NEWS

Introduction to R Programming Workshop beginning January 23

CDE's Statistical Core will be offering an Introduction to R Programming workshop on January 23, 25, 30, and February 1 from 9:30-11:30. Mark Wilkinson from the UW Statistics Department will be teaching the workshop. R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is available for a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS. SSCC has R installed on both our Winstat servers and Linux servers (including Condor). Visit R's web site for more information.

This workshop will be tailored to applications in demographical research, but should be useful to anyone interested in R. If you would like to attend, send e-mail to Nancy McDermott to register. Seats are limited so if the class fills up CDE members will receive priority.

Introduction to NVivo 7 Workshop in March

The Wisconsin Center for Educational Research will be hosting a full day demonstration and two day hands-on introduction to QSR's NVivo 7 in March, lead by QSR's founders, Tom and Lyn Richards. With an entirely new interface and very new functions, NVivo 7 is the upgrade for both NUD*IST (N5 or N6) and NVivo (1 or 2). SSCC will be upgrading to version 7 on the Winstat terminal servers when the software becomes available next month.

Visit http://tqm.wceruw.org/NVivo7conf.html for more information and to register. There is a registration fee.

SSCC Spring Training

We'll be announcing our Spring Training Sessions in next month's issue of SSCC News, but the new schedule will be posted on our training page much sooner. If there's a particular topic you'd like to see offered, please e-mail Russell Dimond.

Welcome Ryan Horrisberger to SSCC's Staff

Please welcome Ryan Horrisberger to SSCC's staff. Ryan is a recent UW-Madison computer science graduate who will be doing network administration and systems programming. Ryan has replaced Cory Chrisinger, who left SSCC in November. Ryan's office is in SSCC's suite in 4226. Please stop by and welcome him next time you're in the area.

Unscheduled Downtime

On Friday morning, December 30th, the Storage Processor that allows our Linux file server to communicate with the network disk space failed. This prevented access to email, SSCC web pages, and the other Linux servers. SSCC staff and Dell technicians worked through the day to resolve the problem, but one crucial replacement part had to be flown to us by Dell. It arrived at 11:30 that night and Dan Bongert, our Linux System Administrator, had it installed and runnning by midnight.

The network upgrade we carried out on the night of January 3-4, in addition to giving us more disk space, gave both Linux and Windows a second Storage Processor they can use if their primary Storage Processor fails. While this upgrade had been planned long before Friday's outage, it means that a similar event will not lead to a similar outage in the future.

We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate the patience of SSCC members during the dowtime.

Tip: Compressing Files

The SSCC has allocated more than 400GB of disk space over the past two years compared to 75GB for the previous two-year period. Network disk space is far more expensive than regular PC hard drives due to the kind of redundancy described above, and while we're happy to provide all the disk space members need we'd like to keep the cost as low as possible. Individuals can help by not duplicating files that can be used from a central location and compressing files that are not used regularly. On Windows, use Winzip or one of its many free imitators. On Linux use gzip/gunzip or any of several similar commands (See Using Compressed Data in Linux for details). In Stata for Linux, consider installing the gzsave/gzuse commands so you can work with compressed data directly.