Biology Computer Resource Center
372 Morrill Science Center
The BCRC is a Computing Facility in the Department of Biology (372 Morrill Science Center, Building IV South). Macintosh computers are available for use by Life Sciences students and faculty. If you have questions, please send email to bcrc-help@bio.umass.edu or call 545-3631.
During the academic year, the BCRC is staffed by student consultants Monday through Friday from 8am - 9pm. Summer and intersession hours are unofficial, but the facility is usually open anyway. The Director, Steven D. Brewer, collaborates with faculty and students to develop resources and course websites. Don't hesitate to contact us if you're looking for technical support in using instructional technology!
The BCRC offers resources and documentation to help you get stuff done.
We build Course Accounts each year starting in August -- just set a password to start using it. If we haven't already built an account for your life science class yet, ask if we can build one for the course you are taking.
Someone asked me recently if there was an easy way to synchronize folders between two computers. Unfortunately, the easy ways tend not to work very reliably. But here is a method that's a little more complicated, but should be extremely reliable. You'll need to do some unix things and you'll need a place on the server where you can keep all of the files.
Note: You could avoid using the server as an intermediate space, but then you'd be limited to a system that only works inside the building. Or, rather, making it so it would also work outside the building would make it a lot more complicated.
We'll assume you're going to keep a folder in your home directory on a laptop and a desktop synchronized with a folder located on a lab hard-drive on marlin. Don't try to set this up with a folder in your home directory unless you've made prior arrangements with the technical staff, unless you only want to use it for tiny things.
Read more to learn how.
Workstations in the BCRC will be updated to Firefox 8.0 overnight. Other labs in our network will receive it over the next few days. Also included are new versions of Flashblock, Flash Player, and Shockwave.
For Technology Tuesday on Nov 22, 2011, I will offer an overview of the No-Script Firefox add-on -- an important tool for improving browser security.
One of the most serious current vectors for security issues in computing are client-side scripts (Javascript and Flash in particular). In many ways, when you let these scripts run on your computer, it's like letting a stranger sit at your computer and do whatever they want (watch your keystrokes when you type passwords, for example). It's not supposed to be like that, but all too often it turns out that they actually can. It's worth taking steps to be aware of the issue and protect yourself.
Unfortunately, browsers don't provide simple tools to manage which sites you allow to execute code on your computer. In Firefox, there is a powerful Add-on called No-Script, which lets you choose on a site-by-site basis, which to allow to execute scripts on your web-browser. I will offer a walk-through of how to install and manage the add-on to help you make informed decisions about security and web-browsing.
The BCRC is experimentally hosting an instance of the TinyTinyRSS Feed Reader that can be used to subscribe to (and publish) RSS and Atom feeds. Most modern websites (like this one) can provide a feed (or feeds) of articles, often by author or category -- or even the comments. Most scientific journals also provide feeds that generally include the abstract. If you're suffering from information overload, a feed reader can help you organize things to stay current with a much larger number of information sources than would be possible almost any other way.
We've changed how we handle paying for poster printing: we can no longer accept payment via checks or cash. We can now accept UCard payments. And we can still bill people provided you will give us a speedtype number to simply the billing. Hopefully this will represent a simplification for everyone.
Biology Department Video
