What's Up at the ACCC

The University of Illinois at Chicago is committed to providing equal access to computer services to people with disabilities, as are we at the ACCC.

ACCC access services begin with all the ACCC public personal computer labs being wheelchair-accessible personal computer labs. ALso, all machines in all ACCC labs have a number of basic accessibility options, which modify keyboard and mouse action, sounds, and the display. The visually impaired can choose to use larger fonts on all machines in the ACCC labs, and screen magnification packages, and screen readers are available.

For ACCC lab hours and locations see: http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/pclabs/index.shtml

To prepare hardcopy material for magnification or reading by computer, a scanner with character recognition software is available early in the SSB lab (2300 SSB). Call the Client Services Office at (312) 413-0003 or visit the CSO in SEL 2267 to set up a time to use the scanner. Assistance in using the software will also be available.

Please note that people with disabilities will be given preference in the use of all equipment with specific accessibility software or devices. We hope that our non-disabled clients will follow this policy voluntarily, but ACCC personnel or the university police will enforce it if necessary.

For more information, see "Policy on Access to Computers for People with Disabilities," at: http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/lan/server_services/policies.htm

If you have any questions or special needs, please contact Margaret Bird at (312) 996-7285 or at mbird@uic.edu.

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REELlibrarian is a client/server software package that allows people to use a tape drive that is physically connected to a remote machine as if it were actually connected to the machine that they are using. A REELlibrarian client has been installed on the new borg. (Not UICVM or icarus.)

At UIC, REELlibrarian supports three types of digital computer tape cartridges:

• 4mm DAT
• 8mm XBYTE
• IBM 3480

• ANSI (default) and ANSI2 (ANSI without HDR2 labels)
• IBM (used when sharing tapes with MVS systems) and IBM2 (IBM without HDR2 labels)
• TAR and CPIO (generic formats usable by most utilities)
• RAW (for storing raw partitions)

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The Academic Computing and Communications Center is pleased to announce the new borg, a Hewlett Packard 9000/800 V2250 (a.k.a. V-server), which replaced the ACCC's original compute server, a Convex Exemplar. (Borg, or more properly, borg.cc.uic.edu, is named after the massively parallel alien race from the Star Trek: The Next Generation television series.) The V-server is HP's latest and greatest state-of-the-art machine. The new borg is a fast, powerful machine with extensive computing power; we hope that UIC faculty, staff, and, depending on their needs, students, will find the machine a useful tool for their research.

The new borg has 14 CPUs, 4 GB of RAM (yes, that's gigabytes), and 72 GB of disk storage, which is enough to allow us to give each user a 550 MB disk space allotment, considerably more than any other ACCC machine. It is running HP-UX Version 11 (HP's brand of UNIX).

The new borg has a wide range of statistical and computational packages and additional packages are scheduled to be added. The latest versions of FORTRAN 90 and ANSI C are available. There are four different editors, including the, a VM/CMS XEDIT clone, which should be of interest to people moving to borg from UICVM.

To request an account on borg, send email to systems@uic.edu with "Borg Account Request" as its Subject:. Include your name, netid, phone, and a description of how you will use the machine. Students must include the name of their faculty advisor. For more information, please see the borg home page at:

http://www.uic.edu

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The ACCC is introducing several new seminars during spring semester, including ones on Perl programming, Lotus Notes, and the new features in Windows 98. In addition, several seminars that used to be lecture-only are now hands-on, including Surfing the Web, Microsoft PowerPoint 97 and Excel 97, and Web authoring (with separate hands-on sessions for Claris HomePage and Netscape). There will also be special topics seminars on Excel and Access 97. To register, visit the seminars home page at:

http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/workshops/

or register by phone at (312) 355-1168.

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Students living in oncampus housing can now find their University telephone statement online. Information about this service and a link to the Bluestem-secured Web page are at:

http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/telecom/studentbill.html

Additional online services are planned, including an email address for questions and comments about Telecom billing.

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In preparation for the removal of CMS during 1999, we are restricting VM:Archiver on CMS from accepting new files. Your existing CMS archives are still available in the usual way for now, using the vmarch recall command. We are investigating various options for dealing with the existing CMS archives in the long run, but we feel there is no sense in expanding the problem by adding new files to the archives.

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