mgualt

I work at a university, and the computer services for my academic department are managed in-house by a couple of computer officers. To maintain a secure network, they do not allow users admin privileges on any machine for which they provide support. While I understand this point of view, (and I am aware that there are probably many potential problems that I have no knowledge of) it seems to render the network much less useful than it could otherwise be.

For example, my postdocs can't install any software without clearing it with the admins in advance (and for experimenting with new software and programming languages, this is really impossible, just think of dependencies).

Another example: I would like to send a student to a python boot camp, but he would need admin privileges on the department laptop. It's a no-go.

My question is: What is the modern "right way" to securely administer a network without laming it to this extent? What is your opinion on what strategy the department should employ?

Given advances in computing power and browser abilities, how far are we from in-browser typesetting? Suppose we ignore issues such as reflow and legacy browser support. I am asking whether true typesetting, such as is provided by the LaTeX engine, is now possible with up-to-date technology.

Suppose I have an idea for the development of a simple utility -- this could be a program which monitors input from a sensor, processes it, and outputs messages using some communication method, say email.

I know that nowadays there must be many frameworks whereby I can focus on writing the core part of the program in my favourite language, say python, and then once the basic functionality is working, I can throw it in the black box, throw in various user interfaces which the black box requires, and out pops an "app" for download on any platform, a web app, or even an embedded cpu gizmo which functions as a standalone appliance, such as a smoke alarm.

What are some of the best such frameworks, or "full stack toolsets" which are relatively future-proof and popular? In particular, are there any toolsets which accept many languages?

Basically I am asking about the most modern, useful, and fun ways to develop relatively simple programs nowadays and get them out there on several different kinds of platforms.

This is a question about how to approach the design and development of a document format.

The basic problem is this: in math (and other disciplines), we write a LaTeX markup file and then compile it to PDF. PDF is basically a paper simulator and lacks many features which webpages/sites can have.

An alternative would be to have a versatile but still constrained markup language (e.g. an extension of LaTeX, or a constrained org-mode) which can be compiled or "exported" to HTML among other formats.

Some of the benefits would include

- Folding of text: hiding parts of the document until further details are desired

- more sophisticated linking between (parts of) documents

- nonlinear/hierarchical document structure

- including media such as animation/tutorials

- running code in the document

The question is: how to approach the development of the system. For example, many of the features could be implemented, say in jquery or some such, but the system should be independent of implementation. How does one proceed in a future-proof way whereby the choices are not regretted down the line?

Note that this is not about typesetting -- I am aware of the web typesetting problem. This is about the inadequacy of PDF as a document format for the future.

The university-wide events calendar for UC Berkeley seems to me to be a marvel of engineering and is very well thought-through. Here is a description of the extensive planning done for the development of this software:

http://groups.ischool.berkeley.edu/EventCalendar/

and here is the events calendar itself:

http://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/calendar/sn/math.html

My university department is in dire need of a robust, well-thought-through, long-term, events calendar. Unfortunately this project is not open source and so we can't just grab it. Does anyone have any advice for a math department which wants high quality events calendar and basic, secure CMS without going corporate?