Phone directory fiasco

Tried to figure out what college that person you met at that one party is in—you know, the one whose number you forgot and name you barely remember due to, well, circumstances beyond your control? You could go the Yale PHonebook, and look him or her up by any other information that you can remember. Recently, the option to see and search by residential colleges seemed to have disappeared from the directory listings on the Yale web page. However, Peter P. Furmonavicius, Senior Research Programmer, Data Network Operations at ITS, explains that the colleges had to be moved out of their previous storage field, "department", because students who also had jobs within other Yale University departments often had their college overwritten by the employment information. Now, however, residential colleges are safely stored in the permanent_address field. However, permanent_address is not part of the limited information returned by a stanard query. You must add " return all" to the end of every search.

For example, if you want to find that cute sophomore whose last name you can't remember, you can just type "Jan* class=2001 return all" into the little box. Or, just use the Yale Herald's Ground Zero portal, which does all the hard work of typing in the right commands for you.

Y2K...A-OK?

With the year 2000 rapidly approaching, companies and governments everywhere are checking and re-checking their systems, making sure that everything will run smoothly for that fateful new year's day. At Yale, ITS was hard at work performing Y2K compatibility tests on all its systems. As students tanned in Florida, technicians performed tests on Yale's phone lines, as well as comtinued to upgrade important components of Yale's servers. The upgrading also included the Pantheon servers—which experienced a shutdown on March 8, caused by a hardware error in the server. However, after seven hours, the system was back up, and the upgrading for Y2K continued. The changes to Pantheon were completed by the end of the spring break.

The Y2K upgrade plan also includes switiching over Yale's administrative and financial systems to an application created using Oracle. A recent email from Dan Updegrove, head of Information Technology Services(ITS), to the "superusers" email lists, announced that the date "new applications [associated with the Oracle system], associated procedures and the new chart of accounts is now July 1, 1999." Dean Plummer, Director of the Business Management Board and the sender of the email, stated a number of reasons for the later implementation date. "Development and testing of the phase 2 software has taken longer than originally expected," Plummer wrote. In addition, the later date will allow more time for staff training. "Additional training time needs to be allotted to help assure the readiness of the Yale community," the email said.

YH's periodic ponderous page pick

We all know computers are the next great tool for procrastination. But some people have managed to use their computers to create—and we think that's cool. To give our readers some help in random web surfing, here's a neat website.

Isabel O'Meara, CC '99, a computer science and music major, instead of making the standard "Hi. This is me," has created an elegant design with simple colored boxes. On top of that, there's a "name that tune" contest. For something we can all relate to, check out her resume. Though the online editors couldn't name the tune, Isabel promises to "do something nice" for you if you can. Go there.

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