The ITS Coffee Break returns from a long hiatus to talk about the mobile web, a college portal, the “Teaching with Technology” grant program, Twitter Bootstrap, Massively Open Online Courses, and Dick Tracy-style watches that sync with your smartphone.
We live in the future.
Arm-chair activism
In the past, Political protest was done with picket signs and chants in front of a capitol building somewhere. Today, it’s happening more and more in a digital format. In 2010, the internet poured on opposition for the Stop Online Piracy, and PROTECT IP act’s. I wrote about it in another blog entry here while it was still a hot topic. The protest went so far as for many sites, including high profile sites like Wikipedia, to black-out their front page during a day of protest. This protest got noticed, and got the job done. SOPA and PROTECT IP died. More legislation has come along with similar dire consequences, and has met similar opposition. None seemed so vocal though.
The idea of threatening someone, or an entity comprised of many someone’s, with information which would tarnish their reputation, or force them to face consequences. Otherwise known as Blackmail, has also, unfortunately, evolved. The concept of stealing someones information has moved away from ski-masks and crow-bars, to data breaches and high-tech compromises.
These developments are all leading us into a new era, of cyber-warfare. Where not only are we letting machines and CPU’s carry out our battles, but we’re not leaving our parents’ basements while we do it. Hacktivist groups are becoming a real threat, for good or ill. So how do we respond to this? Well.. It would seem that the US DOJ responds by making examples out of those tried for cyber crimes. Which has lead up to some interesting events in the past few weeks, and prompted me to write this article.
The death of brilliance
One such case of disproportionate punishment, the case of Aaron Swartz. If you’d like to know more about Aaron, and who he was, you should try google. I couldn’t begin to accurately describe him. I’ll say that many called him brilliant. He help found Demand Progress, and Reddit. He wrote the spec for RSS when he was 14. Sounds like a pretty bright guy to me. Unfortunately, he was caught attempting to harvest all of JSTOR‘s articles. He and JSTOR apparently came to acceptable terms, and they were going to let him off the hook. Again, I don’t have all the details here, I’m more or less regurgitating what other media outlets have told me. The point is, that the matter was settled, and no jail sentence was being pushed.
Enter the US Department of Justice. They apparently weren’t satisfied with Aaron’s punishment, and pushed for (numbers have varied here from reports I’ve heard) up to 35 years in prison, and up to $1,000,000 in fines. Sound’s like a fair punishment, right? Aaron’s lawyer was attempting to work out a Plea deal, where he’d have up to 7 years in prison, but the DOJ wasn’t biting. On 1/11/2013 Aaron took his own life. You can speculate on why, or what contributed. It seems safe to assume that the impending sentence didn’t help matters.
An Anonymous ultimatum
On 1/25/2013, the Hacktivist group Anonymous decided it was time to put an end to injustice. Or, at least as it pertains to the unfair treatment of cyber-criminals. In the late hours of Friday 1/25, Anonymous attacked the US Sentencing Commission’s web site, www.ussc.gov, and placed on their site an embedded YouTube video giving the US DOJ an ultimatum. Fair sentencing for cyber criminals, or “Chaos”. The group claims that through their on-going infiltration of the US Government, they have obtained a lot of dirt on a lot of US Justices. They have encrypted a collection of this data, and broken it into chunks, and distributed the data across the globe, to anyone interested in downloading it. Anonymous holds the key, and threatens to release it if the DOJ doesn’t change its ways.
Did that just happen?
This all sounds like the plot of a Movie. Something thought-up in Hollywood and acted out with unrealistic computer simulations, and kids on roller-blades. Well it’s real, it’s happened, and we’re all just waiting to see how it pans out. The point here is that this is an indication that the days of activists living anonymously on the internet are upon us. The ability to affect change without having to actually leave your house are here. Let’s hope the world’s population is ready for it.
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Redesigned Library Web Site Launches
The redesigned Library Web site launched on Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2012. The new site now uses the college’s “nowWeb” theme and has been upgraded from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7.
Monroe@ LLC hosts “Learn to Code” event
The Monroe@ Living Learning Community is hosting a “Learn to Code” event on Saturday, September 29, 2012 from 4:00pm to 6:00pm. The event will be held at 638 Monroe St; visit the Lafayette Calendar for the full event details.
Reverting to Mac Mail’s Classic Layout under Lion
One of the most annoying things I discovered after upgrading to Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) was its default Mail view. Out of the box it wants to display messages with a preview; this hogs up screen real estate, and makes it more difficult for me to skim my inbox. I prefer to not have a preview and simply see the subject lines of my emails.
Fortunately there’s a to revert to the old way of viewing things:
- Launch Mail
- Go to Mail > Preferences
- Choose the “Viewing” button
- Check the box next to “Use classic layout”
- Close the window
Your mail will now display sans preview text.
Firefox 5 + Latest Flash = Failure
Last week I met with a faculty member who was worried that her WordPress site had lost her media files. After some exploration and head-vs-desk moments, we discovered that it wasn’t a WordPress problem, it was a Firefox problem.
Specifically Firefox 5. Apparently if you’re running Firefox 5, and upgrade to the latest version of Flash, the plugin stops working and your content doesn’t load. Upgrading to the latest Firefox (Firefox 13 at the time of this post) fixes the problem.
Internet Explorer 8 has the same issue. I haven’t tested it, but I expect upgrading IE to a current version would also solve that problem.
Change your LinkedIn password
Numerous sources report that a small percentage of LinkedIn’s 160 million hashed user’s passwords have been posted online. Kashmir Hill, Forbes.com technology staffer, details this issue as well as some concerns regarding LinkedIn’s calendar synch and steps you can take to address both.
Posted in Privacy, security, Social Media
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CLAMP’s Moodle 2.x work ramps up
June is going to be a busy month for the Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project (CLAMP). The organization — which Lafayette College help leads by serving on the steering committee — released its report on Moodle 2.x today.
Eighteen months ago CLAMP issued a similar report recommending that colleges stay with Moodle 1.9 for the 2011-12 academic year because Moodle 2 still had major issues preventing its adoption by our community. Flash forward to Summer 2012 and CLAMP is now recommending the use of Moodle 2.2 and Moodle 2.3 for the 2012-13 academic year.
Also new at CLAMP are the results of our membership survey regarding Moodle 2.x adoption and deployment and a security release of Moodle 2.2.3+Liberal Arts Edition 2.1.
Finally next week Kalamazoo College will be hosting Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Summer 2012. Twenty-nine people will be attending the event, with another four participating virtually. The developers from colleges around the country will be hacking Moodle code, slaying bugs and working on new features, while their instructional technology counterparts test and document new functionality.
Representing Lafayette on the hacker side will be will be Kenneth Newquist and Charles Fulton while the doc side will be covered by instructional technologists Jason Alley and Jennifer Rao.
Scientific Computing – The Plot Thickens
I have written a lot of computer programs in my time, using a lot of different tools and languages. I recall the fun that could be had PEEKing and POKEing 6510 instructions copied out of computer magazines to program the game of the month on my old C64. Wow, am I glad the state of the art has evolved since then!
These days, I like programming in Python, which is a scripting environment that runs on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems. It is language. And I mean language in the sense that you can read it, understand it, and create your own abstractions and concepts with it. As far as modern general purpose computer languages go, it is quite expressive. Nothing near the meaningfulness of a language like English, mind you, but a far cry from those early tools that could only deal with concepts that related directly to computing.
The thing that makes modern computer languages so wonderful is that they can actually be used to express concepts in problem domains outside of computing. For example, a couple weeks ago I was doing some routine monitoring of one of our college systems. I collected the data, stored it in a database, and then what? I wanted to do something to make it really easy for me to visualize what the data meant. And since charts and graphs are a popular way of making trends stand out visually, I started looking for a way to add some simple plotting capability to my monitoring program, which was written in Python.
A quick Google search led me to a library called matplotlib, which fit the bill perfectly. After spending an hour reading the documentation, I had nice line graphs that showed me the important trends in which I was interested. However, I had discovered something more interesting in the process.
In the course of reading the matplotlib documentation, I discovered why the author had written the library. For years he had worked with MATLAB to produce nice looking plots, but as time when on he found MATLAB’s ability to interact with other systems limiting. He switched to working with Python, a great tool for working with other computing environments, and wrote the matplotlib library as a way for folks familiar with MATLAB to come up to speed quickly in a new environment.
I had heard that MATLAB was a software package that was used on campus, but I had never actually worked with it. So I looked at its wikipedia page to get some idea of the kind of things for which one might use MATLAB.
I learned some things about the language MATLAB uses to express concepts. And unsurprisingly, these concepts are related to a very specific domain. The MATLAB vocabulary is centered around matrix manipulation and plotting. I also saw a really cool looking 3D plot (you may need to scroll down a bit). The MATLAB code to produce the plot was also included. Just 7 lines of code to produce a multi-colored 3D shape is pretty impressive in my opinion. So of course I wanted to see if I could achieve the same results using Python.
Now, I had always been pretty good with math in high school. And to my credit, I remember bits and pieces of the higher math concepts I had studied. But would that be enough of a background to translate MATLAB code to Python? Ten minutes later, the answer is a resounding “Yes!”. I have attached an image of my plot and the Python code below. You can judge how well it turned out.
I did some additional reading and discovered there are whole communities dedicated to scientific computing with Python. Projects like SAGE and spyder are aimed at making scientific computing with Python a reality. There are even entire distributions like Python(X,Y) that tie all these libraries together.
I find this really exciting, because it adds expressive capability to Python in the domains of science, math, and engineering. This will allow experts in those fields to connect to a wider computing infrastructure more easily. This is tremendously useful, because a brilliant scientist or engineer may not be particularly interested in learning a new language in order to express familiar concepts. Now, thanks to an expanded vocabulary, those same ideas can be expressed in familiar language.
My First 3D Plot with matplotlib and Python
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D from matplotlib import cm from matplotlib.ticker import LinearLocator, FormatStrFormatter import numpy as np fig = plt.figure() ax = fig.gca(projection='3d') X = np.arange(-10, 10, 0.25) Y = np.arange(-10, 10, 0.25) X, Y = np.meshgrid(X, Y) f = np.sinc(np.sqrt( (X/np.pi)**2 + (Y/np.pi)**2 )) surf = ax.plot_surface(X, Y, f, rstride=1, cstride=1, cmap=cm.jet, linewidth=0, antialiased=False) ax.set_zlim3d(-0.3, 1.0) fig.colorbar(surf, shrink=0.5, aspect=5) plt.show()
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LANDesk Desktop Management – Managing Faculty, Staff, and Lab Computers
Introduction:
In 2008 ITS purchased LANDesk Management Suite. This software suite provides ITS the following functions: Software and Hardware Inventory, Reporting, Remote Control, Custom Scripts, Software Distribution, OS Deployment, Provisioning, and Security and Patch Management. Over the past 4 years we have explored each of these functions and mastered the capabilities of LANDesk within ITS. We have used LANDesk’s features on faculty, staff, and ITS managed lab computers. The first big projects that we used LANDesk for was the deployment of Office 2007 and the conversion to Zimbra. Then we began to transition to Windows 7 using new imaging techniques. Instead of using “fat” images that have all the software pre-installed which are difficult to maintain when new versions come out, we now use Provisioning which allows for a much smaller, simpler image and the installation of each software package post-image. This allows us to simply swap a software package in the image template with the newer one and when a computer is re-imaged, it will contain the newer version. The same software package can also be used to distribute the newer version of the software to individual computers without re-imaging.
Integrating Other Labs on Campus and their Managers:
After internally mastering LANDesk, we wanted to begin including other lab managers on campus in using the tools of LANDesk. The first project to allow this is the upgrade to Windows 7. For the time being we are working on PC labs. There are plans to include Mac labs in the future. With Windows 7, the old way of using a “fat” image approach was not going to work for several reasons. Ghost, previous tool for imaging, was too old to image the new OS. We were also looking for a way to more easily maintain the image and keep its contents up to date. To do this, we created a really thin core image that could be customized with applications and settings unique to each situation, be it faculty, staff, or different labs on campus.
In January of 2011, we deployed an updated lab image in Skillman library using this technique. Soon afterwards, talks began with John Wilson of the Geology department, to begin creating a lab image for his PC lab. These discussions led to a final image that was deployed in the beginning of August 2011. Also, the electronic classrooms were refreshed with a standard image in August 2011. From talks with the managers of the Library, Geology, and Electronic Classrooms, we were able to develop a lab core that was built on top of the main core. Then a third layer was built that was unique to each situation. We then began discussions with other lab managers including Chemistry, English, Math, Music, and Psychology. We were able to complete those in a few months. Just recently we finished the image template for Foreign Languages and Literatures and Physics will be developed shortly. Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering are going to be handled differently for now because of the large software payloads on their images. The lab managers for those labs will be packaging their own software, but in the meantime, we are using a pseudo-“fat” image.
This process has taken a while because each lab has a suite of additional software that needs to be packaged in a way so that it can be installed unattended and customized specifically for that lab. Many of the software installations can be done this way, but there were a few that needed to be “repackaged” using AdminStudio InstallShield. Other software packages needed tweaks that could only be possible by contacting the vendor and asking for some assistance in a form of a custom installer. The first sign of how effectively this process is working is the building of updated images for this coming summer. So far, there are only a few additions, updates, and tweaks. These should only take a short amount of time to accomplish and can be done in a much shorter amount of time than the initial build.
We want to keep adding to the usefulness of LANDesk and desktop management tools to the individual lab managers. Beyond imaging, we have established timelines for software updates so that everyone is synchronized in software versions and expectations of when these updates are available. Testing of these updates is also part of these timelines. Also part of the imaging process marks a computer in a way that a scope can be defined. A scope allows us to designate computers to be only seen and maintained by certain people in the management console. After this summer’s LANDesk upgrade and all the lab images finalized, lab managers will be able to manage their own computers using the console, similarly to how ITS manages computers for the faculty and staff. So these managers can use the other tools of LANDesk beyond just imaging.
John Wilson of the Geology Department commented:
The use of the LANDesk imaging has made the summer roll-out and winter check-ups much more efficient. What used to take a week of building an image with all software, making updates and tweaks, and then installing, now only takes a day. Additionally, the ease of adding new software is greatly improved. If a new piece of software arrives, it is easily added to the LANDesk inventory, and when the Geology Image is selected in the console, it is added to the newly imaged computer. When managing 20 or more machines, it makes tasks like this much more efficient and quicker. Being able to view my own lab machines and verify their status through the console also makes lab management much easier. Now, I can be proactive in management.
Rob Bouton of the Psychology Department commented:
The management of resources has always been crucial. I had worked first with Rich Santillo and most recently with Alan Johnson to image, update, monitor and maintain the lab and classroom computers in Oechsle Hall. As in many projects, it has been a step by step process as capabilities are added. It is a pleasure working with Alan and Rich to implement this new suite in our department. I look forward to having the capability to utilize the LANDesk Suite to consolidate the many functions that previously required several different applications in order to image and to thaw and freeze the many computers in the Psychology Department.
Posted in Classroom Technology, Technology
Tagged Faculty Technology, Lab Technology, Staff Technology
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