Topics

1) Status of Computer Security Changes
2) Unix news: Email on Chemistry
3) Unix news: Mini Tutorial for Gaussian
4) Plotting Data


1) Status of Computer Security Changes:


Last Thursday, the security filters were implemented for the 190 subnet.
The filters will be implemented for the next subnet,

	subnet 20 on Thursday, April 23.

Please make sure that your computer uses the correct netmask, 255.255.0.0
You can read about our Security Policy and about the netmask on the web
Internal --> Computer Support --> Policy Statements, Support Bulletin.


2) Email on Chemistry:


All of you in the Department do have a chemistry email account. Are you
reading it?

We checked faculty and staff mailing addresses and found many users who
apparently read their email elsewhere (e.g. on postbox, the email server
provided by UTS), but never set a forwarding address on the chemistry server.
This has the consequence that email has been accumulating here from Day One
without reaching you.

We have remedied the situation by setting forwarding addresses for all
affected users. This will affect only new email; please make sure that you
read (and delete) the old mail.

Affected users are:

 dutta, epstein, hart, paquette, tsai, lempert (faculty)

 jhaynes, lbowman, jmaus, bgregory, jwilliam (staff)

In general, we recommend that you read your email on chemistry. We do nightly
backups, so if you delete an email message by accident, there is a fair chance
that we can restore it. If you read your email on postbox, there are no
backups, and there is nothing we can do.


3) Mini Tutorial for Gaussian:


We have created a mini tutorial that explains how to start Gaussian jobs
on the RS6000 computers in the Computer Lab 2105 NW. This document assumes
that the user is already familiar with Gaussian in general, but hasn't used
it on the computers in the Chemistry Department. The document can be found
on the Computer Support group page. We welcome any feedback to make the
tutorial more useful.


4) Plotting Data:


Did you know that there are several options when you have need of plotting
data?

Excel (the spreadsheet program within the Microsoft office suites) has
surprisingly good charting and plotting functionality. Its results can
also very easily be incorporated into Word documents. The most commonly asked
question regarding the use of Excel is "How do I do a linear least squares
fit of data?" Excel does this and will do certain non-linear fits as well.
The function 'trendline' is used for this.

Gnuplot is available on all UNIX computers and the PCs and Macs as well.
It is a very powerful, command-line driven plotting program. It is, however,
harder to use, but can be scripted to do many similar plots in an automated
way.

SigmaPlot is also available on all the PCs and Macs in the lab. It is
a graphically oriented program and therefore easier to use and harder to
automate.