• June 3, 2008

Weather warning channels don't include emergency text messaging

by Betsy Edwards, Information Technology Assistance Center
published June 3, 2008

Manhattan's severe thunderstorm Monday morning reportedly caused softball-sized hail damage and was a reminder that K-Staters need to be prepared for emergency weather conditions at any time. The city sounded its tornado warning sirens, but some K-Staters questioned why the university didn't use its Emergency Text Messaging System (ETMS).

Steve Galitzer, in the Department of Environmental Health and Safety, said the ETMS service is reserved for high-level emergencies only, to ensure the campus community gives those full attention if an event occurs. According to the department's Emergency Notification Systems webpage, the following channels are used in the event of a tornado:

  • Tornado warning sirens
  • Police public address systems
  • Reverse 911 telephone call
  • K-State staff who carry radios
  • E-mail, webpage, and local media

E-mail about the storm's status was sent to the campus at 10:31 a.m. via the university's SAFETY-L mailing list. Most K-Staters are auto-subscribed to that list but can unsubscribe at any time, Galitzer said.

For emergency weather news, these sites offer frequent updates, visuals, and links to weather resources.

  • NOAA's Weather.gov Topeka, KS Radar has a zoom-in map with a loop visual that shows the latest 30 minutes of weather radar.
  • The National Weather Service (NWS) has a Severe Weather Summary for Topeka and surrounding regions, showing immediate status of tornado, thunderstorm, and flash flood warnings
  • NWS's www.nws.noaa.gov has a Storm Prediction Center charged with monitoring and forecasting severe weather over the 48 continental states.
  • AccuWeather.com's Manhattan, KS, forecast includes a visual "quick look" summary, weather-at-a-glance images at two-hour intervals for the next 12 hours, plus chance-of-rain images for three-hour timeslots over the next 24 hours.
  • FEMA.gov's Tornado webpage includes what to do before, during, and after a tornado,

Weather tools recommended by K-State IT staff

by Eric Dover, Information Technology Assistance Center
published June 3, 2008

With all the strange weather that went on yesterday and the strong possibility of more to come in the days and weeks ahead, IT staff wanted to take this opportunity to share some tools they use to stay abreast of the weather.

photo of major hail damage to car June2 at Manhattan Municipal Airport
A car displays baseball-size hail damage
June 2 at Manhattan Municipal Airport
photo by Eric Dover
photo of hail damage to windows of several cars June2 at Manhattan Municipal Airport
Cars at Manhattan Municipal Airport received
major damage from large hail June 2
photo by Eric Dover

Websites. A number of websites are available from your computer that provide excellent weather-related information. Here are some of the more popular ones.

Mobile sites. Some cellphones or service providers offer weather applications that run natively on the phone. These vary from provider to provider and phone to phone. However, a few sites provide weather information on your cellphone through the mobile web browser. To name a few:

  • Mobile Weather Underground — m.wund.com
  • iWeathr — iweathr.com. A great NOAA-based radar; works only on iPhone and iPod Touch.
  • Weather Channel — weather.com Use the browser on your cellphone and it will automatically redirect to the mobile site. This doesn't work for iPhone and iPod Touch users, who will get the full Weather Channel site.

Alert services. Several companies are offering weather-alert service, and the best one so far is the Weather Channels "Notify!" service. There's a free service that will send text messages to your mobile phone, as well as pay services that provide functionality such as phone calls; more timely and detailed radar imagery; and the ability to send notifications to multiple e-mail addresses, mobile phones, or land-line phones. The pay services runs $40-$60 per year depending on the features you want. For a complete list of free text-message (SMS) alerts from the Weather Channel, see the Weather Channel Alerts.

K-State Online 8.0 pre-release training June 18-26

by Amanda Tross, Office of Mediated Education
published June 3, 2008

K-State faculty and staff are invited to attend the June 18-26 pre-release training sessions for the K-State Online features coming in early August. All sessions will be in the Hemisphere Room (501) in Hale Library, and pre-registration is required. This is an opportunity to get hands-on time with the new features in a lab setting, gain insight into the coming changes, and give feedback on new features.

A special session is scheduled for K-State students only, noon-1 p.m. Thursday, June 19, in Hale 501. The K-State Online student homepage was redesigned to include new features, and student feedback is needed on these changes. A free, light lunch will be served as an incentive to attend and provide input.

New features of K-State Online 8.0 include:

  • An overhaul of the student-side navigation to make it easier to use, including My Assignments and Student Gradebook
  • Improved interfaces and new features based on user suggestions for two of the most popular tools -- Student Groups and Message Board
  • Additional integration with iSIS to bring more information to the Roster
  • Updates to the Attendance and Chat Room
  • Adding the Voice Recording tools to the welcome message and announcements
  • Adding a streaming Flash media server to stream FLV, SWF, and MP4 files with an inline video player, similar to YouTube.com and CNN.com

Register for these sessions and select the desired date and time. Training sessions will be repeated in August after the release of the new K-State Online version. More details will be announced near the end of July regarding August training sessions.

eTips June 12: Microsoft Office Tips

by Cathy Rodriguez, Information Technology Assistance Center
published June 3, 2008

Cathy Rodriguez will present an eTips session on "Microsoft Office Tips" at 11 a.m. Thursday, June 12, desktop webinar via Wimba. Join this session to learn a variety of tips that will make using Microsoft Office easier. Some tips will include keyboard shortcuts, pasting text without formatting, special formatting options in Excel (dates, fractions, etc.), and much, much more.

Reminder: Cathy Rodriguez will present "Introduction to Wikis" at 3 p.m. Thursday, June 5, desktop webinar via Wimba. Are you looking for a collaborative space to work on a project, on documentation, or do you need a place where your students can meet? Join this session to learn the ins and outs of how a wiki can help.

eTips registration is required at least 24 hours in advance to allow time to add you to the session and ensure your workstation is configured properly for accessing the session.

Security tip of the week

New e-mail scams trick two K-Staters

by Betsy Edwards and Rebecca Gould, Information Technology Assistance Center
published June 3, 2008

Scam e-mails continue to cause problems on the K-State campus. Over the weekend, two individuals on campus responded to another round of scam requests for user IDs and passwords. Remember, information technology staff will never ask for your password -- not in an e-mail, not over the phone, not in person. To learn how to recognize a scam e-mail, check the list of telltale clues in InfoTech Tuesday's Feb. 5 security tip.

If you have any suspicion that an e-mail might not be valid, it's best to check it out first with your IT support person or the IT Help Desk (helpdesk@k-state.edu, 785-532-7722). Better safe than sorry! To learn more about scam e-mails, see the March 25 article, Scam e-mails still causing problems at K-State.

K-State Online

Wimba Live replaces Live Lecture, adds features

by Scott Finkeldei, Office of Mediated Education
published June 3, 2008

The Live Lecture tool in conjunction with the Chat Room was one of the first tools in K-State Online. A newer, improved tool for audio communication is in place. Wimba Live can handle live audio and the chat room, with:

  • The added bonus of slide presentations
  • Additional features including video
  • The ability for users away from a computer to call in via cellphone

Wimba Live has the same requirements as the chat room and Live Lecture, so if you and your students were already successfully using the chat room (Java required) and Live Lecture (audio/microphone required) then Wimba Live will work. It is web-based and uses Voice over IP (VoIP) for the audio, so Real Producer is no longer needed.

The Live Lecture feature in K-State Online was experiencing problems and not working reliably, so as of May it is no longer available. Anyone who wants to conduct a live audio chat is encouraged to use Wimba Live. If you would like hands-on training to move to Wimba Live, contact Bryan Vandiviere, the Wimba coordinator, at wps@k-state.edu.

Wimba Overview is Wimba Live's help and reference guide that includes the many functions available and related tutorials. A printable Wimba Quick Reference Guide (PDF format) also is available for reminders about key functions.

Access to online K-State Calendar? Unix log-in still secure?

by Rebecca Gould and Betsy Edwards, Information Technology Assistance Center
published June 3, 2008

What is the URL for the web-based version of K-State's Oracle calendar?

Many K-Staters don't realize they can access their online calendar from anywhere in the world. Go to kcalendar.k-state.edu. The online version is a little clunkier than the desktop client, but it has similar functionality.

After the weekend changes to K-State's Unix system, when I log in to the central Unix system, it first displays a security window saying the server "has a new key..." After I click OK, the new log-in message shows "PUB2.CC.KSU.EDU" instead of "unix.ksu.edu". Is this still a secure connection?

Yes, it's still a secure connection. "PUB2" and "PUB1" are the new Unix servers.

Spotlight

Seven words for making better PDFs

by Amy Hartman, Research and Extension
published June 3, 2008

Do you need to make your PDFs look better online? Some K-State employees make multi-megabyte fuzzy PDFs that are unsearchable images of text. Few people know how to add usable titles to a PDF's Document Properties, which is displayed as the document title in search results. And some people use spaces in file names for online documents, which can cause problems.

Here are suggestions for making better PDFs in seven words: "Use text. Under one megabyte. Add titles." The tips below tell how to do these with the full Acrobat software. (These features are not in the free Adobe Reader.) For more details, see the Google_and_Acrobat handout (PDF).

Use text.
Make your PDF from an existing document. If you have the full Acrobat, many current applications have a "convert to Acrobat" feature, or can be printed to Acrobat. Or you can use use Acrobat's feature by clicking File, then Create PDF from file. The text of the PDF will be searchable if the original document was searchable.

If you're starting from a paper document, and have scanned it as an image because an original electronic file isn't available, you can re-create the text via Acrobat's Document menu and selecting OCR Text Recognition. Optical character recognition makes the text searchable, and generally makes the file size smaller.

Under one megabyte.
For web use, make your PDF as small as possible. It should be under one megabyte. In the full Acrobat 8 version, use the Document menu and select Reduce File Size. (In older Acrobat versions, this feature is under File, then Reduce File Size.

Add titles.
In the full Acrobat application, hold down the Ctrl key and press the D key to open the dialog box (or go to File, then Properties), so you can add a good title. Keep it fairly short, as Google displays only the first 64 characters or so in search results.

For PDFs as well as any other online file, follow these naming guidelines:

  • Don't use spaces in file names on the Web.
  • Replace spaces with underscores.
  • Spaces in file names can confuse web browsers and put odd characters in your file's web address.
  • File names should be short enough to be convenient to type.