Linguistics

I setup a digitizing station in the HCMC with the old JVC deck attached to one of Greg's retired linux boxes. It may be used to digitize some of John Essling's mini-dv tapes. A PhD student (Aki) has been hired to do this but couldn't get it to work with the hardware up in the ling labs.

We will likely use Kino to capture the video, save it as raw dv and then transcode to its final format.

The project as it stands now is only to take a few minutes from each tape - the contents of which are cooing babies - and leave the rest stranded on the tapes. I will raise the issue with John Essling (or whoever is responsible) and see if we can get them digitized in their entirety so that this research material isn't lost as time passes.

Discovered today after installing ELCAP on the 27" iMac (which was having kernel panics) that the HP 3600n does not support the newest, or even last OS X version. My interim solution was to Bonjou share it off a maverick running iMac that is already there.

Martin mentioned perhaps using an old linux box as a print server. I'll look into this in the new year.

Updates

Oct 1, 2015 - met with Marc Thoma. Will continue with setting up login script, my first attempt will be using launchd.

Sept 24, 2015 - successfully installed DeployStudio on a portable SSD and imaged the iMac I brought back from linguistics. I also have a tentative meeting with Marc in systems and will which will hopefully provide me with some shortcuts along the way.

After spending most of the morning bringing linguistic lab workstations up-to-date the old fashioned way I'm again turning my attention to how I envision this working in the future. I think it will be useful to describe how I want this to work and the tools that I've learned will likely make this happen.

The Context:

Up to 15 workstations, 12 running Mac OS X (I'd like to use El Capitan if possible in the future), at least one of which will be a dual boot into Windows (likely win7 but we'll see), and two PCs running win7 . They need to be up-to-date and configured with the specific software and hardware support linguistics needs for its students and grad students. The best case for me is that MOST of this will be done remotely (the Macs especially). This is the challenge.

Administration Software

I'm going to try and use DeployStudio. First to make the images required, and then to push those images to the workstations, by (in the easiest case) portable HDD, and then ideally by Netbooting and installing remotely. I've downloaded DeployStudio and will commence with a prototype tomorrow.

I'm still faced with the problem of a default profile that all authenticated netlink users will get when they log in. Ideally I would like to configure a default user profile. However, I consider this secondary, as netlink users can still use and configure the workstations installed software as needed, but I still think it would be nice. I think that launchagent likely holds the key to setting up user preferences at login.

I attended the Linguistics department meeting today and introduced myself.

Afterwords I med Peter Jacobs and discussed his need for a front end for his dictionary he his building. I will get specifics the week after next when I meet him.

I did some preventive maintenance on the labs today, running updates and doing some basic house cleaning. I also created a new sign-out/sign-in sheet for their equipment that in my mind was more rational.