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.
