(© James Mravec, all rights reserved)


last updated: Dragon's Job

Dragon's Job Stuff


My job here at Tech is to help keep the TCC functional. My main responsibilities include
instructing new users "what it's all about" in the TCC Intro courses
keeping news stable and operational
managing all sorts of printing accounting and functionality
maintaining the modem software
other stuff: end-user interaction & software construction, spare-time script package for image cataloging, &c

TCC Intro

I don't do the intro course anymore, as that job has been assumed by one of our latest and greatest employees (and good friend), John Shipman, who is also the spearhead for our latest and greatest facility, the New Mexico Institute of Mining & Technology Computer Center Help System. There's a wealth of information and help regarding a good chunk of the TCC resources. And it's constantly being developed and updated.

NEWS

As the news admin, I make sure that our news server is running smoothly, and take care of it when the disk fills up, or a process gets hung. We're using a rather crusty version of Cnews, but for the most part, it works fairly well -- read: better to stick with the devil you know than the devil you don't know. Occasionally adding new newsgroups requested by the users is also one of my daily chores, as well as providing feeds to other sites, though this consists only of our local heirarchy that other sites might be interested in (we're hardly big or powerful enough to handle sending full feeds to other servers besides the two that feed us!).

PRINTING

If there's ever a problem with a printer, or someone is having trouble printing something out, I'm the guy they turn to if a User Consultant is baffled. I'm in charge of installing new printers, fixing old ones (usually just on the soft side), and finding and implementing new filters and drivers that provide for smoother operation of the printers.

The bulk of our hardware consists of Adboe PostScript HP printers of various types and configurations. Two HP LaserJet IIIsi printers (link is actually 4si, as they don't seem to support the IIIsi anymore), each equipped with about 8MB of RAM, with one being a serial printer, and the other packaged with an ethernet interface card. Two HP LaserJet 4p printers, which are thankfully identical ethernet (via JetDirect boxes) machines. And two Apple Laserwriter II printers, one a IIf, and the other a IIg, both with serial interfaces.

Each of these printers is run by the same spooling software, and nearly identical filters, though we were forced to implement an hp-specific filter for the 4p's. Hopefully soon, I will have an HP DeskJet 1200C/PS Color Printer online, to complement our new color scanner.

One of the biggest problems I run into is the fact that we have our own homebrewed accounting system that forces us through a somewhat outdated and not terribly friendly filtering system -- a hacked version of the PLP software, backended by psf and other filters for converting to PostScript. Also, one of our laser printers is an Imagen processor, which runs smoothly most of the time, but is very difficult to debug when it does encounter a problem.

MODEMS

I don't actually deal with the things face-to-face. We have specialized hardware folks, namely: Ray Piworunas, all-around hardware guru, former acting director, and current Operations Coordinator; and Steve Singogli, our new hardware engineer recruit.

Me, I just try to maintain the software people will use for downloading and uploading files, which requires close work with Ray and Steve to understand the idiosyncracies (sp?) of our Cisco terminal server, glenn.

OTHER DUTIES

My other demands at the TCC strongly encourage interaction with other users, be they professional, lay, faculty, or administration, ranging anywhere from computer illiterate to well versed or even near-guru. Occasionally I must even deal with the external customer, or outside account. Problems and questions I'm most often presented with are: And of course, the infamous:

When I'm not doing all these things, I spend my time developing mostly end-user software. My current project is rewriting our request and change-account-name programs (which I was the original author of) to work correctly with the new database format we have adopted and implemented. I've also written a program called fast, which locates in a few seconds the most responsive (not the same as least-loaded!) machines in our midst, as well as, in my spare time, The Fully Automated, Indexing, Imagemapping, HTML-generating, 256 Color, Multi-Image Browser for providing a browsing tool for our large archive of images. This package will soon be distributed to the net, once I have tested the portability of the scripts, provided a nice package, and checked all the files for the appropriate copyright notices.

My main goal this week is to get our HP ScanJet IIcx scanner up and running, because (a) I want to use it, (b) it is sitting in a public area completely nonfunctional, and (c) I want the expierence doing it, since I haven't had to deal with our PC hardware or software since we hired a PC specialist a year or two ago. I'm waiting on a V32-bit SCSI-2 card to arrive and replace the crummy 8-bit one that was packaged with the unit (we need it to drive both the 2-gig harddrive and the scanner, and HP doesn't recommend putting anything else but the scanner on their cheesy SCSI card).