ADA station changes

From Omar:

Here is an update you on some security changes we are making to the
ADA stations at both library sites.

I have changed the password to the ADA stations and are no longer
issuing the password out to the service desks.

The login information for the ADA stations is obtained through the
DRC.  Library ITS is still providing computer support for this station.

If a DRC student wants to gain access to the station, Angela Holleman
is the DRC Technology Coordinator and can be reached at
adhollem@ucsc.edu or at 9-3225.

If a community patron requests access to the ADA station, please direct
them to email help@ucsc.edu with library in the subject line to get
access. 

Note:  The station is not for scanning and is only for adaptive
technology use.

Student survey publicity

You may notice small thin strips attached to our public stations on the 2nd floor at McH publicizing a student survey. The survey is sponsored by UCSC office of Institutional Research and is part of a statewide survey of students regarding class and lecture size. The survey closes on Feb 10th, at which time these strips will be removed.

The strips say: "Get heard. Take the class and lecture availability student survey @ www.uc-class.org. For a chance to win Nite Owl cookies"

Thanks,

Lucia

Right desk Mac screen tilting problem

The ergonomic arm on the right desk Mac seems to have a missing bolt or screw that allows us to tilt it backward and forward as we need to. A call is in to Jerry to see if he can fix it for us.
It does seem to be working at the moment if you gently tilt it back away from you. But if it starts to tilt forward, it falls all the way and is unusable.

Thanks for your patience while we have it repaired. In the meantime, if you are uncomfortale using it until it's fixed, use the center computer on the back table or the left desk Mac.

Thanks,

Laura

IT support over Spring Break

Omar let Lucia know that CNS will be providing on-call service only. The students working this week are addressing maintenance issues, but will be checking machines and monitoring paper supplies. We need to call the CNS number, 459-2486, if there are problems.

Opening PDFs on public computers

If a document opens with the open source PDF viewer (not Adobe), right-click to choose "Open with...Adobe" or save it to the desktop and then drag it to Adobe in the dock. Same for the Ref Desk computers.

Printing update and clarification

From the public computers, there is no longer a second popup window (that tells the patron how much the print job will be). That changed with the new system, but some did not hear about the change. Macs didn't need the notify acknowledgment, but PCs did, to send the print job. It was a feature of the old
printing system, that we did not implement in the new version. So now all the patron needs to do is name the print job and then pick it up from one of the release stations. They will see the cost when they pick up the print job from the release station (Thanks to Frank Dang for this clarification).

Keystrokes on Ref Desk PC workstation

The PC at the McH desk is having intermittent problems accepting keystrokes for entering the password. This seems to happen only at startup. If it happens to you:

1. Restart the machine - holding down the power button for 10 secs will do it.

2. Make sure the numlock is on to use the keypad, OR use the number bar at the top of the keyboard.

This should remedy the problem. Please enter a ticket if you try this and the problem continues.

Lucia

Antidote to the A4 printing error problem

Frank Gravier gets a gold star for discovering the antidote to the A4 tray error printing problem. When you encounter that error and there is no staff at the IT Help Desk, press 7 (for plain letter) and then enter (next to the number 4 and a left arrow), and the job will print out. It may not stop the A4 error from occurring but at least it doesn't hold up everyone else's print job.

Word documents on public computers

A patron came to the desk before the IT desk was staffed and said her Word 2007 document wouldn't open on PC #7. I called ITS and
Frank said that the PC's do have a concerter pac installed and should automatically open Word 2007 docs. If they don't, have the patron try another PC and report that one by submitting a ticket to ITS. And that's what I did and it worked fine on another PC. So in case this happens to you on a morning watch, that's what to do.

Students accessing their home directory in Info Commons

Periodically a student will ask for help accessing their home directory, which is UCSC server storage space provided to all students, faculty, and staff. Here's how to get to one's personal directory from the PC and MAc stations in the Info Commons:

From Macs:
-go to Fetch (from the dock or finder)
-in the Host Name text box, type: unix.ic.ucsc.edu
-in the User Name text box, type your email login (without @ucsc.edu)
-select SFTP from Connect using the drop-down menu
-type in your password in the Password text box
-select Connect

From PCs:
-go to the Secure Shell page
-select the Secure File Transfer Client icon
-select Quick Connect
-in the Host Name text box, type: unix.ic.ucsc.edu
-in the User Name text box, type your email login (without @ucsc.edu)
-at the prompt, type your password
-select OK

Saving docs on public computers: save often and wisely

There is not much more frustrating when a student comes up after a power outage and has lost their paper because they were only saving it to the desktop. So to help them avoid this, we've added some signage in the Info Commons to help them know how to save safely. And it's a good reminder for us to tell them. I conferred with Fish about this so here's the scoop:

Safest ways to save:
-Flash drive / memory stick
-CD
-Google docs
-Email to yourself

Unsafe:
-Desktop only
-Documents folder only

If they've only saved to the desktop or docs folder and the power suddenly goes out or flickers strongly enough, they will lose their paper and there is no way to recover it.

Problems with EBSCO on Library Commons Macs

Firefox users may see a "proxy error" message when searching EBSCO databases (e.g. Academic Search Complete, Historical Abstracts, etc) on Macs with 10.5 in the Library Commons. Usually they can get past this by reloading the page. If that's annoying they may want to use Safari for their EBSCO searching. See Fish's note below for more detail as well as news of a fix forthcoming.

Hi,

Apparently there was an issue yesterday with an EBSCO database search on one of the info commons iMacs. This is a known issue that effects certain databases. There is something buggy with firefox running on 10.5 machines. we have tried many things to work out what the problem is without success.

If you do get a browser error on firefox when doing a search you can hit reload on the page and the search usually loads fine, otherwise Safari should be used.

I am building a brand new image from scratch due to some other network related bugs - working with an apple engineer it was determined that there may have been some corrupt files on these machines. I am hopeful that the bugs and annoying quirks will be resolved once the new image is rolled out.

--
Andrew 'Fish' Phipps