I was in the Angell Hall computer lab this morning to print out some Taiwan apps, and as I walked out I noticed that one of the tech people had a big lavender-and-grey Sun monitor sitting on a trolley in the admin area. Suspicious because one of the Suns had already been removed a few weeks before, I wandered over to the corner normally occupied by the Suns and found that the boxes I had been logged into just a few minutes ago (and use to forward a connection back to my machine behind Woody's firewall) were being taken apart and carted off. Naturally, I was alarmed. Calmly, though, I asked the guys who were taking the servers apart what was happening to the Suns, and if they would be replaced. They said that the Suns were being taken down and replaced with Linux boxes running KDE. When I mentioned that I used the Suns to run Netscape and access campus-restricted journal databases from home, the younger guy agreed that he used them for that same purpose, and that the new boxes would in fact have Mozilla available. Sweet. I made sure to let them knew I was looking forward to using the new Linux boxes, although I'm likely to be out of the country next year. Anyhow, glad to hear that geekness still reigns behind the scenes at ITCS.

Two other tidbits of info: I learned that certain people were unhappy that the Suns sat around taking up space and not being used, and that they switch from telnet to SSH had seen a sizable drop-off in the number of people logging into the login.itd servers to read their mail—many people switched to webmail instead. On both counts, I'm perfectly happy: more CPU cycles for me.

John Yim, if you read this: I'm slowly going through Dive Into Python, it's a good introduction to Python for folks with programming experience.