<strong>Your Name: </strong>Patrick Collins

<strong>Today’s Date:</strong> 2012/11/30

<strong>Day(s) worked or described:</strong> M W, M W F

<strong>Total hours for week:</strong> 6, 8

<strong>Kind of Work:</strong> Tech General

<strong>Main Report or Narrative:</strong>

<strong></strong>11/19 + 11/21: Last week went as normal. I continued fixing up computers from the IDF room. There's a slowly growing stack in room 518, I dunno where the working ones can go at this point in time. Mitch talked to me about cleaning up the database a bit and I wrote a python script that gets rid of old user accounts. I played around with writing a script to handle the .tar backups of the website over the weekend and I have something resembling something that works. I have to take a look at the crontab on the webserver at some point and get it in a more usable state. I wrote it in LISP as a programming exercise for myself, which may not be a reasonable solution for the webserver.

11/23: Ray had no school because of Thanksgiving

11/26: Ran the cleanup script with Mitch. Had huge issues with a computer that had some driver problem with its NIC in the library. I eventually accidentally got it working. Mitch gave me some compressed air, which is making for some much quieter computers.

11/28: Fixed another computer or two. I fixed some issues with computers in their lab -- some of them seem to get an issue where they don't do anything at all (you press the power button, the fan runs but the monitor doesn't show any input, the keyboard won't respond to the caps lock key, etc) that can be fixed by unplugging them, holding down the power button for a few seconds to drain whatever charge is in the motherboard, then plugging them back in. Presumably there is some kind of bug that develops in the motherboard's memory that can be cleared. I've never heard of anything like it before, it seems to only be an issue with the newest machines.

11/30: Arrived at Ray, started writing this report. The machine I'm writing it on is having some issues installing MS Word 2k7, I don't know why. The self-extracting installer constantly freezes, and the copy that I finally did manage to extract complains that it's missing some configuration file. The MS Word installation usually goes fine so I'm somewhat confused. I'm running the self-extracting archive again and hopefully it will work this time.

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Also the post about DF reminded me -- the computer that I took out of the library due to complaints that it was unusably slow has DF installed on it. When I try to uninstall things and make other changes so it's less painfully slow, DF reverts them, obviously. But when I run the DF configuration thing, nothing happens -- I see a "deepfreezeserver.exe" or something like that in the task manager but there's never anything that pops up. The icon in the system tray also doesn't do anything when I click on it. I'm not sure how to fix this.

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Also, I've had some computers that I'm working on have issues with a "wuaucult.exe" process that takes up a ridiculous (100-200mB) amount of memory. The internet says that this is some memory leak in the process that checks for Windows updates -- I disabled the Windows updater because I figure it's unlikely that Microsoft will have any more urgent updates for a 10 year old operating system.

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EDIT: Also, I'm catching up on my timsheets today (yes, I've put that off somewhat). The UChicago time website seems to still be down.

EDIT EDIT: Apparently, I'm supposed to have been clocking in every day. Oooops....