I gave lightning talks at nearly every meeting I attended this semester! Here are a few examples of things I discussed in these sessions:
Next semester, I think it would be interesting to start maintaining general meeting overviews/who has done what lightning talks via the COSI docs.
It's also worth mentioning that I ran one of the meetings when Eric Richter was otherwise predisposed.
I'm currently the sole maintainer of Elephant, the labs' core backup server! Here's what that meant for this semester:
Hopefully as time goes on we'll see Elephant gradually starting to host backups for more and more services. Thus far it's backing up the core files for: dns1, dns2, elephant, list, mirror, mysql, web1, web2, and all old configurations that were backed up prior to elephant existing.
I'm also currently the co-maintainer of LDAP, with the primary maintainer being Jake Greenfield. I don't have too much to report on this, other than that I've set up a few user accounts and have been walked through pieces of the process in hopes of being an apt maintainer at some point.
I've attended quite a few workshops, and even helped run one of them! Here's a short list of a few of the things I went to:
Time Lapse Project
At the time of this presentation, one could actually look in the corner of the room and see a tablet currently running a time lapse recording! Every 1.5 seconds the camera is capturing a frame of 720p HD footage. These frames are then strung together at a playback rate of 30 per second -- so every 1 second of time in the video is actually 45 seconds passing. It will be running for nearly 24 hours, which should equate to 32 minutes of footage.
The hope is that this time lapse project will be something performed over a long period of time -- once a semester, every semester, COSI will have a time lapse day. This will capture the status of the labs as they are currently, and the people who show up on a regular basis. It should show a pretty interesting organic growth of the labs as time goes on -- hopefully I can find someone else to take up the mantle when I'm gone!
The videos will be posted to the Docs page, and, in theory, should typically be performed on a meeting night with plenty of prior notice.
Operation: Make Computers Less Dusty
This is more a plan than anything I've been able to genuinely enact at this point, but when our air compressor finally gets setup I intend to hold a workshop on proper computer maintainence, which will involve getting attendeed people to clean the lab machines and fix their various small problems while learning about basic computer maintainence. A veritable waterfall of dust poured out of the computers when they were opened to install the new graphics cards.
Aside from anything official, my only other big involvement with COSI has just been hanging out in the labs as frequently as I can, and helping people whenever I can. I also help clean up pretty frequently.
I also saved the Beast machines on the side of the room from the brink of destruction. They were so dusty that one of the fans fell off of its bearing. I organized a group of us to take them outside, disassemble them, and dust them out entirely. This took two full cans of compressed air.
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