The Connector
The Connector

By Jack Huang and Rachel Chaikof

During the winter quarter, some students complained of computer issues.  Many of the students who have to work on Mayas for class assignments said they were unable to access the program because a many of the computers were missing the software during the winter quarter.

“About four or five of the Mayas in Professor Tony Tseng’s class didn’t work,” said second-year animation major Miranda Jo Bradley. “He taught in two different rooms, and I hear they fixed the problematic ones in 311, but the ones on the other end were still broken.”

Students often carry large Maya files stored in portable devices to finish their renderings and have their work ready for presentations, but the large file size and the lack of available Maya software prolonged their work time, some students said.
“There was a time when most of the computers of the animation lab all died and erased the H drives,” Bradley said.

“The graphics cards are shot in quite a few of them,” second-year interactive design and game development major Joey Justice said of the computers.

“We are aware that there are problems in the labs. We have not heard the Maya problems on the third floor,” said Michael Clark, the help desk manager.

He and the help desk support will speedily look into any problems the students may encounter, Clark said.

Whenever there’s a Maya installation problem, or a similar issue, Clark said, most of the time it may just be a matter of the program being accidentally uninstalled.

“Software like that could easily be reinstalled,” he said. “We will take requests from any student who encountered a problem. We are here to provide support and we can fix most of the problems.”

Germaine Brown, technology services manager, gave possible reasons for the Maya glitch.
“All lab computers are configured the same way,” Brown said. “We essentially take one computer, install everything that the lab is supposed to have, verify that it all works, then copy the system to the remainder of the machines in that lab.

“Since Maya’s configuration files are stored on each students network drive, their problem will follow them from machine to machine,” he said. “Generally, the faculty that teach Maya will recognize the problem and inform the student to delete their configuration.”

During the winter quarter, some students said they also came across viruses on some computers.

Jeanne-Ann Whitter, a third-year fashion student, said she found out her flash drive had a virus after taking it to Kinko’s. She said a Kinko’s employee told her other students had come in with the same problem. She said the technology support center was helpful in resolving the issue.

“We encounter viruses in all labs — both Mac and PC,” said Brown. SCAD computers are equipped with antivirus software: Trend Micro on PCs and Sophos on Macs.

Brown said both antivirus programs are configured to help clean the infected file or delete the file if cleaning is unsuccessful.

“Unfortunately, not every virus can be cleaned or deleted,” Brown said. “Those computers have to be rebuilt.

“Most of the viruses that we seem to encounter are spread by students’ thumb drives and by downloaded content from the Internet,” he said. “Part of our security configuration prevents viruses from spreading from machine to machine over the network. Infections from viruses will be a never-ending battle.”