gnome 2.10
So gnome 2.10 hit the freebsd ports tree on saturday. The freebsd gnome crew put together a script that checks, removes, and rebuilds all the packages that require glib, which pretty much takes care of all the dirty work. It took a significant portion of sunday to rebuild everything, we're talking 12+ hours here on a 1.2Ghz p3. But as always, it was well worth it.
First off, I don't use metacity as my window manager. I prefer the wonderfully simple Xfce. However, the file browser that it comes with (Xffm), leaves a lot to be desired imo. So, I still use nautilus. The one big thing that I have been waiting for is the ability to mount remote file systems and have them treated as if they were local. Nautilus has had some support for this in the past, but I could never get it to work. Not a problem anymore. I was quite impressed how easy it was to mount my various home directories on multiple servers over ssh. Not only that, but other applications *actually* recognized the connections and handled them flawlessly.
This makes my job soo much easier because now I can do all my dev work on the testing server through bluefish with no hassle! Muahahaha!
something is wrong here
no clue how that one happened. It just showed up.
Can't get rid of the little bugger either.
edit: After a reboot, windows decided that it really wasn't a critical system folder, and let me delete it. But there goes my 20 days of up time... 
lab usage stats
I'm not sure if I can take credit for the idea, as it was envisioned some time ago. Basically, each lab machine in the residential labs uses active desktop to display a small 'lab notices' page which allows us to easily post important lab related info, like when MyWestern goes down. 
So this has been in place for some time, and works fine and dandy. The innovation came when we figured that we could easily adapt this to get near realtime stats on which machines were in use, and the duration that someone was logged in. This can help us monitor the labs for possible problems. Not that we don't actively check on the lab machines, but if we see a machine hasn't been used in a week, then its probably prudent to give it a quick checkup.
Last friday I had some free time so I put together a small php script that logs this info into a database, and a created a nifty color coded interface to view current machine usage. Once finals are done with I'll have time to start generating some pretty graphs, which should be quite interesting.
work environment
I was checking the computer lab in Mathes today, and a couple maintenance guys were testing the elevator intercom by riding the elevator and calling each other jackasses. It was totally rad and made my day.
I'm glad we have such a laid back attitude in the ResTek office, it definetly helps make the time go by faster.
Battlecity
Battlecity has finally returned! Almost.
I remember having a great time with this game back in the day. But people found cheats, servers got hacked and whatnot, and since it was closed source at the time, when the server went down, that was it.
Numerous groups have attempted to rewrite the game with varying degrees of success, but it's finally been done.
The current test release is pretty rad, but it's a lot harder than I remember it being. They still have a bit of work to do to make this a true clone of the original, but they seem to have the momentum to see this through. Best of luck to the dev's, your work is definetly appreciated.
printer stats
I spent some time today working on a nice backend interface for managing the SNMP print monitoring we do. Now it's a breeze to add new printers for monitoring, as well as configure things like duplex support. Now that the backend is complete, I can tie in my original printer stats code to use the new config data and shared class.
Pretty slick, eh?
Even though we don't maintain the printer in the Fairhaven lab, it's still neat to watch it as a comparison. Of all the residential computer labs, Fairhaven goes through the most paper. The Ridgeway lab is second highest, but it only does about 65% the volume of Fairhaven.
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