Bitten by the leap second

It looks like at least one of our services was impacted by the leap second added earlier this evening. The ActiveMQ process (a Java application) servicing code.seas started to consume an unusual amount of CPU time at 10PM EST. The behavior match descriptions elsewhere on the web regarding problems caused by the leap second, and rebooting the server has corrected things. For the duration of this problem, service was slow but still functional.

Science! (And Coffee.)

Pictured here: an essential part of daily operations here at Academic Computing — our Productivity Corner. Fair Trade organic coffee, in both caffeinated and placebo varieties, plus associated essential geek coffee humor.

Anyone in SEAS is welcome to stop by for free coffee and to chat. This isn't just because we're friendly and like to chat about geeky things, but because we don't want you to die.

Yes. It's true. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine confirms what we all wanted to be true all along — not only is drinking coffee not bad for you, it significantly reduces your risk of death.

So, please, come by, have some coffee and extend your life. We recommend the caffeinated varieties, since science demonstrates that  most Americans do not get enough of this vital nutrient. (Seriously, you're only drinking 3-4 cups per day? Keep going!) However, the decaf kind is just as good for lowering risk of death overall — are there problems with this study? We're not listening. La la la la la — you're welcome to that too. Oh, and there's tea and hot chocolate for those unfortunates who have not yet developed the proper taste.

Puppet Camp Boston

I will be talking about our use of Puppet for configuration management at the 2012 Puppet Camp Boston. It looks like there are some other interesting talks going on, so stop by and say hello. The event is free and will be held at the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, MA. Here's the blurb for my talk:

Academic Computing in Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences adopted Puppet as a server configuration management tool in the summer of 2011. In order to take advantage of our existing package distribution infrastructure and limit the deployment of new services we opted to run Puppet in a "masterless" configuration. I will talk about how we manage and distribute our Puppet configuration and how things are working out after running it for a year.

Harvard IT Summit: Vision and Initiatives

Last Thursday, May 31st, was the Harvard IT Summit.  The best part for me was hearing a clear articulation from the CIO Council concerning the vision for IT at Harvard and the 16 Key Initiatives.  The vision consisted of three points, and is short enough to be quoted in its entirety here:

We aspire to build a secure Harvard technology environment that enables:

• Access to data, information, and knowledge
• Innovation in teaching, learning, and research
• Collaboration across communities and disciplines

Within the SEAS Academic Computing group we're thinking about all of these things.  In particular:

Access: How do we do identity management?  How does this fit into access control?  Can we combine SSO and security while also maintaining ease of use and support for external collaborators and visitors?  We are considering how standards and technologies around LDAP, InCommon, OpenID, and OpenAuth can be combined for our "in house" systems and services, but also for externally provided web-accessible services.

Innovation: What are the most innovative and high impact computational capabilities we can provide to our community?  How can design and practical computation further infiltrate the existing SEAS course offerings?  Two areas where Academic Computing has addressed this topic are in our PaaS Virtual Machine environment (currently moving from Open Nebula to Open Stack), and a GitHub-like software hosting environment.

Collaboration: How do faculty, staff, students, and external collaborators work together for learning and research?  In this space we've been considering many tools and services: video conferencing, wiki systems, course forums, collaborative paper review.  Hearing from the Division of Continuing Education (Harvard Extension School) was particular interesting with respect to distance learning technologies and multi-media video conference enabled classrooms.

It was also fun seeing the video they prepared to communicate some of these points.  Looking forward to the change that lies ahead.