Lot-o-SPAM

One day last week, Wednesday, May 21, 2008, our SPAM-fighting server blocked over 100,000 SPAM messages. Go ahead, read that again. That is 100,000 in one day… 24 hours… that’s over 4,100 per hour, which is just more than 1 per second. In another light, that is also approximately 100 messages blocked per user! Could […]

Mail service interruption

The mail service at UCLS became unresponsive at some time after 4:00PM until the server was rebooted at 6:15 PM. Service appears to have returned to normal and we are investigating the cause. 

Cool Mail/iCal trick in Leopard

So far, the biggest win I see in Leopard is being able to create an iCal event right out of a Mail message. The program is smart enough to know when a date appears; hovering over it produces a click box to enter it in iCal. It works really well and is a major timesaver.

SPAM diet

Have you noticed a reduction in spam to your UCLS email address? Although the attempts at spamming UCLS accounts continues its upward trend, we are seeing a reduction in the amount that actually gets in! We have employed a new spam fighting technique that is showing great success. The new system has processed over 3,000,000 […]

Leopard Released

Today, Apple is finally releasing Leopard, the latest upgrade to Apple’s operating system software. It does include a number of significant improvements to an already-powerful OS and adds some neat new features as well.
Last spring, just before Leopard’s original release date, Lab teamed up with other Mac-using units on campus to procure volume pricing on […]

Electrical Work Redux

The electrical work scheduled for two Saturdays ago was rescheduled for this Saturday, Oct. 6.
Most school servers will be offline all day Saturday. That means you won’t have access to e-mail, file storage, blogs, Garbanzo, and most other services. The web site will be running on a contingency server, so it will be available - […]

Visual Thesaurus Demo Oct. 4

The fine folks at Visual Thesaurus, our online thesaurus product of choice and one of the most useful tools we offer, will conduct a web-enabled tutorial session on VT’s many features starting at 3:45 on Thursday, Oct. 4. VT has a host of resources available for teachers and students.
I’ve reserved Judd 204 for this event; […]

Servers Offline Saturday

Electrical work this weekend will mean that most school servers will be offline all day Saturday. That means you won’t have access to e-mail, file storage, blogs, Garbanzo, and most other services. The web site will be running on a contingency server, so it will be available - but don’t make any changes to […]

Fun graphical language arts resource

A friend recommended a free online resource similar to Visual Thesaurus. Visit visuwords and have fun playing with this “online graphical dictionary.” The display colors are bolder, and while it is not as fully featured as Visual Thesaurus, the relationships between words are cleverly color-coded as are parts of speech and other word attributes. I haven’t tried […]

Reminder: Loaner Pool Discontinued

You may recall last winter’s announcement and subsequent reminders that the IS loaner pool of laptops and cameras would be discontinued at the end of the school year. We’ve followed through on that, so please be aware that these items are no longer available.
In its early years, the loaner pool served a worthy purpose and […]