from my office in Clement, 3 access points visible in the site monitor. All TTU-WLAN-1, all separate channels.

2219 spam comments, nearly all caught without my direct intervention. And the Spam Karma 2 footer claims to have eaten over 11000 spams since I set this blog up.

1. By default, the majority of a researcher’s files are stored on a single drive (hard drive in the office, hard drive at home, or flash drive). A single hardware failure can mean the loss of days, weeks, months, or years of work.
2. If a researcher makes a mistake on a particular file or set of files that can’t be easily undone, they may have considerable difficulty in restoring those files to their former state. Most people don’t have automated backups of any kind, and many just manually save copies of their work onto different folders periodically.
3. Advisors don’t have automatic access to their students’ research files upon graduation. Rarely do they have easy access to them during the research period. Collaboration is often reduced to emailing drafts back and forth, or to shuffling materials around on removable media on an ad hoc basis. Simple supervision uses the same methods, but on an even more infrequent basis.
4. Researchers don’t have a standard storage location for their research materials that is large enough to contain all relevant files, accessible from around the world, and secured against unauthorized access. GMail doesn’t count.
5. Researchers don’t have a standard place to publish works in progress, completed papers, and anything else that would be of use to the larger research community (at TTU and/or elsewhere).
6. Researchers don’t have a facility for others to comment on completed projects, and to collaborate on works in progress.
7. Researchers with computational needs tend to focus on the types of problems they can solve with PCs in ITS labs, PCs on their desk, or PCs they can purchase on a project budget. These PCs are often underpowered, underutilized, and redundant purchases when you consider multiple projects. They also limit the scope and scale of problems that can be solved.

Why would anyone related to TTU’s Engineering research activities care?

1. We shouldn’t limit our computational research unnecessarily. We should work to the limit of our available facilities, and use those facilities as effeciently as possible.
2. Researchers shouldn’t have to worry about their storage media’s integrity. They should be able to trust that if they save files somewhere safe, that they’ll be there the next time they’re needed. They also shouldn’t have to always worry about keeping multiple copies organized.
3. Especially for projects where there is more than one researcher, and also for projects of interest to a supervisor or advisor, the ability to automatically track code and other changes automatically would be great. Even on single-researcher projects, the ability to track all the details of changes means the ability to revert those changes as needed.
4. Many techniques that are new to a particular research group may be established procedure for another. This could include image processing, Groebner bases, boundary element methods, LaTeX tips, etc. If the various research groups can see the works in progress of other groups, then they at least have an opportunity to comment and suggest alternative strategies. Similarly, if groups are in the habit of constantly publishing their daily successes and failures, then others at TTU or worldwide can avoid reinventing the wheel and/or offer suggestions on how to work around the particular problems.

My basic strategy is as follows (some of these have already been done to varying degrees):

1. Define types of services that each of the above goals, and set up the specific hardware and software for those services.
2. Identify faculty and student champions/testers for each of these types of services. Ideally, these researchers would be spread around all departments in Engineering.
3. Tune service offerings to meet unexpected needs from the testing group.
4. Branch out to other faculty and student researchers not in the initial testing group. The testing group would provide some credence to the tested methodologies from step 3, and could demonstrate how the business of conducting research had improved as a result.

So what does step 1 look like? The following table shows the various services already available in the CAE network, and how they help solve the problems given above:

Next up, identifying my champions/testers in different departments, tuning the offerings to meet their unexpected needs, and starting on documentation and publicity materials for the rest of the college.

Off we go to Acresso’s downloads page. Fill out a form including my email address, phone, name, and other information. Eventually, I get redirected to this Acresso page, where the lmutil downloads actually are held. I grumble a bit because I’ve filled out the form on something other than the server where I need lmutil, so odds are, they’ll prevent me from doing the download since I won’t have some kind of cookie from the original form.

Nope. No security there. Copy the link to the 32-bit Linux lmutil, paste it into a terminal on the server, and go. So from now on, I plan to just return to their target page to do the FlexLM downloads.

I really don’t know what they’re trying to accomplish here. 99% of the people looking for lmutil or anything else on that download page aren’t potential Acresso customers, they’re just looking for newer releases of programs already provided by other software vendors.

But regardless, I’ve got my graphs running now:

But since I’m far too lazy to type them all in myself, and I don’t have a grader or other underling to task with it, here’s what I did:

1. Find your class roll, and then click on the “Send E-mail to Class” link.
2. This will bring up a page with a link of the form “E-mail Group: Lastname1, Firstname1 Middlename1 to LastnameN, FirstnameN MiddlenameN”. This is a fairly clever mailto: link that puts all the students on a BCC list. Mind you, this doesn’t look like it will work in Thunderbird, since WFF formats the spaces after each comma as a %20 instead of an actual space, so the second through Nth email address are all of the form “%20FMLastname21@tntech.edu”, but since I’m not going to actually hand this list to an email client, that’s ok by me.
3. Right-click that link in Firefox, and select “Copy Email Address”.
4. Open up your trusty Unix-style shell prompt (you do run MacOS X, Cygwin, or have an account on a Unix/Linux/BSD system somewhere, right? If not, can’t really help you here), and type the following command:
   cut -d= -f2- | sed 's/, /\n/g' | cut -d@ -f1 | sed 's/[0-9]//g'
   (What? You mean it’s not obvious what that does? Ok. First, it cuts off everything before the first = sign, global search/replaces all ‘, ‘ strings with a newline, cuts off everything after the @ symbol, and deletes all numbers.)
5. After you’ve typed that command, hit Enter and then paste in the copied email addresses.
6. Hit Enter again. Watch the reformatted student names fly by.
7. Copy/paste the names into whatever file you want.
8. (Optional) Marvel that your class information is held in a form that’s almost, but not quite, entirely unlike something useful.

• Stop Death By PowerPoint
• Everything I Know About Presentations, I Learned in Theatre School

So I receive an email memo informing me that since some group of people had trouble printing an earlier email memo (one I don’t think I ever received oh, wait — they sent the original as an email with no body text and an attached JPG from a scan of the original memo? I finally found it in my Spam folder), that copies of the original memo were attached to this email in both Word and PDF formats.

This second email totaled up at 77,711 bytes. Broken down into:

1. A 24,576 byte MS Word document
2. A 25,230 byte PDF file
3. A 1,980 byte HTML version of the main body text (thank you, MS Office HTML export).
4. A 178 byte text version of the main body text.
5. The balance of the space taken up with encoding the binary attachments, the headers, and the quoted-printable conversion of the body text.

All this to send a memo that had a grand total of 724 bytes of actual text in it. An approximately 1:107 signal to noise ratio. I know. Disk space is cheap, as is on-campus bandwidth. And the second email is still an improvement over the 121,571 bytes from the original email with the absent text and the JPG attachment. But it’s the principle of the thing.

And I bet everyone could have printed the original memo perfectly well if they had just sent it as text.

“Did you check at Staples?”

Um, no. I get everyday electrical stuff at Lowe’s. Power strips; surge suppressors; extension cords; heavy cabling, plugs, and receptacles for hooking up high-power heaters or parts of server racks; etc. There’s an industrial electronics place in town that’s good for heavier-duty batteries, but these batteries will probably last for years regardless. Staples is more for when we need a cheap network switch right now.

“Staples has a state contract, and if an item is on their contract site, we have to document that we can find it cheaper elsewhere.”

Ok. So I finally went to Staples today. Not that they can actually price check the batteries without charging and then voiding my university card:

The mind boggles. Office-supply stores don’t sell batteries for cheap, even if you have a contract with them. Why doesn’t the state board that wrote the contract know this?

Eventually, I’ll get dspam working alongside it, since 3 of the delayed emails today were actually spam, but this is an enormous first step, and the return on the minimal amount of configuration required is huge.

Update on emails delivered versus greylisted: