The problem continues

The problem with HPV's at SJSU
I am not against bicyclists, or bicycling, but I am seriously against very dangerous use of them. I am an avid cyclist. I know that cycling, even done carefully, can result in serious injury or death. I am not against anything that involves a risk, but I am against unnecessary risk. I am against what I feel is a grossly dangerous situation. That is why I have been complaining for years about how bicycles and other human powered vehicles are being used at SJSU. In my opinion, so far the university has done nothing to manage what I feel is a real risk on our campus. More on this topic can be found here.

[More photos here]

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, California State University, San Jose, ssloansjca

Campus Movie Fest 2009

Today SJSU students are turning in their movies and the equpment they borrowed to make their productions. There is a line outside here at Clark Hall. This is one of our most fun events at SJSU.

[More photos here on Flickr]

How I remove hot spots on shiny skin in Photoshop

This works very well. One of the best and easiest ways to fix hot spots, like flash reflections on shiny skin, on a photograph is this:

1. Make a duplicate layer, choose that layer and work from that layer.
2. Choose the healing brush tool and in the options bar, for mode choose "DARKEN" and check the option "SAMPLE ALL LAYERS".
3. Set your healing brush tool hardness to 0% (this is a soft brush) and size of the brush (use a brush size slightly bigger than the hot spot) and with OPTION+click (MAC) or ALT+click (PC) choose a skin tone you like. Then, paint on the shiny areas with the healing brush tool. Painting, as used here, means clicking and dragging on, or over, the areas where you want to cover the hot spot(s).
4. Apply slight a slight Gaussian Blur (Filter>Blur) and lower the opacity of the layer.

What is great about this technique is you have cloned pixels on a separate layer and you can apply the slight Gaussian Blur filter and lower the opacity of the layer to blend your adjustments in and achieve a great end result.

Here is where I learned this technique.

I do not recommend leaping to Snow Leopard yet

Tech Guy Leo Laporte says:

(Mac OS X 10.6) should be renamed “Snow JOB.” Cause he doesn’t see any difference and is more a “service pack” that should’ve been a free upgrade, not an insane $29. It also breaks a few applications. Sure, you have a little more hard drive space, but only because it doesn’t install all the unnecessary drivers.

Jeremy Horwitz, Editor-in-Chief of iLounge said, "multiple machines upgraded, all with serious, awful stability problems of some sort. Safari’s crashing. Photoshop’s crashing. Apps you didn’t even know could crash (like TextEdit) are crashing. They’re crashing when we save files, crashing randomly when we’re not saving files, and so on."

We do not support Snow Leopard at the SJSU Help Desk. The SPSS software we provide does not work with it. Unless you have a serious business need that requires Mac OS X 10.6 (and I know of none very few for most users) there is no reason to switch yet.

The university offers faculty training on the same day it requires they do not work!

How can the university on one hand offer events to faculty on furlough days, like this one, when The CSU/CFA Faculty Furlough Agreement requires that prior to the start of their assignment for any term, faculty must certify in writing that they will not work on the assigned furlough day?

Did Apple iPhone Compromise Enterprise Security?

According to a recent post in Network World by Galen Gruman:

Thousands of users have been accessing e-mail, calendars, and contacts over Exchange connections through their iPhones or iPod Touches, not knowing they were compromising their corporate security. During that entire time, Apple has extolled its support of Exchange and convinced many businesses that the iPhone was a corporate-class device they should embrace or, at least, tolerate.

[Read More]

SPSS not currently supported on Snow Leapord

Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" (the just released current version) does not support SPSS 17.1 (the current version we have at SJSU.) SPSS has been renamed PASW Statistics. Reportedly, SPSS/PASW Statistics is not scheduled to be supported in Snow Leopard until PASW Statistics 18 is released. I don't anticipate we will have PASW Statistics 18 until sometime in Spring 2010, if past precedent holds. SPSS/PASW Statistics system requirements are pretty well spelled out. We get new versions of SPSS/PASW Statistics well after they are released. SPSS shipped SPSS 17 to SJSU less than 6 months ago.

We do ask our customers to check the system requirements of the software, which we show them in writing, before we sell them install media. We will try to be even more vigilant about doing this.

This is not unusual. SPSS/PASW Statistics is not usually quick to support new operating systems, and PASW Statistics is not big enough for Apple to tailor its OS software to work with it.

We do not currently support Snow Leopard at the SJSU help desk. We do not even have it yet. I anticipate we will be (officially) supporting Mac OS X 10.6 and Windows 7 in the Spring. But, that is not my decision to make!

BTW - I suggest folks not install new operating systems on production computers until they are at least 10.x.3 for Macs or SP 1 for Windows OS versions. Then, they should only install a new OS if they have a business need to, and they are sure their applications are compatible. IMHO the main use of an OS is to allow users to access applications and applications to efficiently access system resources, the rest is fluff. The best thing an OS can do, in my opinion, is to get out of my way! (But then, I liked the spartan Windows 2000 interface.)

BTW #2 - I am going to be out of the office until September 8. If help desk clients want issues addressed as quickly as possible, please do one of the following:

• Call us at (408) 924-2377 during our normal business hours. Our business hours are the only times we are open and/or are able to address issues. Our business hours are here.
  
• Or, go to our ticket portal and submit an incident ticket into our ticketing system. Our ticket portal is here.
  

Have a great holiday weekend:
~Steve

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