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Old Mail Account "Retirement" Process:  March 15 - April 12 Time-frame

With the exception of a handful of accounts, the lab has transitioned to Google for mail storage. The infrastructure required to maintain old imap storage will be retired later this year.

Before this happens, we are going to provide everyone at the lab who had an IMAP account one last chance to insure anything that did not migrate can be dealt with. Note - most of us made the transition to Gmail last year and have not looked back.  In that case, you won't have to take any action at all.

(If you do want to recover some that were left behind, our FAQ is here).

Reasons why a message might not have migrated

• An attachment was too large for Google (the attachment size that Google can accept is around 25MB, as opposed to 35MB for the old system)
• A message was identified as having a virus. If this was false positive, you might want to go back and take another look

Note: We have observed that some users who were using a mail client (e.g. Mac Mail, Thunderbird), continued to send copies of their outgoing message to the old system and not Google.  We will provide an FAQ that shows you what to do to move those messages to Google.  (each impacted individual will be notified).

After completing the process for the IT Division, we will repeat it 4 times for for the rest of the lab (25% of the lab in each group). Each group will get a 2 week, 1 week, 1 day warning and then the old imap account will be retired. The process will start for the  IT Division on Tuesday, March 15, and for each of 4 groups that compose the rest of the lab - one a week for the following month.

THESE SEMINARS ARE PROVIDED BY MATHEMATICA, NOT BY IT

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Explore advanced topics in the newest free online Mathematica seminars.

S51: Image Processing Applications: This seminar explores several applications of image processing in Mathematica, including segmentation techniques, feature detection, working with multiple images, image stitching, and deconvolution. The new image processing capabilities of Mathematica 8 are highlighted.

March 9, 7am-8am (PST)
March 29, 11am-12pm (PDT)

S60: Control Systems in Mathematica: This seminar explores the new suite of control system tools in Mathematica 8, used to do analysis, design, and simulation of continuous and discrete-time systems. Topics include the construction and manipulation of state space and transfer function models, system interconnections, frequency response plots, and controller design.

March 10, 7am-8am (PST)
March 17, 3pm-4pm (PDT)

S70: GPU Computation Using Mathematica and CUDA: This seminar provides an overview of the new GPU functionality in Mathematica 8 by using CUDA. Topics include reasons for using the GPU, overviews of CUDA and OpenCL, some use cases for CUDA and OpenCL, how to use CUDA from within Mathematica, and the GPU programming workflow within Mathematica.

March 14, 3pm-4pm (PDT)
March 16, 7am-8am (PDT)
March 18, 11am-12pm (PDT)
March 30, 9am-10am (PDT)

Here are additional dates and times of upcoming live online seminars. These seminars are free!

S11: What's New in Mathematica 8

March 9, 9am-10am (PST)
March 22, 7am-8am (PDT)
March 31, 3pm-4pm (PDT)

S17: Applied Parallel Computation with Mathematica

March 9, 3pm-4pm (PST)

S27: Got Manipulate?

March 11, 7am-8am (PST)

Attend as many seminars as you like. See the complete calendar here:

http://url.wolfram.com/n4MSUM/

Mathworks (Doug Eastman and Jaime Winter)  will be at the lab on Tuesday April 26 and will offer two seminars in the Bldg 50 Auditorium.

• AM session:  9:30 - 11:30:  How a Differential Equation becomes a robot – which focuses mainly on Symbolic Toolbox, Simulink, SimMechanics, and xPC Target – this is a really cool session!
• PM session: 1:30 - 3:30:  MATLAB boot-camp with signal processing

Jaime passed us a link that he though might be interesting to Matlab users.

This is a short article on ‘Real-Time Simulation of Physical Systems Using Simscape’ and will probably be of significant interest to people just using MATLAB for this sort of thing. It discusses our Simscape platform and explains very simply how to move to our model-based design platform (SimScape).

Google released a product they call "Cloud Connect on Feb 24. Using a Microsoft Office Plug-in, it allows someone who works in Office and stores documents locally to also sync them to Google Docs. At the moment, it works on Windows computers (XP, Vista, Windows 7)

Google's help page has this description: "Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office brings collaborative multi-person editing to the familiar Microsoft® Office experience. You can share, backup, and simultaneously edit Microsoft Word, PowerPoint®, and Excel® documents with coworkers."

Google's help page is here

We have added a number of new sessions to our continuing series of Google "Hands on" Classes held in the 90-26 Training Facility. Register for these classes at Employee Self Service. To take a quick look at the IT calendar which lists these classes, go here.

These are the classes that we currently offer. 

From a Google Blog - New features for the Google Docs Viewer

Google Docs Viewer allows users to quickly view PDFs, Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint presentations online by viewing them in the browser without downloading them locally.

New files supported:
Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 / 2010 (.PPTX)
Apple Pages (.PAGES)
Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
TrueType (.TTF)
XML Paper Specification (.XPS)

As of Thursday, Feb 17, anyone with a Lab account has access to Google Video. This allows you to store videos and then reference them from links in email or on websites. Our first successful use of this new capability was achieved by Anne Boynton, Emergency Services Specialist.  Anne loaded the presentations made at the most recent Building Managers and BET Quarterly Seminar into Google Video for viewing. The meeting was held on January 25, 2011 and features talks by Chief Bruce Martins, City of Fremont Fire Department and Bill Nay, Security Consultant.

According to Rocky Saunders, Emergency Services Manager,  videos stored on Google,  "are going to be mostly emergency services training tools.   The video  feature in Google offers the Emergency Services Program a great tool to easily make video clips readily available to either a targeted segment of the lab, such as Building Emergency Teams, or they can be available to the entire lab."

Access Google Video by clicking on the video link when you are in any of our core Google products (Gmail, Gcal, Gdocs, Gsites) using your Lab account.  When you do, the screen you see will look like this.  Note that the video can be shared with anyone at the lab, but cannot be shared outside the lab (this is the right tool for content that is restricted to lab staff). For an overview of video distribution options at the Lab, visit Labtech.

Here are some options and support levels for various video sharing services:

ITBS Application Outage

Lab Users will see a redesigned user interface for Google Docs over the next several days. One of the most helpful changes is the addition of a preview pane on the right side of the screen. Filters that allow document selection by the manner in which they are shared, sorting options, and more convenient ways to keep your documents organized highlight the changes. For more information, check out Google's Blog.  In a prior blog post, Google added the capability to upload and play videos.

If you have never used Google Docs, consider reviewing some of the older YouTube video's that explain how they can be used.

Wolfram will be on-site for a two-hr. training on Tuesday, Feb. 8,
2011 from 1:00-3:00; Bldg 2-100. Doug McClinitic from Wolfram will
provide an overview on the newest Mathematica features.

Agenda:

Brief Overview of Mathematica

A brief introduction to Mathematica for those unfamiliar with the current version:  Mathematica 8.0

Woven throughout this talk we will highlight new capabilities in Mathematica 8.0 which include:

• Free form linguistic input and integration with Wolfram Alpha
• Nearly 100 new statistical distributions and new statistical visualizations
• CUDA and OpenCL support for GPU computing
• Automatic C code generation and linking
• New image processing functions
• New import and export formats
• Integrated control systems
• Wavelets analysis
• Computation & Visualization

In addition, the talk will cover:

• Example-driven view of key computational features: symbolic
  processing, solving, import/export, analysis, filtering and plotting
  data, modeling, simulation, dynamic computations; applied examples
  chosen from image processing, bio-informatics, particle physics,
  geodesy, astronomical science, and more.

• Programming
  Mathematica as a development environment; programming paradigms (example-driven), parallel computation; development tools.

• Connection Technologies
  Brief overview of connecting to databases, Java, .Net, legacy C/Fortran, etc.

• Deployment
  Mathematica as a technical document environment; slideshows, saving to TeX/PDF/HTML etc.

The IT Division is offering a new backup service for PC and Mac computers called Carbonite that is reliable, cost effective and easy-to-use. Carbonite is easy to install and runs unobtrusively in the background. It securely encrypts data for protection. More importantly, restoring files, whether just a few or your entire backup, takes just a few clicks. Restoring to a new computer, after a crash or upgrade, is easy as well. Unlimited backup storage is only $4.00 monthly, billed yearly at $48.00. To learn more and get started, visit the Backups Service Page.

Over the next three weeks, IT will be upgrading one division to the
new Google Apps Environment each evening. Users who will be
transitioned will receive a notice the day before as well as
immediately after the upgrade. After the upgrade, users will have
access to additional Google Apps services. Users will be required to
re-login to the service but no other disruption is expected. For more
information about the upgrade and schedule visit the LBL Help Site

When we originally launched the Lawrencium cluster project, we said there might be a possibility of a charge for CPU cycles to recover some of the costs. Unfortunately, that time has come and we will start recharging for cycles. The good news is that the charge will only be $0.01 per cpu-hour in addition to the monthly $25/user account fee so we anticipate a minor impact to everyone's budget. For further information, visit the SCS project page.

(the below message went to the most frequent purchasers of monitors at LBL)

As part of our overall sustainability program, the Laboratory tries to
purchase sustainable products, including computers and monitors that
are EPEAT registered. Registered computers and monitors are confirmed
to use significantly less energy and meet our overall sustainability
goals. In particular, purchasing EPEAT products ensures that multiple
sustainability goals are met, including reducing the use of
environmentally sensitive materials and design for end of life waste
reduction and safety.

While most popular products meet these specifications, it is very
important that you as a purchaser take the time to verify that
commodity electronics products (like monitors, laptops, and computers)
are EPEAT registered.

Last year, approximately 10% of the monitors purchased were not EPEAT
registered. 4 models, two from Dell and two from Asus, accounted for
the majority of these monitors. EPEAT registered alternatives at
competitive price points exist for both of these models*.

The ebuy website for USFalcon (CDW) lists the EPEAT status of almost
all products. You can also verify the EPEAT status of any product by
visiting the EPEAT website (http://www.epeat.net) and using their
“Search the Registry” tool. It takes just a minute or so to verify
the model you are interested in.

We know there will always be situations which require particular
monitors which may not be registered, but we ask for your help in
limiting those circumstances as much as possible.

We are working with the ebuy vendors to improve the visibility of the
registrations to you, the purchaser, but in the meantime, we need your
assistance in order to keep the purchasing process flexible, but
responsive to our sustainability goals. To make things easier, all
future recommended monitors and computers listed on the IT website
will be EPEAT certified.

Thanks in advance for your help. If you have other ideas about how we
should spread the word about EPEAT purchases, drop us a line at
[email protected]. And please share this email with others in your
organization who make IT purchasing decisions.

The SustainLBL Team

http://lbl.gov/sustainlbl

The Google Docs equations editor now supports a variety of LaTeX shortcuts for equation entry. More information is available here: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=160749