SSCC News for January 2000

Inside this issue...

The New and Improved NORMAN
Status of WordPerfect on UNIX
Statistical Software Resource Links
Address Change for Connecting to UNIX Disk Shares
SSCC Training for Spring Semester: Suggestions Invited
Farewell to Ralph Rodriguez and Jeff Hayes
What Do You Think of SSCC News's New Look?

The New and Improved NORMAN

NORMAN has been replaced with a Compaq Alpha Server DS10 that is significantly faster than any other UNIX computer at SSCC. NORMAN is primarily dedicated to running STATA and SPSS jobs. (It does not run SAS jobs.) Note that the version of SPSS running on the new NORMAN is still version 6 but includes a Y2K compliancy update.

Status of WordPerfect on UNIX

An unfortunate effect of replacing NORMAN earlier this month is that WordPerfect no longer works. This is because the software is incompatible with the current version of the UNIX operating system on NORMAN (the version required for Y2K compliancy). We will attempt to install it on an older UNIX workstation (with an older nonY2K compliant version of the operating system) later this week or next week for temporary use until the end of the Spring Semester. If this attempt fails, we will not be able to provide WordPerfect on UNIX because the company that develops WordPerfect (Corel) has no plans for future releases of its software for True 64 UNIX.

Statistical Software Resource Links

There are two web sites definitely worth checking out for statistical related information. http://www.stata.com/links/ contains links to all the statistical software providers that the SSCC has licensed (plus lots of others), links to Statistical journals, organizations, and publishers.

http://www.stattransfer.com/lists.html provides a subscription service to all the major statistical software listservers. From this link, you can subscribe to (in digested or undigested form) and unsubscribe from any list. These listservers provide a depth of support that is essentially impossible for staff at any one institution (like ours) to duplicate.

For your convenience, we have also provided a link to these two sites from SSCC's home page (near the bottom of the page under "Other Sites of Interest."

Address Change for Connecting to UNIX Disk Shares

SAMBA, the software that makes your Unix directories available to you on the PC network, has been upgraded. This upgrade will improve problems in communication between Wincenter and SAMBA that have been reported in the past. For details on these problems, see the article in the September issue of SSCC News.

There is also now a new path address for connecting to UNIX disk shares from your PC. Although the old address (\\norman\sharename) will continue to work indefinitely, you will get better performance by switching to the new path of \\sscunix\sharename. For example, for mcdermot to connect to her UNIX home directory, she would enter \\sscunix\mcdermot in the dialog box that appears when you choose Map Network Drive from the Tools menu of Explorer. For detailed instructions on connecting to disk shares, refer to SSCC Pub. #5-8.

SSCC Training for Spring Semester: Suggestions Invited

Staff are in the midst of planning training for Spring Semester. The new schedule will be announced in SSCC News in February. Please send mail to mcdermot if you have any suggestions for training topics.

Farewell to Ralph Rodriguez and Jeff Hayes

We say farewell to Ralph Rodriguez and Jeff Hayes this month. Ralph has been with SSCC for almost five years and has served as UNIX systems administrator in the past and most recently as SSCC's network security administrator. Many of you know Ralph from attending one of his popular UNIX training session. Jeff has worked as a Project Assistant for SSCC for the past seven years doing consulting and PC support. Both Ralph and Jeff will be greatly missed.

What Do You Think of SSCC News's New Look?

SSCC News has a new more modern format. We found that it was getting longer and more dense in recent months and decided to "HTMLize" it to improve its readability. It's not exactly an idea we can take credit for as most electronic newsletters are published in a format similar to ours. But, what do you think? Do you have any suggestions for improvements? If so, send mail to mcdermot.

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