unluck of the draw
Today my shiny new 250gig hard drive showed up. Unfortuantely, the drive is defective. For some unknown reason, the drive just couldn't be detected. I tried it on two separate computers with the same result. 
So, I RMA'd the drive and will be mailing it back tomorrow.
work work work
It didn't seem like it before, but a lot happened today. We got a feature request for the conference services app to allow editing of the start and end dates of a conference. The request was one of those "why didn't we do this in the first place" things. I set to work on that early this afternoon, and have most of it done, all that's left is to do some error checking and a bit of testing. 24 hour turnaround time on a feature request is pretty darn good if you ask me. 
Over the past few days, Nick and I have been researching different vendor solutions for migrating our current servers over to 1U rackmount boxes. Dell, HP and NW Computers were all able to offer ideal solutions that fit what we were looking for, however Dell's pricing was much more easier on the wallet. We'll know in a few days how many of the little guy's we'll be able to get. Then comes the fun part of planning out the deployment, and deciding on an OS. The focus right now is on whether to go with a bsd like we did on our filter boxes, or some flavor of linux, likely suse or gentoo.
Nick, being a hippy linux nerd favors gentoo. While I, an elitest cs major, favor the bsd's. To be fair, we both have good reasons supporting our decisions, but since it's my blog, I get to be right.
Oh, and as a late afternoon surprise, we got to test out iPrint on our lab printers. Thanks Greg!
Students have commented in the past on how nice it would be if they could print to a lab printer from their own computer. We've looked into providing this in the past, but could never find away to do so without the hassle of installing the novell client on the students' machine. With iPrint, the user only has to install the novell internet print agent, and select the printer they want to print to from the list. The agent automates downloading the drivers, adding the printer, and best of all, it handles all of the user authentication.
While this is still a long ways off from being production ready, it's awesome to see it in action.
catchup
Well, it's been a while since I've posted, so I suppose an update is in order.
I'm up in bellingham taking one class (Programming Languages) and working. I'm working for restek on a per project basis. So far this has included evaluating different calendar/scheduling systems, making the new lab images, and working on the dashboard project (more on that later).
Since myWestern uses uPortal, I looked for software that would easily integrate with that system. Along comes uwCal, a decent package put out by the university of washington. However, the whole thing is written in java, and I have to say the whole tomcat java servlet setup is one big pain in the ass. I don't think they could have come up with a more intricate or complicated method for running what should be a simple webserver, db, and webapp. Plus, this thing is very hungry for cpu and memory. Boo.
Fortunately, John Huddleston over at reslife has been working on a project called nexus. It's designed just to organize groups and group events. You pick out what groups or activities you are interested in, and any events for those groups will appear on your own personalized calendar. Very cool. Now, what would make this a killer app, would be the ability to add your own personal event, share your calendar with others, and pull rss/xml based event feeds from other sources.
With those features, I really think that this will be something that students will really enjoy and make use of.
The other project I'm working on is a independent project for John Jordy who works in the councelling center at western. I am working on a app for palm pda's that will facilitate the tracking of aspects of a person's health. i.e happiness, stress, pain, medications. This information paints an interesting picture that often times helps people understand the coorelation between those things. "Oh see, here is when the headache started, and your stress levels increased until you took a pain killer, and then the pain and stress went back down." Ok, so thats a pretty simple example, but you get the idea.
Diving into the world of palm development has been quite interesting. It's all C/C++, but the forms and input paradigms are much different from anything I've done before. So, I've done quite a bit of trial and error trying different techniques, but progress has been good. This being my first solo programming gig, I'm extra motivated to do a kick-ass job.
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