{"id":452,"date":"2011-07-01T09:40:46","date_gmt":"2011-07-01T09:40:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/?p=452"},"modified":"2011-07-01T09:40:46","modified_gmt":"2011-07-01T09:40:46","slug":"summer-shenanigans-stacs-overflow-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/2011\/07\/01\/summer-shenanigans-stacs-overflow-and-more\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer shenanigans, STACS overflow, and more"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hello everyone,<\/p>\n<p>As usual, while you&#8217;re all off earning some extra cash or having a well-earned rest for the summer, we&#8217;ll be here improving the teaching systems infrastructure and lab machines ready for the next academic year.  This means that from time to time certain systems will be unavailable as we&#8217;re upgrading them &#8211; details will be posted on the <a href='https:\/\/secure.ecs.soton.ac.uk\/status\/'>systems notice board<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h2>Upgrades and suchlike<\/h2>\n<p>Here&#8217;s some of the stuff we&#8217;ve got planned:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Linuxproj is getting an upgrade (we&#8217;ve got a nice beefy machine racked up and ready to go pretty soon now!)<\/li>\n<li>The undergrad login server (uglogin) will be upgraded and moved to a virtual machine &#8211; this will give it improved resilience and lower power usage<\/li>\n<li>The lab monitoring system will be improved &#8211; the plasma display map will become more readable, and we will be able to get better usage stats<\/li>\n<li>The UG print server hardware will be upgraded, and we&#8217;re planning some improvements to the software<\/li>\n<li>CSLib are migrating their various servers to less ancient hardware<\/li>\n<li>We&#8217;ve ordered some new chairs to replace the ones that are really showing their age<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>STACS Overflow<\/h2>\n<p>We&#8217;ve also got a new system that&#8217;s been kindly set up for us by <a href='https:\/\/secure.ecs.soton.ac.uk\/people\/dsc'>Dave Challis<\/a> (ECS webmaster) &#8211; <a href='https:\/\/stacsoverflow.ecs.soton.ac.uk'>STACS Overflow<\/a>.  This is a question-and-answer site much like <a href='http:\/\/stackoverflow.com'>Stack Overflow<\/a> which many of you have probably seen; it&#8217;s a place where you can ask and answer questions about programming, hardware, electronics, debugging, software advice, etc.  We&#8217;ve had a few people trying it out and asking questions already; we may even be opening it up to other departments later in the year!<\/p>\n<h2>Toys^WTeaching equipment<\/h2>\n<p>Some of you have already seen the two quadrotor helicopters (ARDrones) we&#8217;ve got in the STACS office; we&#8217;ve also got a pair of Microsoft Kinects and a few keen individuals have been having a go with the OpenNI software under Linux.  With a little help from <a href='https:\/\/secure.ecs.soton.ac.uk\/people\/dct05r'>Dave Tarrant<\/a>, some of our students have even linked the two together and caused terror in the breakout zone with handwave-controlled robotic flying machines! If anyone would like to help improve the software and get it packaged up (or invent new and exciting uses for a scarily advanced computer vision system), give us a shout.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s also a shiny new (surprisingly small) 3D video camera available for loan from stores, and rumour has it there will be some extra stuff turning up there soon &#8211; watch this space&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hello everyone, As usual, while you&#8217;re all off earning some extra cash or having a well-earned rest for the summer, we&#8217;ll be here improving the teaching systems infrastructure and lab machines ready for the next academic year. This means that from time to time certain systems will be unavailable as we&#8217;re upgrading them &#8211; details [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[181,8992,182,183],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing-labs","category-hardware","category-lab-computers","category-systems-services"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=452"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":460,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452\/revisions\/460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}