Purchasing

I spoke with Jenny Jia today and got more info on how purchasing works. Turns out I missed a step or two in my first explanation. Here is the update:

• Make sure the vendor can accept a purchase order
• Go to online vendor's website
• Select the items you want and put them in your shopping cart
• Before you press "Buy", print out the itemize cost sheet
• Take this printout to the ME office
• Patsy's fills out a form and sends it to the PI and the Chair for approval
• Then she sends this to the Dean's office for approval
• Then it comes back to the ME office with the approval (or not)
• Call the company and ask for an invoice for the selected items.
• The company sends an invoice.
• Print out the invoice and take it to Patsy to fill out that paperwork to actually purchase the item(s).
• Patsy then sends this to purchasing to get the payments sent through.

I also found out that paying for a variable monthly bill (like AWS) may not be possible, but maybe some strings can be pulled. I'm sure this kind of thing will be requested more and more often in the future as cloud services become more suitable than rolling your own stuff in your lab.

Patsy's not in today so the remaining reimbursements and PO's will have to wait till when she returns.

Matlab

More info from our sales rep, Alyssa:

You cannot pair an individual license with a concurrent license. However, with the concurrent license, you do not need to have the same number of toolbox seats to MATLAB seats. The license server must be owned by CSU and reside physically on campus. Yes, the student version comes with several toolboxes, but can only be installed on a personal machine, not a university machine.

http://www.mathworks.com/academia/student_version/index.html?s_tid=acmain_sv_cta1

I think I'm going to go with 5 academic licenses with these toolboxes for each:

• Control toolbox
• System ID
• Simulink
• Signal processing

Just need to verify whether you can use the same academic license for dual booted machines or virtual machines.

GSoC

I reviewed a bit of Tarun's VisualizationFrame PR, https://github.com/PythonDynamics/pydy-viz/pull/17. He has two camera's now that mirror the ones in three.js. The code looks pretty good, just needs some polishing for style, method names, etc.

Plone

Made it into Chapter 5 of the Plone book and have a working dev environment.

Notes for what I did are currently in

/home/moorepants/Websites/professional-plone-4-development/chapter-3/notes.rst

I'll push them to github soon.