2011
Computer Laboratory awarded two Google Research Awards for 2011
12 December 2011
Congratulations to both Cecilia Mascolo and Andreas Bulling, who have received Google Research Awards for 2011. More …
Network problem 2011-11-25
28 November 2011
There was a major problem with the CL internal network during the afternoon of Friday 25th November, believed to have been caused by a faulty switch. There were a number of consequential side effects on other systems, which we now believe have been dealt with. More …
Unix group cleanup
25 October 2011
On departmental Linux systems, many Unix groups have been added locally, to facilitate groups of users jointly editing files. Use the shell command "id" to see which groups you are a member of. To avoid malfunctions, we now need to clean up older groups with gid value below 500. This requires your help. There are two sources of groups: More …
Computer Lab team recreate Darwin's emotion experiment
21 October 2011
A team from the lab's Graphics & Interaction Group are using 21st century technology to recreate an experiment run by Charles Darwin in the 19th century. More …
Dan Greenfield wins BCS Distinguished Dissertation Prize 2011
18 October 2011
Congratulations to Dan Greenfield, who has won the BCS Distinguished Dissertation prize 2011. More …
Dr Andy Harter elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering
14 October 2011
Computer Laboratory Visiting Fellow Dr Andy Harter has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. The Academy's Fellowship honours the UK's most distinguished engineers. More …
Computer Lab student on winning team in the 2011 Audio-Visual Emotion Challenge
12 October 2011
Tadas Baltrušaitis, a research student in the Graphics & Interaction Group, was on the winning team for the 2011 International Audio-Visual Emotion Challenge. More …
Head of Computer Laboratory calls for more computer scientists
23 September 2011
Professor Andy Hopper refutes Government Statistics More …
CentOS 5.7 released - kernel lock bug fixed
15 September 2011
Although not yet announced on the CentOS web site, CentOS 5.7 has been released, which includes a new kernel which fixes the bug which caused the machine to OOPS if an NFS file lock was attempted. As such, there will be a campaign of rebooting CentOS 5 machines, such as slogin-serv and miscellaneous other Lab servers. As CentOS systems automatically do "dot" upgrades, systems should automatically install the new kernel, and all that should be needed to move to the new kernel is a reboot. More …
Lab students win ACM Student Research Competition at SIGGRAPH 2011
13 August 2011
Lech Świrski and Christian Richardt, PhD students in the Graphics & Interaction Group, won the ACM Student Research Competition at SIGGRAPH 2011 with their poster "Layered Photo Pop-Up', based on Lech's 2011 MPhil project. More …
Wireless network replacement - phase 2 complete
29 July 2011
Phase 2 of the wireless network replacement is now complete, adding a number of mid-corridor access points. More …
Phone outage Thursday 28th July
28 July 2011
The Computing Service send their apologies for the telephone system outage this morning. A small and fairly routine reconfiguration was made to the West Cambridge routers during this morning's CUDN vulnerable period, ironically with the ultimate goal of improving network resilience. Unfortunately a maintenance script failed to run correctly and the voice network became disconnected. Once reported (by mobile phone), the communication channels worked well and the fault was attended to promptly. More …
Lab Professors elected Fellows of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications
28 July 2011
Professors John Daugman and Neil Dodgson have been elected Fellows of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. More …
Wireless network replacement - phase 1 complete
20 July 2011
The initial phase of the replacement wireless network installation is now complete. All of the old access points have been decommissioned, and 24 Aruba access points have been installed. More …
Password requirements change
19 July 2011
Passwords created or changed from now onwards will need to be of higher complexity than was permitted previously. Details of the requirements can be found at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/local/sys/access/kerberos/. Existing passwords will continue to work as normal - you only need to be aware of the extra restrictions when you choose to change your password. More …
Wireless network replacement
13 July 2011
On Monday and Tuesday of next week (18th/19th July) the long awaited upgrade of the wireless network in the building will take place. There will be disruption to wireless access as old access points are replaced with new, but I hope that there will be connectivity available from most places at most times. More …
Mohan Ganesalingam awarded Beth Prize
13 July 2011
Congratulations to Mohan Ganesalingam who has been (jointly) awarded the Beth Prize (see http://www.folli.org/) for his PhD thesis "The Language of Mathematics". More …
Professor Peter Robinson best in-category winner at Pervasive 2011
30 June 2011
Professor Peter Robinson was awarded best in-category at Pervasive 2011 for the video 'The emotional computer'. More …
Andreas Koltes awarded IET Postgraduate Scholarship
13 June 2011
Andreas Koltes has won the IET Postgraduate Scholarship, one of two awarded in 2011. More …
Peter Calvert wins ACM Student Research Competition
9 June 2011
Peter Calvert won first place, in the undergraduate category of the ACM Student Research Competition, for his final year project on offloading Java to graphics processors. More …
New package signing key
8 June 2011
A new key (3294FB03) has been generated to sign all Lab packages (RPMs and .debs). This has been installed on most Lab managed machines. Private machines which use the Lab repositories will need to register the new key. Details available on the WiKi More …
World IPv6 day - 2011/06/08 - possible network service problems
7 June 2011
On world IPv6 day there is a possibility of disruption of network services due to machine with dual stack not working correctly. Although we will be making small changes, most of the changes are outwith our control. If you experience problems, please contact sys-admin so that we can monitor and try to sort things. When we last enabled local services via IPv6 as well as IPv4 there were problems due to some Windows machines thinking that they have IPv6 connectivity, trying to use the IPv6 address, and failing. We believe that the particular problem was fixed, but there may be others. More …
svn services changes
17 April 2011
As mentioned in centos-5-machines-upgrading-to-5-6 CentOS machines have upgraded. They now run svn 1.6.11, so the svn-1-6-6-serv service is being withdrawn. More …
Computer Lab PhD scoops EAPLS Best PhD Dissertation Award 2010
11 April 2011
Dr Alexey Gotsman has been named the winner of the European Association for Programming Languages and Systems's Best Dissertation Award 2010 for his dissertation on logics and analyses for concurrent heap-manipulating programs. More …
CentOS 5 machines upgrading to 5.6
10 April 2011
CentOS 5 machines (mostly servers rather than user workstations) are automatically upgrading to 5.6. It should be mostly transparent, but the mailer (exim) has a security fix, so the old config file causes email to fail, including email saying that there is a problem. Some machines may have problems with the upgrade, and Virtual Machines may install a kernel which fails with NFS locking. If you use a CentOS machine (see /etc/issue) and it has problems, please email sys-admin. More …
WordPress upgraded
1 April 2011
The old WordPress software used for these pages has been upgraded. The theme has changed, but other things should be much the same. More …
Computer Laboratory to start full recycling scheme
29 March 2011
The Computer Laboratory will operate a full recycling system from April. More …
Network outages and consequences
17 March 2011
As of about the 11th of March, we have been having a number of problems with servers crashing, machines misbehaving, network dropouts, things going slowly, etc. We believe this to be due to some sort of local networking problem with the switches. Latest update: The supervisor in use on the central switch was was swapped Tue Mar 22 09:52 and the problems did not recur within four hours. More …
Anil Madhavapeddy wins Verisign grant
17 March 2011
Anil Madhavapeddy is one of four researchers chosen to receive a Verisign grant of US$75,000 to pursue projects aimed at strengthening Internet infrastructure. More …
Tom Cashman wins Eurographics dissertation award
14 March 2011
Eurographics, the European Association for Computer Graphics, has chosen Tom Cashman 2010 dissertation as one of this year's three award winners. Tom's dissertation, "NURBS-compatible subdivision surfaces", had previously been the runner-up in the 2010 BCS Distinguished Dissertation competition. More …
Robert Watson and Jonathan Anderson scoop Cambridge Ring Hall of Fame Award 2011.
9 March 2011
Robert Watson and Jonathan Anderson have won the Publication of the Year Award 2011, at the Cambridge Ring's Hall of Fame Awards, for 'Capsicum: Practical Capabilities for UNIX'. More …
Unix groups now also available in AD
21 February 2011
All Unix groups are now also maintained as a set of Security Groups in the Active Directory. The membership is controlled from the Unix groups and additions and deletions to maintain the groups in synchronisation are performed hourly during the working day. More …
slogin-serv move to NFS sec=krb5
7 February 2011
Any users of the "slogin-serv" service should be aware that changes
are to be made which may require them to run "kinit" to
access their home directory. Lab Linux machines are moving
from using NFS with sec=sys (which trusts the client OS user
information to auth users) to sec=krb5 (which requires the user to
have a kerberos ticket to indicate what access they should have) to
improve the security of user files on the central NFS server. Users of
new or upgraded Linux systems will be used to sec=krb5, but it's a bit
different on servers. Some hints and tips are available on the
NFS
sec=krb5 web page. We will be moving the main "slogin-serv"
service over starting the week beginning 2011/02/07. Initially the
name 'slogin-serv' will point at the existing sec=krb5 instance. Users
may need to type "kinit" (or equivalent) to get access to the filer.
Users experiencing problems should login to 'slogin-old' (or
'slogin-serv9' or 'ramsey') and then email sys-admin explaining the
problem. When we are confident that things are basically working, one
of the old servers ('ramsey') will move over to sec=krb5. When we are
happy that everything is working, the temporary name 'slogin-old' will
be removed, and 'slogin-serv9' will be retired. Users are encouraged
to try the new service in advance by connecting to ssh-remote-0, and
send any feedback to sys-admin More …
EDSAC to be recreated
13 January 2011
A working replica of EDSAC, the forerunner of general purpose computing, has been commissioned by the Computer Conservation Society, in recognition of the achievements of the pioneering computer scientists at Cambridge University in the 1940s, to inform the general public about Britain’s illustrious computer heritage and to inspire future students of engineering and computing. The CCS, a special interest group of the BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, has a 20-year track record in successfully recreating pioneering computers. More …
Web server changes
10 January 2011
Two small changes have been made to the Lab web server that may break some existing web pages, in particular those using other character encodings than UTF-8. More …