One of my readers wanted to know about fees at University Villa in Provo, Utah. While I’m not the authoritative source, I thought I would share what I know.

Every month, there is a $10 communications fee in addition to rent and utilities. A semester parking sticker costs $15. Failing a cleaning check is suppose to incur a $5 recheck fee. Failing a cleaning check twice usually results in cleaning charges which is variable depending on what needs cleaning. Paying rent late incurs a $20-25 late rent fee.

Parking after midnight with out a permit risks getting a boot on your vehicle, which results in a $55 fee to University Parking Enforcement.

On February 15th, BYU will launch a new look and feel for its various websites including the BYU homepage, Route Y, and department and college sites.  The administrators for BYU’s webpages have nicknamed this new look and feel Collage.  The Collage theme sports new colors and new methods for user interaction, but will increase a hacker’s ability to steal student’s identities.

An essential component to Collage is a login form on the top of every page.  Students can type their username and password into the form to be shown a custom set of Internet links.  Webpage administrators expect that students will frequently enter their password to gain access to their preferred links.  Students will then be trained to frequently type their password on top of any page with the Collage theme.

Within a matter of minutes, anyone with a technical background can set up a page using the Collage theme.  They can make it look like a genuine and legitimate BYU site.  In particular, hacker’s can create a fake site that looks like a BYU site, but it really just a technique to trick student users.  Many student users could be tricked into giving their username and password to a fake site created by a hacker.  The hacker could then gain access to the student’s personal information, email, and financial accounts.  Once the hacker has access to the student’s information,

Someone told me that I have girly handwriting. Is that a good or bad thing?

The last couple of weeks have been hard. Stressful. I look forward to Monday, which is the start of the rest of my semester.

I am like a zener diode.

For work I’ve been looking into Calendar Servers to see what they are capable of doing in case we want to implement any.  We already have an active directory server and mail server, so some of the groupware servers might not be the best fit for us.  I’ve found four open source calendar server products, which I plan to research more:

• Apple’s Darwin Calendar Server
• Bedework
• Really Simple CalDav Store
• Cosmo

I hope to be able to post more here when I find out more.

I found a very cool thing today.  I use KDE on Linux.  One of the things I like best about KDE is that it supports psudo- filesystems such as fish, which allows you to access a remote filesystem over ssh.  I wanted to copy a file that was on a remote system into a local directory.  Without thinking, I did the mouse drag-and-drop action to move the file.  Except that I dropped the file into Konsole, the KDE terminal program.  A popup menu appeared with several options, one of which was ‘cp’ which I selected.  The result was that the file was copied from the remote server to the current working directory in my KDE terminal.  My terminal showed that it had run a command in order to copy the file, which was:

 kfmclient copy ‘fish://username@remoteserver.com/tmp/filename’ .

This is extremely cool, and I’m definately going to have to use it a little bit more often.

Gordon B Hinckley has taught:

Love is like the Polar Star. In a changing world, it is a constant. It is the very essence of the gospel.

Without love . . . there is little else to commend the gospel to us as a way of life.

Source: Teachings of Gordon B. Hinckley [1997]