Area Events
The return of bonfire (.tamu.edu)
Bonfire Remembrance and Memorial site goes live
Just a quick note to say that we just launched a new Bonfire Remembrance site at bonfire.tamu.edu. The site takes the old Bonfire site that was launched shortly after the collapse in 1999 to keep people updated and then left as a kind of online remembrance and merges it with the Bonfire Memorial site that we inherited. In both cases, time and broken links had caught up with both sites.
But with the 10th anniversary of the collapse and the 100th year of Bonfire, the activities and need for a better web presence was needed. But for this to happen as quickly as possible, we needed help. And we got some great help.
Big shout outs to David Swanson and the folks at the MSC who offered up the old bonfire.tamu.edu URL, and Shawn and the DoIT folks who helped us get a site up in Drupal. The Bonfire Remembrance Committee provided me text for pages and Bryan and Trent in our Division knew where the right photos were.
Now that the site is live and in the DoIT system, it can be maintained much easier by folks on the Traditions Council, the MSC, the Bonfire Remembrance Committee (since most if not all of those groups have access to/already use DoIT’s Drupal instance).
Ultimately, this isn’t really about the site but the fact that so many people pitched in to help. These are the kinds of projects I always enjoy , and again my thanks to everyone who offered time, support, insight and assistance.
IT Forum
Don’t forget the IT Forum this week
601 Rudder Tower
Wednesday, July 29, 2009 • 3:00 – 5:00
PREFERRED IT TRAINING VENDOR
St. Edwards University the preferred information technology training vendor
will be discussed.
CODE MAROON REGISTRATION
Allison Oslund will discuss registration in the new Code Maroon system.
IDENTITY FINDER CONSOLE
Willis Marti will discuss the availability of the Identity Finder Console.
CAMPUS WIRELESS UPDATE
Rob Brenner and Justin Hao will describe the status of TAMULink and
deployment of 802.11n.
BITE-SIZED SOA
Jamie Horgan, Principal Consultant for NeuDesic, will present on the value
of using SOA as a small scale solution. This presentation will describe
lessons learned by Mr. Horgan in his fifteen years of experience leading and
developing custom enterprise solutions.
Events this week
Don’t forget, there is a meeting of the IT Forum today at 3:00 in 601 Rudder. Topics will be: SIMS Access Time Line; SSN Scanning Update; LDAP and Shibboleth Update; Understanding Security Threats
On Friday UWeb is getting together at 11:00 in 101A of the GSC. We will be talking about social media, both in general and in how it is being implemented here on campus.
Google at the IT Forum: Your input requested
We’re pretty excited about the new calendar demo, but on May 27, at the IT Forum, I’ll be sharing new thoughts on topics that aren’t as new: how webmasters can take advantage of the Google Search Appliance and apply basic principles of search engine optimization. › Continue reading
DesignCamp BCS
Short notice but the Creative Space is hosting “DesignCamp BCS” which is a free conference this weekend. As they put it it’s “put on by creative people for creative people”. I know there are a lot of us who are designers and developers that need opportunities to explore and expand our creative boundaries. This is a great chance to do so, while meeting and mingling with other creatives whether in the Web field or not.
The conference is free and is being held at the Astin Mansion in Bryan but you will need to RSVP (through Facebook). If you need any more info, I’m betting you can catch up with Roby or any of the other folks over at the Creative Space.
5th Annual Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC)
This year Texas A&M will be hosting the CCDC in Rudder Tower March 6-8, 2009. I know from my own experience that the the students who compete are some of the best students to enter the industry because of the knowledge they gain in this competition.
I was a Linux Team Leader as a student at UTSA for the very first CCDC competition. I still have several friends who compete in this competition and it is a great way for IT and CS students to learn about the dark side of computer networks and programming. Too often students go through school not knowing the dangers lurking on the networks and websites that they will soon be working on.
The competition is not just about defending the network, but also about handling typical business requests during the defense. Some of the hardest challenges we faced as a team in the first competition were the business requests handed to us by the White Team. They would request that new mail accounts be created, or they would ask for access to a SQL server. As soon as those services were opened up they were attacked by the Red Team. If we weren’t prepared our services would be compromised or we would not get the tasks completed in time to get points for them.
Only teams who can establish an effective method of handling these requests truly come out as winners in this competition. The same is true in the real world! Some of the other “requests” that came from the White team were related to redundancy and failover – they would come in and say “your firewall machine has failed” and would literally take the machine away. We had 10 minutes to get another firewall machine in place or face point deductions or worse – a security compromise! Honestly, we didn’t have the processes in place to handle these scenarios and it burned us (the UTSA team). But, I know for a fact that every student on that team now values redundancy on the network and servers that run our applications and access!
This competition is important to raising security awareness, so please support the students and teams willing to compete and put their skills on the line against some of the best hackers around. More information can be found at the Texas A&M CCDC website, or at the National CCDC site hosted by the UTSA Center for Information Assurance and Security. Texas A&M’s also has a CIAS program to help students conduct research and learning about information security and assurance.
Aggieland .NET User Group January Meeting
The first meeting of 2009 will be Tuesday, January 13th at 12:00 PM at the General Services Complex (GSC). J Sawyer from Microsoft will be presenting Windows Azure, the new “Cloud Computing” platform from Microsoft. More details are available at http://aggielanddnug.org/ or on twitter @aggielanddnug. › Continue reading