If you have an account on the blog server then you will need to change your password after our security updates. This is quite simple; you can have a new password sent to your email address by following the “Lost your password?” link on the login page.

The blogs and wikis on the departmental servers are now more secure.  Captchas will have to be used to create accounts or to make comments by unauthenticated users.  It is hoped that this will cut down on spam and help prevent compromises.

The MathJax software on our webserver, www.math.toronto.edu, has been updated to version 1.0.1a.

The textconv command is now available on coxeter.  It will convert a file to UNIX (the default), MAC, or DOS end-of-line file formats.  It changes the file in place if an output file is not specified, that is, it will overwrite the original file with the new version.  Run man textconv for more details.

java and firefox are now working again.

There are some issues with running java inside of firefox since the update this afternoon.  We are investigating the problem.

There will be voltage reductions of 3% (from 10am to 11am) and 5% (from 2pm to 3pm) on Thursday, July 15, 2010 as Toronto Hydro tests the electrical system (as part of a province-wide test).  This will likely not affect our equipment, but there is a chance that some machines may fail.

The software updates to be added later this afternoon will mostly be transparent to users, but there is one change that we have been awaiting.  firefox will be upgraded from the 3.0 series to the 3.6 series.  The most noticeable change will probably be that tab opening behaves a little differently.  According to http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2009/01/firefox-new-tab-behavior-to-be-updated/:

Currently, when you open a link in a new tab it is added to the end of the tab bar, and the relationship with its parent tab exists only in the user’s head. I usually have to move it closer to the original tab to avoid tab scrolling.

With the new behavior, new tabs opened from a tab will be added to the right of the parent tab, unless there is already a child tab. In this case it is added to the right of the last child tab.

New tabs opened via the new tab button, File/New Tab… menu, Ctrl + T, etc. will still be opened to the end of the tab bar, as it is not possible to know if it’s contents will be related to the current tab or not.

This new version of firefox also supports HTML5 video tags so that some video will be automatically viewable in the browser without the need of an external application.  There will be no sound for browsers opened on coxeter, but if you have a personal machine with speakers configured then video and audio could work on some videos (admittedly most videos are not yet in HTML5 format yet).

Finally, if you look at the “People” page on our departmental website with this newer browser the background colour of alternate lines is different, which makes reading easier.

In order to lessen the risk to the departmental systems, the local departmental networking on the sixth floor of Bahen will be disabled starting at 3pm on Wednesday June 23 and will be restored on Monday June 28 (we expect that connectivity will be restored by the normal start of that day).  This means that, for example, office machines and the machines in BA6200 will not be networked.  The departmental servers (coxeter, mail, www, wiki, and blog) should all remain accessible from outside Bahen, if there are no problems.

There is a potential security issue with viewing flash content inside PDF documents when using “acroread”, so such viewing has been temporarily disabled on coxeter.