e-infrastructure | Thomas' Work Space

Fall2013 LRC room booking and equipment circulation improvements

2013/08/22 plagwitz Leave a comment

We had a lot of problems over the last 2 years with students, unlike faculty and staff, not getting automated accepted/declined responses to their resource booking requests. This seems now finally a thing of the past:
In addition to automated responses in cases of policy violations or booking conflicts, we meant to automatically enforce policies that restrict booking of certain resources to certain groups. While groups still need to be maintained manually, this is now possible (and being implemented first for film studies and film club students that have exclusive rights to our film equipment). And here is what it will look like: “You don’t have permission to book this resource”. Don’t hand out equipment to clients who got this response.

2013/08/19 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.

2013/08/15 plagwitz Leave a comment

Problem: control panel on the teacher station unresponsive (both hardware and software buttons). No AV and on/off switching.
Cause: Octo switch in the AV cabinet crashed (it needs replacing).
Resolution: Open the door to the AV cabinet and powercycle the switch (= unplug and replug the lower thin black cable in the 1st or top rightmost thin black cable in the 2nd photo). Or use the call button (still functional) and wait for help.

2013/08/13 plagwitz 3 comments

If you set resource mailbox calendar default permissions to “full details” like so:
you will get the benefit of seeing immediately the contact info of other bookers of the resource in the scheduling assistant , like so:
That is more personal and personable – in Outlook! In OWA of exchange 2010 sp2, you still do not, and you have to go through the full calendar (subscribed or published with full detail like in the view links here).
Here is a little bonus for the recent commenter: You may have to trigger a refresh (wait time seemed bit enough). The information for the resources at the bottom I started seeing only after I switched back and forth between scheduling assistant/appointment/scheduling assistant view.

2013/07/31 plagwitz Leave a comment

For lack of PowerShell access, we have to:
sign in as the resource :
“click on publish” in the calendar’s context menu:
choose these settings”
1. we do a lot of forensics and statistics, looking back throuhg the term, which is longer back than 3 months
2. students do not need to book ahead at the beginning of the term for end-of-term projects, so we do not need 6 months forward;
Result: .

2013/07/28 plagwitz Leave a comment

For layout design:
1. Go to http://[yo r site’s URL here]/wp-admin, e.g. http://lrc.unc.edu/wp-admin, and log in (you need site admin privileges , like I have for the LRC site).
“Pages”(in the left hand menu)
1. are an afterthought in wordpress which was originally based on dated posts (for a diary-like web logs), but can be useful for not time-sensitive , stable areas/sections of your site.
2. You can include a bulleted or numbered list which you periodically update manually (click “edit” on the page)
3. or, for frequently changing information (like lists of students), you can use a system that may have more initial learning curve, but in the long run makes updating easier
  1. embed an online spreadsheet from Google Apps or SkyDrive
  2. or embed an RSS feed like in the above example (if you have an RSS. provider).

2013/07/23 plagwitz Leave a comment

In this instance, the cryptic message denoted a bitness problem: dcfldd (the extension in question, like so: for /f %i in ( ‘dir /b .\input’ ) do dcfldd.exe if=input\%i of=output\%i.jpg bs=1 skip=6) would not start in a Cygwin 64-bit environment. Installed cygwin 32-bit (and changed my path), and dcfldd worked fine.