Todo List


Week ending:

26 Dec 1997
Sent out 5 invitations to HP alums to apply to work at MIT
Opened call with Polaris to work issue of Sparc 4 small power supplies may be eating SIMMs so the FCO we've been using may need amendment.
Moved forward on Applixware spreadsheet cut bug, but I'm not convinced they understand it yet.
12/23 VDI-MG: capacity planning
12/24 took the half day off.
12/25 Xmas holiday
12/26 Vacation
19 Dec 1997
Made final changes to hrsupport matrix, and put last meeting minutes up on the web. Reviewed minutes of meeting I missed most of. Sent out another rejection letter for open position.
Sorted out the CD stacker order. Larry will take it to Jennifer.
Received the short cables for bloom.
Got a call from Sun wondering why we weren't renewing Alliance Plus. Straightened them out! Here we go again! They want to start all over with a new Source license.
Got tape drive working on bloom (after all these months) Used new cleaning cartride, and pedigreed tapes to test.
Found new ear at Sun for "You should do install/update like we do!"
Ordered replacement disk for dead one on bloom.
Went through HUGE resumee book from Hewlett-Packard.
Classified all applicants that we received for open positions as not good enough. All the rejection letters have been sent.
12/16 ACMG: talking about hardware renewal
12/17 IS Holiday party. Lots of schmoozing!
12/18 E40 holiday pot luck.
12/18 Meeting with new SGI Sales Rep and Vijay and Mbarker.
12/19 Fires ate my last Tai Chi meeting of this session. Starting again in january.
12 Dec 1997
<MAIN>Met with new SGI Sales Rep. Gave the all-singing, all-dancing, story of Athena and SGI.
Did lots of prep work for roll-out of hrsupport stuff. We are ramping down!
Opened bug with Sun on new TCP death gram problem. Made them (FINALLY) put my email in my db record.
Heard from SGI that our database update is finally complete.
Continuing to work issue of Sparc 4 power supply replacements: Lou and Polaris are doing the swaps, but our bug report doesn't mention the right remedy, and 'fix on fail' may not be strong enough.
Opened bug with Sun about strange behavior in NFS having to do with exporting directories below mount points.
Talked to someone in Materials Science interested in an Athenized O^2.
Continuing to work issue of SGI's more restrictive licensing for Varsity Pack things.
Got the bad news on Data Recovery of drive from bloom: all is lost.
Preparing to replace bad Micropolis drive with new Seagate drive.
Prepared new task list for CSTR/Thesis work.
Worked with Larry on moving forward on CSTR/Thesis stuff: we've got quotes on the CD Stacker we want.
12/8 Interviewed two candidates for Pismere/Athena positions.
12/9 Annual reunion of Tulip team: Suzanne now works for a Center in Sloan. Craig is becoming an IS Faculty Liason. Bill is cynical as ever :-).
12/9 ILEAD: First official roll-out of new Performance Appraisal process and the output of the Team Leader/Mentoring team (formerly known as hrsupport team)
12/11 ITLT: 9:00 AM presentation of Team Leader/Mentoring stuff. I stayed awake.
12/11 CSTR meeting: moving forward with services, disk replacements, and CD stacker stuff.
12/12 Farewell to sao at redbones.
5 Dec 1997
Received my O^2. Am using it now with Athena 8.1 on IRIX 6.3.
Picked a Drive data recovery service. Had Larry send off the drive for an estimate.
Found out some of why arachne didn't get remote access enabled after reboot.
Pushed Sun on the way they logged out Sparc 4 hang problem. They're gonna look into making it easier for their people to find the solution to the problem in future.
Got info on alternatives for replacement of dead drive from out of business source. Peter has generously offered to take the financial hit if necessary.
Webified hrsupport meeting minutes for 11/18 meeting.
Merged in tiny updates to hrsupport matrix.
12/1 Meeting with Pete Kelley and Dave Lambert to discuss service needs for Origen. They signed off on a sensible service level.
12/2 Release Team: Greg sent out minutes.
12/4 Karlyne Thesis Review
12/5 Fuzzballs
28 Nov 1997
In Monday only.
Dispatched Larry to investigate data recovery and dead drive replacement options while I was away.
Thanksgiving holiday, and took Tue, Wed, and Fri as vacation.
21 Nov 1997
Did two HRSupport interviews: Ron Hoffmann, and Bill Hogue.
Aggregated data from HRSupport interviews.
Called ADS: Getting RMA to return Jukebox and Smart Storage software.
Read and reviewed 15 Resumees for open positions for Athena NT project.
Working with Lou, Brian, Sun, and Polaris to sort out replacing power supplies for SPARC 4 hang problem.
Worked with Sun Opcom to specify work to do for updating CNBoot.
Poked at SGI because NONE of our machine contact database updates had been done.
Made extensive updates of HRSupport matrix as a consequence of interview feedback.
Disk drive on bloom containing 7GB of thesis images died.
Found out another dead drive on the shelf was never sent back and now the vendor is out of business.
Brought up Facade.mit.edu which will be a secure front end for access to origen.
11/18 Release Team: punted to do HRSupport work.
11/18 ACMG: punted to do HRSupport work.
11/18 HRSupport Team: went over survey results. Decided to delay presentation to ILEAD.
11/19 Imaging Meeting: People who are familiar with Imaging technologies and business needs to got acquainted.
11/20 HRSupport Team: Ratified changes to matrix and mentoring plan based on interview feedback.

14 Nov 1997
Bert Dvornik helped me set up a duplicate of /, /usr, and /var on origen's second system disk. Suggested to Kelley and Lambert that it might be useful to others.
Check in with Susan Sinclair of SGI on blue line caper. We're gonna close all the open cases. She and I will keep in touch to make sure SGI handles the internals correctly, and that MIT is properly credited for all boards. I clarified that SGI should put a logic analyzer on the SIMMs/Motherboard and understand the timing issue. No software work is required.
Sent new version of blue line inventory to Susan Sinclair of SGI.
Caught up on weekly status reporting in milestones.html file.
Interviewed Ted T'so, and Mike Barker for HRSupport.
Got Purchase Order to Sun Opcom so they could work on CNBoot.
Investigated MBR-7 and MBR-7.4 stacker drives on Solaris with Larry Stone.
Investigated other stacker options. Talked to ADS about them. Prepared to make some calls to get the promising Pioneer DRM-624x in for a test-drive.
Worked with Lou and Brian on the SPARC 4 hang problem. Emailed Sun with proposal on moving forward on power supply upgrades, and told them they gotta be more forthcoming about FCO's.
Worked with Miki and Brian on setting strategy for getting their Notes replacement system rolled out.
Discussed what to think about when reading resumees that came in for his two open positions. Told him I'd try to read them by monday.
11/11 Holiday: worked anyway.
11/12 Saurons: talked about coverage, transition, and ideas to fill positions opening by Craig and Andy leaving.
11/13 CSTR meeting: everyone was VERY pleased with the Origen progress.
11/13 HRSupport: cancelled
11/13 Review Karlyne's ABS Admin guide draft
11/14 Delivery Team Leaders
7 Nov 1997
Long conversation with Harold Pakulat on improving working relationship between my team and the Database team.
Tracked down delivery of SGI Compiler update. SGI is reviewing their compiler licensing strategy. John Coukos put me in touch with John Coombs and Val Greenlaw to help advocate for a good approach to compiler license policies for large educational sites.
Assigned Larry Stone to mirror CSTR images from reading-room-3.lcs.mit.edu to origen. By the end of the week, half of 20GB was in place!
Helped get on-demand CSTR printing working for Comstock. (This service will probably migrate to origen in the future.)
Network Ops folks fixed a topology bug at W91 that seems to have helped performance.
Requested a Sparc 5 from Vijay/Crockett for use as ftp front end to Origen.
Received CC of SGI support manager asking for business case in addressing our blue stripe caper. I replied in a way to let folks know of my displeasure. (Since Sept 23 and they now ask for a business case? I pointed them at the various aspects of the business case I'd already reported myself.)
SGI promises to update their database this week per our changes.
Discussed with engineer at Sun how to get Sun SCSI driver to work with Nachamichi MBR-7.
Lit fire under Sun Opcom to merge in our cnboot changes and get us boot blocks. They promise relief starting 18 November.
11/4 Release Team: Small short meeting dealing with a few niggling issues in 8.1.14 and IRIX 6.3 support.
11/4 ACMG: (punted to work on HRSupport and other out of control projects.)
11/5 ILEAD: HRSupport team presented a status report and solicited issues on the team's work and, separately on a proposed plan for a mentoring program.
11/6 HRSupport:Discussed the matrix and the Questionaire for the interviews.
11/6 Peter Lee fare well
11/7 Fuzzballs: Color Printing should start small -- through copytech. Ultra installer is working. The O^2's have arrived.
31 Oct 1997
Wrote memo to Lambert and Kelly saying it's not possible to "set the IP address of a SPARC" except in the context of performing a software install.
Had good long meeting with Dave Lambert to discuss Origen support and roll-out issues.
Installed Athena on Origen. Found bug in Athena Install. Found bug in Athena network between E40 and W91. Install took MUCH longer than expected. Miki will make Athena NFS install hard-code 1400 byte packet instead of 8192 byte packet.
Net Ops fixed problem with E40 subnet that helped origen performance A LOT.
Communicated with Russel Hammer (Dennis Aylward recommended him and one other person.) of Sun on Jukebox issues. Data overrun problem was because CD set for 2k block size but Sun expects 512 byte block size.
Made contact with Tracer Technologies and talked about their Jukebox software. It too may be inappropriate.
UPS STILL wants to charge us $5 for SGI pickups.
10/28 Release Team: discussed perl5 a little. Discussed in detail the next steps in addressing the Scull and Bones crack.
10/28 Conference call: Smart Storage about Juke Box software
10/29 Saurons: round table. And a WELL DONE to everyone.
10/30 PDB Implementation Team: Decided to disband and see who complains. Will wait for Discovery Project to create new implementation team.
10/30 HRSupport: Discussed Mentoring plan. Reviewed Reid's review of the Hay McBer team leader competency model. Assigned interviewers and interviewees for feedback process.

24 Oct 1997
Began trying to install Athena on Origen the CSTR/Thesis file server Ultra.
Ordered Disk cable for Origen.
Requested Origen get Serial console.
Received Jukebox software from Smart Storage (after I beat up ADS for not getting it to me when they promised.) It is designed exclusively for a different application.
Emailed Nakamichi for help with Jukebox. (They sent me to Tracer Technologies.)
Established CSTR plan first step: get legacy data and services off dying LCS machines. (Probably means we'll need an extra Sparc 5 to be an anonymous FTP server.)
Took delivery from Larry Stone of new version of Jet and Tviewer that creates variable depth windows instead of using the default depth. This makes performance on 24plane displays much greater since we only create an 8 plane window, and don't need to push 32bit color values around any more.
Used project DB to report status on projects for Quarterly Report.
Requested 2 more NVRAM chips from SGI.
Worked issue of SGI sending latest motherboards and NVRAM chips to wrong address.
UPS still wants to charge us $5 to pick up SGI boards. Made contact with someone in SGI Customer Relations.
Ordered a couple possible tools for NVRAM extraction.
Asked Joe Welch and Juan Vargas to review SGI site list so we could correct their database.
10/20 Draft Responsibility Matrix with Dave Lambert
10/21 Release Team: After much discussion decided NOT to change the default window manager because it would be too disruptive to users, would change the UI from what windows users would expect, and would not provide much value added.
10/23 IS Forum: Presentation on the Advanced computing initiative: It looks to build on what Athena has done. Also brief presentations on revised performance appraisal process, and project Pismere: Scalable NT cluster with Athena services.
10/24 HRSupport: review the HRSupport matrix, and letter to infosys asking for feedback.
10/25 Meeting to debate Standard Web Server Proposal: miki is going to work on a "gold standard" source configuration of Apache.
17 Oct 1997
UPS still trying to charge for pickup.
Went over syslog files to see if there were SGI's getting consistent parity errors. Suggested Lou replace simm 4 in m4-035-14.
Checked in with Susan Sinclair on SGI blue line situation
Examined CSTR image processing methods. Asked Larry Stone to look into better methods based on Tulip stuff.
Sent note to Sun which explained patches to cnboot for Ultra. Also asked them for boot blocks.
10/13 Holiday
10/14 Release Team: discussion of how to handle multiple disks on install. Also discussed what next steps to take on reports of panic problem in the clusters, and on rolling out support for Ultras.
10/15 ILEAD: Small meeting. Finished early. Somewhat informal startup and discussion of how to make future ILEAD meetings worthwhile.
10/15 Saurons: Roundtable. mbarker sent out minutes
10/16 HR Support Team: Fleshed out project plan. Made team assignments.
10 Oct 1997
Opened issue with Tom Farmer of SGI of UPS trying to charge us $5 cash to pick up SGI boards.
Received NVRAM chip from SGI to put 66-080-13 back in the field.
Requested NVRAM chips to correct host ID's of machines with new motherboards.
Asked Cliff Nelson of Polaris for procedure and tools to do NVRAM swap on Indy.
Ordered new SCSI card to put Jukebox on its own bus.
Investigated data overrun errors on Jukebox's singleton CD.
Showed Tviewer to Larry Stone. Got him thinking about how to modify it to create 8 plane windows on 24 plane displays. (A hard-coded default design in Jet imposes all windows to be the default depth.)
Supplied USENIX association with an HTML version of my 1989 USENIX paper: The Evolution of Turnin.
Sun visited to view the Sparc 4 hangup. Replaced motherboard in Andy Oakland's machine as a test.
Team membership for the hrsupport team established.
Wrote top level page for hrsupport team, and set up tlplan list.
I was minutes taker for the first meeting.
Emailed Joe Barkoviak, manager of folks at Sun, praising their handling of the SPARC 4 hang caper.
10/7 Release Team: cancelled
10/7 ACMG --Punted for Sun service call
10/8 Fuzzballs: Discussed recent security issues with focus on what can be done to cut down number of passwords sent in the clear over the net.
10/8 Celebrate completion of cgplan charter
10/9 PDB implementation team: Check in on status of action items for roll out of BRL based project db. Bill hands leadership of the team to Mike Barker. Began discussion of scope of next version of the Project DB. Probably should approach it as a bonafide Discovery Project.
10/9 HR Support Team: Set groundrules.
10/10 Review of revised Performance appraisal process: Bill Hogue made excellent progress on making it shorter, more meaningful, and less unpleasant.
3 Oct 1997
SGI: found pointer to someone to talk to about source code product.
Sun: Opened official trouble ticket on Sparc 4 hangup problem.
SGI: Making suggestions to them to help make parts care easier for us.
Unpacked CD Stacker for CSTR: broken door. no manual, no software.
Wrote initial charter for "Connect the Dots" project to support mime and decoding of content types sent by PC and Mac on Unix platforms.
Wrote "RARP Considered Harmful" memo for Sun to encourage them to adopt bootp or at least institutionalize a few basic changes in install.
9/30 Release Team: discussed MIME support, Ultra support. Began discussing Athena 8.2 issues.
9/30 AFS meeting
10/1 Competency Modeling for new Director of Staff Developent and Resource Allocation
10/2 ILEAD Planning: Topics and procedures to restart ILEAD
26 Sep 1997
Lots of SGI Hell.
SGI screwed up on crediting boards we sent.
SGI: work with Susan Sinclair on resolving enet problem.
SGI: sent list of serial numbers of machines we want new NVRAM chips for.
SGI: more work on compatibility matrix
cgplan: helped startup of hrsupport team.
hrsupport: Did top-level web page and installed charter, workplan, and invite.
Sent out welcome for Larry Stone's beginning.
Did inventory of recent SGI machines. Found all CPU's unsure of location of 1 monitor.
Library: check in with Dave Lambert on Backup, disk attach to bloom, and assembly of Origen.
9/23 out sick
9/24 Coaching luncheon
9/26 Delivery Team leaders meeting. Talked about ideas for improving technical training.
1970 undead messages
19 Sep 1997
Lots of SGI Hell.
SGI: lay ground work for correcting contact info on machines.
SGI: got board with rev C demux, but all same enet address.
SGI: we know how they set enet address.
SGI: helped Lou swap NVRAM chips to recover enet addresses.
SGI Finally reproduced blue line bug, and opened official bug on it.
SGI: UPS'ed 7 boards, handed 10 to SGI rep.
SGI: went over compatibility matrix: apps between 5.3, 6.2, and 6.3. Sent erratta to SGI.
Library: confirm with ADS all is well for disk ship out.
Did Greg Hudson 6-month follow up.
9/16 Release Team
9/17 nut-lib
9/17 cgplan: helped review and put final touches on Director Job description
9/18 pdb team: Code is on track. Set milestones for better documentation.
12 Sep 1997
Lots of SGI Hell.
Tracked down where all Origen hardware was.
Tape drive came this week.
CPU got delivered to W91.
Diskies waiting for rack-mount bracket.
Worked with Cfields and Ghudson on SGI timeline. got buyin from many.
9/9 ITIT Luncheon: SAP Web. Learned some history.
9/9 ACMG: presentation on web-based distance learning.
9/9 more SGI meeting
9/10 Fuzzballs: color printing; presented latest SGI timeline
9/10 Welcome Eric Celeste into new position.
5 Sep 97
Began experimenting with SGI web-based call tracking system.
Received installpatch issue from miki
Started Dave Lambert thinking about Origen
Pushed SGI on Transition issue: Spoke with Dan Vivoli, VP desktop division
Spoke with Leslie Tung and now understand why 6.2/6.3 is big gap.
changed willow passwords for FirstSearch.
Helped Eric Celeste rebuild tfirst for new passwords.
Merged sgi changes into tfirst source tree.
Got crucial insight into Blue line problem from Kingston Technologies: Toshiba memory is significant.
2049 undead msgs!
9/3 cgplan: celebrate deliveries, work on Director job description
9/3 Meet with SGI salesman
9/5 Delivery Team Leaders: sent out minutes
29 Aug 1977
Loaded vanilla 6.2 on problem-child and confirmed death
Tried out web-based SGI call tracking. Hated it.
8/25 cgplan: catch up on being away, Meet with other stakeholders
8/26 cgplan: work out recommendations and principles for them
8/26 ACMG: Helen Samuels on draft standards for keeping student online records properly protected
8/27 cgplan: work on final report talk
8/28 ITLT: presented cgplan final recommendations
8/28 project db mtg: cancelled -- too many on vacation
8/29 6month follow-up review
22 Aug 1997
Vacation
15 Aug 1997
Worked butt off trying to further isolate SGI blue line problem.
8/11 cgplan: Evolve sense of what CG team should look like, and what areas of work it should take on.
8/12 Release Team
8/12 ACMG
8/13 give talk on Certificates to librarians
8/13 Meet with John Coukos of SGI: need transition Indy -> O^2 NOW!
8/13 Fuzzballs: discussed color print quota issues
8/13 cgplan: prepare for 8/14 mtg with JDB
8/14 cgplan: present current status and findings to JDB
8/15 IS BBQ
8 Aug 1997
Sent out 7/24 Milestones Digest
Opened trouble ticket with SGI on Blue Line Problem.
Opened 17 hardware calls for the failing SGI machines
Sucked 4 SGI managers in to project.
8/5 Release team
8/6 cgplan: competency goals. review feedback.
8/8 Delivery Team Leaders: Bill Hogue of Support special guest. Talked about support issues.
1 Aug 1997
Delivered complete second draft of competency history paper in collaboration with Jonathan Ives. Completed post search report for Larry Stone. Got him an official offer letter.
6/28 cgplan: work on workplan
6/29 Release Team: tasks for 8.2; new mkserv services, bugs and fixes
6/29 ACMG: Athena Platform discussion. Faculty want O^2's most.
6/30 cgplan: reviewed history doc
8/1 Online Thesis: saw demo of java-based digiment browser
Worked with Lou Isgur and Mark Silis on fault-isolating blue-line bug.
25 Jul 1997
7/21 Competency Group planning team -- reviewing draft charter, discussing the scope of the work. Discussing ways of communicating with people. 7/22 Release team: release is on track.
7/23 Nut-lib: They found someone to take care of Barton, at last.
7/23 Fuzzballs: issues of Decstations and giving Lincoln Lab user ID's on Athena
7/23 Competency Group planning team -- reviewed work breakdown, and the history doc I wrote.
7/23 Long chat with Mike Barker to give feedback on N42 stuff -- reviewing some principles from PeopleWare book.
[main] A first draft of doc to capture history of competency group efforts.
Wrote a new version of the Competency Group planning team charter.
Wrote first draft of Post Search report for Larry Stone.
Made two outgoing contacts for references for Larry Stone.
Received first Larry Stone reference.
Swapped my Classic for a Sparc 5/170. This required migrating a bunch of stuff that was on the local disk. kerberized rsh worked where ADSM failed.
Spent time working through bugs in ADSM. Dave Kalendarian is great. The product is not.
Spent significant time trying to figure out why my power book drive never spins down on command. Reinstalling 7.5.5 didn't help. Nor did installing the driver from FWB. (Special thanks to Alexis for creating a second bootable system disk drive.)
Got all the modifier keys working on my ALPS keyboard. (Special thanks to Craig for supplying the required lore.)
18 Jul 1997
Vacation
11 Jul 1997
Joined Competency Group task force.
Went over handouts. Researched early thinking on Competency Groups.
Demo'ed Athena boot/fast install of IRIX 6.2 to Andy Shein of SGI.
Received Suns AND SGI's for Team hardware renewal.
Determined where in the Zone machines will go.
Wrote to Ken Hibbard at SGI to reopen 6.3 on Indy issue.
Made an offer to fill SPIII!
Reported ADSM core dump problems.
Got progress from Sun on CNBoot for Ultra: maybe we'll have binaries in a week or 2.
Got progress report script to excise binaries from SGI inst packages -- it's coming.
7/7 Tai Chi Class
7/8 Release Team -- Talked a lot about SGI and platform Qualification.
7/9 ILEAD -- sick
7/9 Fuzzballs -- cancelled
7/10 Luncheon with Larry Stone and 2 Directors.
7/11 Delivery Team Leaders -- talked a lot about issues in entry of delivered products/services into service.
7/11 Tai Chi class.
4 Jul 97
1 day Vacation. 1 day Holiday
7/1 ACMG
7/1 Release Team -- Mike sent minutes.
7/2 Thesis Image Delivery -- buying stuff, moving forward on trying to hire Mitchell, have fall-back if Coffin fails to deliver browser.
7/2 AFS Server -- inventoried differences, set schedule.
Re-Reviewed Karlyne's proposal
7/3 Project DB implementation team -- accomplished action items from last meeting, and began setting the stage for version 2
7/3 ILEAD planning -- What will/should happen to Ilead after Erin departs.
7/3 nut-lib -- Welcom Eric Celeste to his new position: Assistant Director for Technology in the MIT Libraries.
Closed SGI bug with kernel panic on g2r.a -- They are lame. We have to be faster at reporting bugs to get useful patches back.
sent out Saurons digest of 20 and 27 June.
* Reviewed Cfields's install requirements. Sent it to SGI, along with other helpful prose.
Reviewed Rbasch's printer doc. I want to see a little clearer separation between operational documentation and documentation of the differences between Athena printing and stock Berkeley lpr.
Integrated changes made to tiff2psL2.c into tviewer: Now the tviewer program can auto-rotate 600 dpi landscape images like MIT theses are currently scanned.
27 Jun 97
Reviewed Karlyne Hutchings thesis proposal.
* Spent time coming to closure on the purchase of the Library Bit Image server -- handed quotes for everything to Jennifer Crockett.
Requested quote for two SGI O2's. Handed quotes to Jennifer Crockett
Got upset at SGI enough to draft an epistle to the CEO, over waiting two months to ask if it was ok to ship what we bought without internal floppies.
Drafted Poster for IS forum.
Fault-isolated problem with printing on EZ under Athena 8.1 on Sun.
Documented lore of fault isolation in EZ printing.
Reviewed Modifications to Project Database for Quarterly Reports both alone and with Bob Ferrara.
6/23 Vacation Day! (Got a little sunburned.)
6/24 Release Team (missed most of it)
6/25 Brief reunion of Tulip Alumni at Toscanni's
6/26 IS Forum
6/27 Tai Chi Class. It's good to restart these classes.
Caught up on some, not all of email.
Sent out Saurons Digest for 13 Jun.
20 Jun 97
? get relief on bloom tape problem
Drafted proposal for CSTR/Thesis
6/16 PD Community -- Roundtable various news of the world
6/16 Meeting to qualify new Athena platform. Converged on Criteria and next steps in the process for possible Summer 98 roll-out.
6/18 Watchmaker orientation -- everyone introduced. Gave lecture on good programming style.
6/19 E40 Space meeting -- Determined ACS Team will move to N42 and that resolved the major issue.
6/19 Meet folks to discuss Scanned Thesis Image issues.
6/20 nut-lib -- talked about Librarian training in the Web, and on Certificates. Mentioned stuff from Thesis meeting.
6/21 Delivery Leaders -- Spent a big chunk on plus/delta on Competency efforts, and trying to help move things forward with Shirley Picardi and Erin Hoffer leaving.
6/21 Luncheon with Manager of Sun Education Systems Engineering. Played at forcasting future directions for Sun and MIT.
13 Jun 97
6/9 Met with Brenda Gillingham to discuss the Project Database
6/9 Met informally with Greg Anderson and chatted about IS management processes, and the Library Bit Image project.
6/10 OCMG -- Jeff gave a talk on Certificates. I learned some new things.
6/11 Meet with Pete Kelly on Libraries SLA's
6/11 Fuzzballs --Talked about Zip drive deployment status, disk crashes (nothing out of the ordinary), Naomi's presentation of us to ACMG, and a new low-end cluster brainstorm session.
6/12 Meet with PDB design team -- designed change for Quarterly Report support. Plan to meet in 3 weeks to begin discussing V2.
6/12 Conf call with Sun -- New Alliance Plus Rep from Sun: Angelo Rajadurai replacing Jim Hill
6/13 ILEAD -- presentation from Jim on Space and moving.
6/13 Tnstaffl -- project notebooks
6/13 Conf call with CD international. A CD jukebox is one SCSI ID and N lun's.
Working issue of stripping binaries from inst.
Working issue of g2r.a panic -- one line fix.
Got equipment order for staff machine renewal to Jenifer Crockett
Order contains an image processing machine for CSTR
6 Jun 97
filled in neo-NEOS tasks.
Entered CSTR into PDB.
6/2 PD community -- vented at "entry into Service"presentation
6/3 Release Team -- Early is 10 June.
6/3 E40 Space Meeting
6/4 Saurons Briefing on space and Roundtable.
6/5 Meeting about CSTR/Thesis -- I write proposal
6/5 Nut-Lib -- reviewed year's accomplishments.
Closed bug with SGI opened in November on Hardware bug that prevented Messages from running. Now have production patch with work-around, and tested it.
Helped work issue of communication down from directors.
Had davidh schedule interview with new SPIII candidate.
Worked issue of soft errors on Bloom tape drive.
30 May 97
5/30 Delivery Team Leaders -- sent out minutes.
Got info on tapes and disks for possible Library image application.
Cooked up an initial hardware budget for Library image apps.
tiff2psL2.c: removed superfluous Landscape directive.
SGI: tripped over known bug in escall not seeing reopened calls.
Tripped over new escall bug reporting bogus status.
Worked issue of MCC and blessed Sparc 5 configurations.
Talked to Vijay about renewal of team Athena staff machines
Enqueued order for CSTR image processing machine.
Asked davidh to set up Athena platform qulifier criteria meeting.
23 May 97
5/19 PD Community -- punted due to illness.
5/19 Coaching Workshop -- VERY GOOD! Got something out of it.
5/20 ACMG -- talked about Fuzzballs
5/21 Saurons -- planned poster
5/21 Interviewed SPIII Candidate
5/22, 5/23 out sick
Pruned away TONS of undead Z39.50 implementor's group email.
16 May 97
5/12 Welcome Bob Basch luncheon
5/12 Meeting with Electronic Thesis Image folks
5/13 Release Team: Some early beta update problems.
Inventoried Bloom Hardware
Spec'ed out some new disks for Bloom 23 gig is $3100!
Discussed image processing workstation with Michell Charity. Spec'ed out a box.
Picked interviewers for SPIII candidate and had davidh schedule them.
Closed SGI Applix Bug -- I'll call if further testing turns up problems.
Spec'ed out library image repository hardware -- SPARC Ultra, 23GB disks, various tape drives, various cd ideas.
Activated Long Jobs Project
Out one day sick.
Met with folks to kick off NEOS follow-on project.
Had davidh schedule interview for SPIII candidate.
Received resume for new SPIII candidate.
9 May 97
2 SPIII phone calls: Discovered that one lendman candidate we hadn't heard from is out of the country. Turned up another candidate who took another job.
That leaves only 2 left. Tried calling -- left one voice mail. No answer on the other.
One SPIII candidtate is still interested -- conducted phone interview. I want to bring her in for a formal interview.
5/5 PD Community -- Shirley & Erin talked about Competency work -- status update: spending time doing pilots and getting buyin on the work.
5/6 Release Team -- mtools issues, patches for Athena 8.1 for SunPro dev tools.
Talked to Kim Lingle of SunSoft about getting refund on source payments, collaboration on NFS & Install/Update. Asked what definition is of a recommended patch.
5/6 ACMG -- presentation by Greg Anderson on Discovery Process as it is now better understood from ITLT off-site ponderings.
5/7 Interview another Library Assistant director candidate
5/7 FuzzBalls -- completed zip drive work. Planned presentation to ACMG: "Here's what we did with zip drives. We think we need to start thinking about AFS futures." Discussed mbarker's compute server reservation system.
5/7 Saurons -- discussion of criteria for SPIII candidate.
5/9 Delivery Team Leaders
Finished reviewing revised willow run and install scripts. Blessed them in library.new. Checked them into libdevo source trees.
2772 undead messages!
2 May 97
Got negative reply from another lendman candidate
Sent Dennis Aylward inquiry to pick between 2 ultra configs
Helped Mike sort out jhawk's issues with quickstation email lists.
Bought a SPARC Ultra.
Met with Jerry Saltzer on issues of Scanned document delivery -- CSTR and Thesis.
Helped shepard a way out of an Arachne outage.
Sent out 12 to 25 April Saurons Milestones Digest
reviewed Willow install as done in library.new
Played with mtools for Zip. Found a tricky thing with non-partitioned DOS diskies.
Received install notes from Cfields -- need to review it.
Met with rferrara to go over Team Athena directions. He thought what we mapped out was just fine.
Worked with Bert and did version of tiff2psL2 that nicely prints MIT theses pages scanned by MIT Document Services.
25 April 97
Holiday
4/22 ACMG: Round table and catch up. Mentioned our plan for 8.2 and for platform qualifying.
4/23 Helped interview assistant library director.
Played with tviewer code. Got a 32 bit mode working (half as fast as 8 bit mode).
Installed Applix Linux at home and began testing.
Received Solaris 2.6 Beta.
Began considering issues in NFS protocol changes to get it to answer the requirements that drove us to using AFS.
Wrote paper that tells why NFS will never have a migration protocol.
Read digiments thesis that Jamie Coffin wants to conform to.
Suggested to Rich Altmeyer of SGI a closure to Applix Panic bug.
Invited another Lendman client to apply for the SPIII position.
Reviewed SPIII resumes with Mike and Paul and Andy.
Requested 2 SPIII rejection letters go out.
Sent out two rejection emails.
Reviewed silly article from CAEN.
2908 undead messages
18 April 97
Revised, and submitted Post Search Report on danw.
4/16 Helped interview Assistant Library Directory for Technology.
Nudged SGI about patch 1289 and prom bug issues.
Restarted SP3 search
SP3: reread resumes
SP3: had davidh send out one rejection letter.
SP3: Sent follow-up email to two candidates from Landman.
Opened AFS Backup project in Project DB.
Investigated 24 bit tviewer. Bad news: it DEEPLY assumes colors are 8 bits wide or fewer.
Met with Jamie Coffin who wants to do page image delivery of MIT theses.
Ordered two SGI Indy's
2920 undead messages.
11 April 97
Worked with Karlyne on ABS documentation.
Completed draft of Search Report to fill Mark Virtue's vacancy with danw.
Bought a tape drive so we can back up bloom.
4/7 PD Community: Missed it. Sorry!
4/9 Fuzzballs: discussed issues around external Zip drives for selected cluster machines.
4/9 Saurons: very long but productive meeting deciding on what we're up to.
4/10 Nut-lib Discussed issues in Library Web page support and in support of the various library machines such as TGA and Bloom.
Submitted several Applix bugs.
Reviewing Bloom and TGA service issues.
Out one day sick.
4 April 97
Brought 9gb drive online on Bulb for Document Services.
Did ghudson review.
Drafted Craig Fields' review.
Closed Solaris X size service call.
Work on Project DB issue of allowing non-directors to create projects.
Did telephone interview for SP2. This SHOULD be the last.
Asked Charles Marker of SGI to put us onto Beta, and pointed out some issues, and the urgency of doing installs of 3rd party software.
Did Craig Fields' Review
Pushed on Sun for further details on where my www bug report went.
Had two SP2 rejection letters sent out by davidh.
Reopened SGI Applix patch bug. It got closed.
Move forward on ideas for updating SGI unbundled software.
Converted search report template to applixware.
2827 undead messages.
28 Mar 97
Bought more memory for Ops-5
Had my performance review. OOOF!
3/24 PD community. Sent out minutes.
Drafted Brlewis review.
3/25 Release Team
Wrote quick Project DB presentation for Ilead.
3/26 ILEAD Sent out minutes.
3/26 Saurons: UROP Projects
3/27 Nut-Lib Discussed issues in accessing passworded net resources.
Conducted Reviews for Miki, Brlewis,
Conducted another SP2 phone interview
3/28 Delivery Leaders -- sent minutes.
21 Mar 97
Sent notification to performance reviewees.
Updated Projects DB entry with full list of tasks and issues.
3/18 Release Team: Discussed issues in doing SGI application updates. Followed up with email to Charles Marker.
Sent out milestones digest through 14 Mar.
received SGI inst code
Get questions for phone interviews of SP2 candidates.
Conducted 5 phone interviews for SP2
Fixed bug in ez2ps.
Reviewed Karlyne's doc and handed it to Miki.
Drafted ghudson review, and revised with Mike.
Drafted Miki's performance review.
Opened official Sun bug on losing my X bug report to their Web server.
Reviewed enhancement request for Sun's "bug report submitted" page.
2717 undead messages.
14 Mar 97
Defined a project flow and PDB status values to fit it.
Pursuing an idea to fill the SP2 position.
3/10 PD Community: Sent minutes.
3/11 Release Team: Patch Release, and SGI
3/11 ACMG: Renewal Decisions.
3/11 Reorg ratify: Mike is a leader of a Standing Team!
3/12 Fuzzballs: Talked about SGI, and listed to Ted report on Decorum.
Got PDB machine scheduled for move and going live 17 Mar.
Drafted announcement of PDB going live.
Suggested to specific folks at SGI an IRIX 6.3 based strategy at MIT.
Came to closure on wording, coverage dates, and price of Sun Alliance Plus contract.
7 Mar 97
Wrote VERY SHORT SGI issue paper "pm/sgi/scale_up"
Processed weeklies.
Poked at Ron Parker.
Moved forward on simple test case for SGI patch 1489.
3/4: Release Team: postponing attach fix until 8.1.
Talked about Install issues with someone new at SGI
Worked through SPII resumees.
Sent out some more rejection letters.
Invited 2 to apply for SPIII.
28 Feb 97
Sick one day.
2/26: Crosstalk: Teaching E&M w/visualization; classroom ideas.
2/25: Job Fair. Got a couple resumees. Talked to many.
2/25: Release team: On target for patch release.
Checked in with Sun Software license: on track.
Did cursory tests of SGI patch 1489 beta. applix and messages work.
Filed post search report on Bob Basch.
Shepharded Projects DB closer to deployment. Arachne is up and backed up. Need review from Ron Parker in DB group as last step before moving machine to W91 and going live.
Reviewed performance issues in Document Services use of Bloom.
Learned more about promotions.
21 Feb 97
Holiday (1 day)
Entertained visitor from UVM.
2/19: ILEAD meeting: credible report on HR PD
Found Arachne Disks.
Handled reference librarian question for UW :-)
Took action on all Resumes for SPII. Asked to schedule an interview. Sent out five rejection letters.
2/20: Team Athena reorg meeting: Lots of questioning of where we are and what we are doing.
2/21: ABS Fate: Cancel ABS.
2/21: Nut-Lib: Discussing ramp-up for various databases.
14 Feb 97
Opened bug on Solaris /bin/passwd/ Forwarded to Alliance Plus when they screwed it up.
Did reference check on Bob Basch. Recommending go-ahead in hiring.
Took delivery of Arachne.
Tracked down where the Diskies have vanished to.
PD Comm:
ACMG: Council on Educational Technology Report
IS Forum: projects -- being more organized, and what we could be doing.
Get review of Projects DB UI(?)
Got buyin on hiring Basch.
Got escall help working!
Found out where SGI source comes from.
Made Basch an offer.
Pondered how to get relief on overload with various folks.
Delivery Team Leaders: Demoed Project DB. Sent out minutes.
Brought second 9GB drive online on Bloom.
Specified how to make other drives come off Bulb.
Submitted bug to SGI on how their owner's guide tells how to run diagnostics but never mentions that the diags are fetched off CD, and never mentions the identity of that CD.
7 Feb 97
Read resumes for sp3, sp2
Did some review of Competency based HR work plan.
Asked for volunteers to read resumes.
Meet with Basch
Recieved beta of patch to fix Applix Panic.
Received Errata sheet that documents the Hardware bug that killed Andrew Messages.
Requested info about status of AFS manuals.
Got volunteers to read Resumees.
Opened Sun bug on /bin/passwd
Tried to make progress on escall help not working. Complained to everyone in sight.
Nut-lib: various status sent out.
31 Jan 97
Took inventory of Resumes with Davidh
Attended ACMG -- thinking about issues in deciding what hardware we should buy this year.
Ordered Disks and tape for Project DB machine.
Forwarded request from Dave Kalenderian to Alex Prengel about getting ADSM to more neatly install on Athena workstations.
Updated team athena software maintenance and DECStation port pages.
Cleaned my desk
24 Jan 97
Shut down Fionavar rs/6000
Took reports spreadsheet and cut away 1996 entries into separate file.
Speed-Read SGI Indy Workstation Owner's guide. (It's mostly about hardware.)
Speed-Read SGI Software Installation Administrator's Guite (It's a complete reference on using the 'inst' program.)
Attended meeting to design user interface for Project DB.
17 Jan 97
Presented Project Database to ILEAD
Craft Draft of SGI work plan
10 Jan 97
Specified and ordered Project DB Server
Began specifying Disk and Tapes for Project DB server
3 Jan 97
Talked with Bob Riccomini of SGI about Physical Security of O2
Do first draft of Search Report for Bob Basch
27 Dec 96
Put draft of ABS admin guide online