DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of October 30 - November 3, 2000

This page contains news related to the ECE department of the current week. Specifically it includes current information about seminars, exams, travel, research grants, professional news, personal news scheduled for this week.

This newsletter is also emailed by Friday afternoon of previous week to: {faculty,staff,gradstudents,ee-undergrads,co-undergrads}@ece.nwu.edu.

If you are not receiving this email, please contact nancy@ece.nwu.edu and we will get you on that email list. Mention which category you belong to.

CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN

As many of you know, one of the initiatives that we have undertaken in our department these last two years is to be more involved with the placement of our students in key companies after graduation. During the past two weeks, we have produced the ECE Resume Book which lists one-page resumes of all our B.S. seniors in electrical engineering and computer engineering, graduating M.S. students in electrical and computer engineering, and two-page resumes of all graduating Ph.D. students in electrical and computer engineering. We have mailed the resumes to the top 35 ECE companies in order to help place our students in these companies. We have also produced the resume booklet in electronic form for easier distribution. I hope the companies find this information useful and our students get successfully placed in the top 35 companies.

I wish to thank Nancy Singer for compiling all the resumes, producing the resume booklet on time, and distributing them to various companies in such an efficient manner.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENTS

Photonics Area Colloquium
DATE: Thursday, November 2, 2000
TIME: 3:30 p.m. (Coffee at 3:15)
PLACE: Tech L324
TITLE: High-Speed Quantum Cryptography SATCOM
SPEAKER: Gerald Gilbert, Director, Quantum Information Processing Group, MITRE Corporation

EXAMINATIONS

There are no examinations scheduled this week.

TRAVEL

On Thursday, October 26, Alan Sahakian visited the University of Illinois at Chicago to give the Bioengineering Department Seminar titled: "Mapping Cardiac Tissue Repolarization in Vivo."

Prith Banerjee is traveling to Annapolis, Maryland, November 1-3, to attend a DARPA PI meeting on the PACT Project.

CSRL NEWS

MS DONATION UPDATE

As you know, Microsoft Corporation has donated a number of PCs and 500 copies of each of the following software packages: Windows 2000 Professional, Visual Studio 6 (with upgrade to version 7 when it's released), Office 2000, Project 2000, and Visio 2000 Technical.

To date, we have received all of the above except for Project 2000. Once we have the complete set, an announcement will be made here with details regarding distribution procedures. Please do not ask about it until the announcement has been made.

SUN FORTE DEVELOPMENT SUITE INSTALLED

Sun has made its Forte (formerly known as Workshop) software development suite free to higher education. Normally, it costs $384 per license, after our educational discount. The package includes the following compilers: C, C++, FORTRAN 77, FORTRAN 95. It also includes an integrated development environment, including a built-in debugger, and source code version control. See

http://www.sun.com/forte/info/features/dev6_update1.html

for a complete feature description. Documentation can be found at:

file:/vol/forte/SUNWspro/docs/index.html

SOLARIS REBOOTS

It's time again to install patches on all of the Solaris machines in the department. We have already used the Wilkinson lab as a testbed to ensure that there are no major problems with the latest patch cluster; we are ready now to install it on the rest of the department's machines. To make the patches active, each Solaris machine must be rebooted. That will be done on Wednesday, November 1st at 7am. As usual, please notify root if there is some reason why a particular machine should not be rebooted at that time, and give us a date for when we can schedule the reboot.

NETSCAPE TO BE UPGRADED

Netscape will be upgraded from version 4.7 to 4.75 in the next week.

SUN PROMOTIONS

Sun has announced its latest promotions on popular workstations and other hardware. Please see the following URL:

http://www.sunedu.net/secure/promo-q1fy01-02.html

HIGH LASER1 PRINTER USAGE

Printer usage in the Wilkinson Lab--the "laser1" queue--continues to be alarmingly high. We have implemented an accounting system to track printer usage by username. This is likely the first step in a print quota system. The Computing Facilities Committee has decided that that is an option we should consider. Another option in our attempt to curb unnecessary printer usage is to remove laser1 queues from non- Wilkinson Lab machines. If neither of these works, we will have to go back to charging a nominal fee per printed page. That is a last-resort solution. It's our sincere hope that it will not become necessary to do that.

COMPUTING STAFF MOVES

The ECE Computer Support staff (Chris Bachmann, Tim Johnson, and myself) have moved from room M328 to room M334, which is next door. M328 now belongs to McCormick. Our phone numbers have not changed.

-Pred Bundalo
Computing Facilities Manager

OLD NEWS

You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .

HOW TO SUBMIT ENTRY

Please send email to ecenews@ece.nwu.edu before Thursday 5PM of previous week to be included on current week's news. Include information about seminars, exams, travel, research grants, professional news, personal news.