July 2007

Reserving Computer Classroom for Fall Semester Courses

Stata 10 Released

Stata 10 has been installed on all of the Linux servers, and will be installed on Winstat Wednesday, July 18. One new feature in Stata 10 is a graph editor, which allows you to manipulate a graph after it's created. You can change formatting, add text, and even draw new lines on your existing graph.

One intriguing new feature is an optimizer built into Mata. This should give Mata similar capabilities to Matlab, but Mata can use both Condor and Stata/MP. Stata/MP splits its tasks between two processors, often giving results in half the time, while Condor allows you to run many jobs at once. If you're interested in converting your Matlab program to Mata, please contact the consultant and we'll be happy to work with you.

Stata 10 also includes a variety of new estimators. For a complete list of new features, see Stata's web site.

Reserving Computer Classroom for Fall Semester Courses

Now is the time to get a jump on reserving the 3218 classroom or mobile lab for your fall semester class before your spot gets taken by someone else. Reservations are filling very quickly. Contact Ann Lewis (atlewis@wisc.edu) to reserve. Ann's office is in the 4226 office suite and her phone number is 2-0862. Visit www.ssc.wisc.edu/sscc/instruction/ for more information about the 3218 classroom and the mobile lab,.

Even if you do not need to reserve the classroom or lab, you can arrange for your students to have access to SSCC's drop in labs (3218 and 4218 Social Science) for doing their homework. Ann can help you with this as well.

Doug Hemken (dehemken@wisc.edu), statistical computing specialist for SSCC, is available to help students with homework and class projects. You can also arrange for Doug to come to your class and provide instruction on statistical software. Doug's office is in the 4226 office suite and his phone number is 2-4327.

New Winstat Servers

Last week we brought eight new terminal servers on-line. (Click here for the announcement.) All eight servers have all software so you no longer need to connect to a Winstat server for statistical analysis or a Wincenter server for other tasks. Because of this, any shortcuts you've created to Wincenter or Winstat no longer work. Instead, simply visit the SSCC Terminal Server web page (or click on the Winstat link at the top of most SSCC web pages). This new interface has the advantage of sending you to the least busy server automatically.

Here's a few pointers based on calls we've received from our help desk:

The new web interface is slightly easier to set up using Microsoft Internet Explorer than Firefox, and has a couple of additional features. However, either browser works just fine.
Firefox users who have the old ICA client installed, should uninstall it, reboot, and then follow the instructions in SSCC Publication, Using Winstat, to install the new client.
Log off of your Winstat session rather than disconnecting, unless you want the server to run a job while you're away. Disconnecting does not release a license for someone else to use.
Only log in to one session at a time (for the same reason as above).

For more details about the SSCC's Windows Terminal Servers and the new web interface, see Using Winstat.

If you have difficulty accessing this web page please contact Russell Dimond (rdimond@ssc.wisc.edu).
If you have questions about the SSCC or SSCC services, or if you are an SSCC member and are having computer problems, please contact the SSCC Consultant.© 2008 University of Wisconsin Social Science Computing Cooperative.