Video Tutorials for Work
Next week we will be responsible for supporting a new two factor authentication system for our campus portal. If you are familiar with how Bank of America's online banking works, you already know what this concept is. This is a pretty major change for our facuty, staff and students, so I have had the priviledge of making video tutorials for the new process. I have to say that it was a lot of fun making the videos. I really wanted to copy the look and feel of the best lynda.com tutorials, but in my opinion fell much closer to some of the worst. I learned a great deal about what I was doing and hopefully can do more in the future. If you want to check out the videos below I would love any comments.
For students not signed up for password reset:
For students signed up for password reset:
It’s virtually LANDesk
Friday marked a major turning point in our LANDesk project. It is phase 1 of a three phase project to secure our LANDesk environment. Phase One was to move our LANDesk core off of a single physical box and place it on an ESX cluster as a virtual machine. In what has the be the single largest stresser of the last few months, it ended up taking about 10 minutes for the switch over. Seven of the 10 minutes was figuring out how to deactivate the old core, calling LANDesk, and activating the new core. Overall it was a great end to a very stressful week.
After the switch over we did about thirty minutes of testing and it looks like the VM core is actually going to be a great solution for us. We are just shy of 3000 nodes and expect towards the end of spring semester to be closer to 5000, and the VM did great over the weekend. As the work week gets ramped up we'll be keeping a close eye on the system and begin work on the next two phases. Phase 2 is getting service pack 2 for LDMS 9 installed. This is a major upgrade and hopefully a major step forward. Phase 3 is a more realtime backup/failsafe solution for the LDMS database. Over the next few weeks LANDesk should become one of our most stable and dependable systems.
This is also a somewhat sad project for me as it is the last major LANDesk project on my radar. Once all three phases of this are complete, the handing of the reigns to Sundiata should be as well. I am so ready to start another project but I really have put a lot of time and effort into this one. It is hard to get my mind off of it and onto the next thing. I am excited about the next project though and hope to have some more information in the next couple months.
Change is in the Air
Wednesday will mark what I see as the start of the new HUB. We will have a meeting in the morning in which our new director will outline her vision and goals for the HUB. This is absolutely freaking me out. On the one hand I have a very nostalgic view of the HUB and how it used to be, granted it hasn't really been like that since 2002 however. On the other hand I always want us to grow and get better. To evolve and refuse stagnation. I think the biggest fear I have though is being told that my job will not be changing.
One of the greatest joys I have had at the HIUB is the continual change and growth that it has offered. Over the last year however, that has not really happened. I have been on one project since May of 2009 and while I saw it as a great project to start and get going, it was never long term in my mind. At this point I am feeling the burnout however fear that without change, this will become just a job. Here's hoping for some great news Wednesday.
Legality
Lawyers suck all the fun out of life. Hopefully this will be my last day in contract negotiations.
HTML EMails
I have always had a backwards view of HTML based email. I say it is backwards because I have felt it was just for spam. Recently I have really started noticing some great benefits of using HTML in the email space. It provides a great way to brand yourself, as well as a a way to consistently show the information you need. A great example of this is how facebook and progressive use HTML emails for their notification systems.
Flip UltraHD 120
We have had a time the past few years with classes being assigned video projects, but the school not offering cameras for them to use. This has led to a lot of opportunities for the HUB. Students can check out VHS cameras from media services, but they have no real way to get them on their computers. They will sometimes use a digital video camera, but have no way to get it on their computer. Worst of all they will use a camera that stores video on some weird tape or DVD. I have taken it upon myself to look into this and figure out if their is a better way. Enter the Flip UltraHD 120.
This little wonder is four and a quarter inches tall by two and a fifth inches wide, yet it shoots 2 hours of 1280 x 720 (720p) video at 30 frames per second. It has 8GB of internal storage, but really only about 7GB available for video. So where did that extra gigabyte go? Preloaded on the device is an editing app for both Windows and Mac. No need to have anything else. Speaking of not needing anything else, the camera has a built in USB connector so you don't even need a USB cable. I would absolutely want one myself as the camera seems to just dangle in the air when connected to my desktop. Doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
The problem with support
Steve Jobs
This morning when I got to work I was excited about a light day of work during what is usually a slow time of the year. As soon as I turned the corner to go into my office I knew that was not going to be the case. Some of the buildings on campus had no network connectivity and our phones were lighting up. This isn't too big of a deal except people were also trying to go around us for support and that just makes it harder for us to get the problem taken care of. I guess that is the norm. The biggest problem was that while this was going on our network access control (NAC) system started to freak out on several people's computers across campus.
Our NAC is something I am so looking forward to when it is fully online, but right now we are still in the phase of working out the bugs. I worry about the problems we are having with it because the potential of the NAC is so great, but keeping employees excited about what it can offer us is getting harder and harder. I know that if our staff doesn't see it as anything but problems then they will not be able to back it 100% and we have to. I know that tele-com is working as hard as they can to make sure there are no problems and hopefully things are going to smooth out soon.
An introduction
Kim came by work today for lunch and for the first time I let my boss know about her. It was kind of a spur of the moment thing but I really wanted Kim to meet Debye. Debye's face was hilarious when I first introduced her. It went from a look of "Oh no, what'd we do to her computer" to "wait, she isn't here because of a problem" to "you have a girlfriend?!?" in about 1 second. I was very glad I got to introduce Kim to Debye today. When I got back from lunch, Debye stopped me and was was questioning me about Kim and why I hadn't said anything. I try to keep my personal life separate from work to a degree. Anyway, it went well and I am so very glad Debye seemed to like her.
Getting ready for students
One of the major factors in purchasing LANDesk at CSU was to enable more freedom for our students. Currently a student who needs to install Microsoft Office will need to come in to one of the HUB's two walkup locations. This has been the common practice since we started ITP Choice in 2001. With LANDesk we hope to move out of this and enable students to install software on demand anywhere on campus.
A huge hurdle in this task is a disconnect between our student information system and LANDesk. Before an install begins we have to be sure that the person installing it is a currently enrolled, eligible student. We looked at several solutions for this including LANDesk Process Manager, but ultimately decided we could more efficiently do it with a simple authentication application.
