From the Director:
Annual Laboratory Plan 2010
by Persis Drell
This is the time of year when SLAC management has the opportunity to present
our vision for the laboratory and our plans to achieve it to the leadership in
the Department of Energy Office of Science. Sandy Merola, Jo Stohr, David
MacFarlane, Keith Hodgson, Bill Madia representing Stanford, Paul Golan
representing the Site Office and I all flew east on Memorial Day. Tuesday
morning, Sandy and I spoke about our strategy to achieve our vision for the
laboratory. We had submitted a
written document (SLAC internal). Some of the
slides I showed are posted (SLAC internal)
I spoke about our objectives for the future: To be an internationally leading photon science lab, to be the premier electron accelerator lab, and our goal of having targeted programs in particle physics, particle astrophysics and cosmology. I spoke about our core capabilities and how our initiatives, if successful, would define the laboratory of the future. Then Sandy talked about how we were working to ensure mission readiness for all of the operations functions at the lab, and we talked about some of the new buildings we need at the lab.
The briefing went extremely well. All of the senior leadership of the Office of Science was present, and I think they were excited about what they heard. I was able to talk about some of the first science from the Linac Coherent Light Source and that was the centerpiece of the presentation. As I told them, LCLS is opening a new scientific frontier and it continues to outperform expectations. It is a time of extraordinary scientific opportunity.
However, the best part of the trip occurred before the briefing ever started. I arrived in Washington, DC, at 6 p.m. on Memorial Day. After I was settled in my hotel near the Forrestal building, there was still enough daylight for a walk on the
National Mall. To visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the
Lincoln Memorial, the
Korean War Veterans
National Memorial and the new National World War II
Memorial in our nation's capital on Memorial Day is an experience I will not soon forget. It was very moving. The mall was filled with people, flags, remembrances, tears and smiles. It put what we do and why we do it in perspective for me in an important way. Have a wonderful Independence Day weekend!
Windows Web Server Migration
by Jean-Raymond Pierre
Microsoft will end support of Windows 2000 Server on July 13 2010; this affects seven of
SLAC's main public facing Web servers. All of the central Windows 2000 Web Servers will be decommissioned by the July deadline. Finalization of the
Web site migration to newer and more powerful hardware as well as upgrading the
operating system to Windows Server 2008 R2 64 bit and IIS 7.5 is currently in process. IIS 7.5 adds many new features such as improved application isolation (which means a crashed
Web application will only bring down itself, leaving the other Web applications running), improved performance, improved security, improved .Net support, increased IIS stability and added support for hosted Silverlight streaming applications.
FrontPage, FrontPage Extensions and Expression Web
Microsoft has added many new features, but they have also removed a feature. FrontPage Extensions or FPE has always been problematic, both for security and stability.
Microsoft has realized this and has dropped support for FPE. This affects those users who have been either authoring their
Web sites using Microsoft FrontPage or have been using the FrontPage Extension in third-party authoring tools to edit their pages. We suggest everyone upgrade their Web
authoring tool to the new Microsoft Expressions Web, which is far superior to FrontPage in authoring standards-based
Web pages as well as dynamic pages using .Net and classic ASP. As a replacement to FPE we have installed WebDAV. WebDAV
provides "seamless" functionality very similar to that FPE users are used to when editing their
Web sites. To upgrade to Expression Web, please contact your department administrator or download it from the
XWeb.
Read more...
Word of the Week: "Insertion Device"
by Brad Plummer
An insertion device is a magnet or series of magnets "inserted" into the beam path of a synchrotron or other light source to generate synchrotron radiation. At the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation
Lightsource, three kinds of IDs are used: bending magnets, wigglers and undulators. These devices force the beam of electrons to bend or oscillate back and forth, which causes them to give off radiation in the form of
X-rays.
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