It was Christmas in July at the Village of Winston Park seniors' care home, Kitchener, on July 9 when a group of Waterloo undergrads volunteered to set up festive decorations, help run event stalls and — like Roy Lee (left), nanotechnology engineering, and Chris Letnick, computer engineering — serve food. The event raised more than $700 for the Alzheimer Society's Walk for Memories.

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Change coming to login screens

"[Starting today,] there will be a small change appearing on the login screens of all ADS and Nexus computers used by about three to four thousand faculty and staff, and 20,000 students," says Erick Engelke, director of engineering computing, and leader of the Active Directory consolidation project for the university.

"The change will be that computers in nexus domain will also mention ADS, and likewise ADS computers will mention nexus. We don't actually want people to try logging into the other domain, but we need this step so we can start moving accounts across for a future time when all these users will be in Nexus."

Details of the change, and the reasons behind it, are online. Here are some excerpts:

"The Active Directory consolidation project aims to simplify the campus into a single Active Directory for teaching and administration purposes.

"Active Directory is Microsoft’s directory, a sort of phone book which holds lists of computers and users with associated attributes. For users, it contains attributes with information like passwords (irreversible hashes), home directory pointers, preferred email addresses, and groupings that declare one a student, a member of one or more departments, and members of other lists which might access to certain databases or other resources.

"Three existing Active Directories (ADS, Artsfaculty and Nexus) will be folded into one: Nexus. The merged directory will contain all users on campus, and will be used to manage access to many campus databases, SharePoint servers, wireless access, email, and directly manage at least 6,000 campus workstations."

"The week of July 25th, 2011 we will begin the first major steps on production systems. We will create trusts between ADS and Nexus. 

"The only noticeable effect for most people will be that the login screen will allow them to log into other domains that weren’t listed before. People are encouraged to not attempt to change their login domain.

"This stage will be used to copy accounts from ADS to Nexus, but only for users who haven’t used Nexus in the year 2011, including those who have never used Nexus. Regular Nexus users will not be moved yet.

"The timing of this stage allows us to prepare for freshmen students arriving for September. They already have ADS accounts for Quest; this will copy their accounts and password for use in the Nexus labs."

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Waterloo robot tears up the track

Last weekend, July 23, the University of Waterloo’s Team Wavelab Robotics returned to the International Autonomous Robot Racing Competition at the University of British Columbia, with a redesigned version of the vehicle that crashed last year just before the competition and had to be rebuilt at lightning speed. This time, it was a clean sweep for the Waterloo team.

They won the Grand Award, and also captured first place in the Design, Drag Race, and Circuit competitions. Videos of the Circuit Race Training are here and here; a video of the Drag Race Competition is here.

Earlier this year, the joint UW Robotics and WAVELab Robotics team also did well at the International Ground Vehicles Competition at Oakland University in Rochester, with the best showing of any Canadian entry. The team is advised by mechanical and mechatronics engineering professors Steve Waslander and Sanjeev Bedi.

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Staffer, camera buff, takes to the sky

This aerial photo of Warrior Field, looking towards the south campus, was taken by Joe Bevan, multimedia specialist in Mapping, Analysis and Design, on July 13…. but not from an airplane. He used a kite.

“Basically I have a fairly simple yet large kite (left) that can lift a bit of weight,” Bevan says. “I'm using a 45-square-foot parafoil kite onto which I attach some clamps which in turn hold the strings that are attached to a camera rig I made (below).

"The rig is balanced using the crisscross network of strings and contains a camera, trigger servo, battery, and a small bit of electronics for triggering the servo.

“Right now I angle the camera manually before sending it up but the next version of the rig will incorporate movement like rotation and tilt.”

People have been taking aerial photographs from kites since the 1880s. Lately, thanks to lighter cameras and microelectronics, aerial photography from kites has been growing again in popularity.

CPA staff

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