changes afoot - please read

["M. Woo" <melissa@zelda.ehs.uiuc.edu>]

Thanks to the generosity of the (NWBPA) National Waste Brokers and
Processors Association and the seemingly infinite patience of Daniel
Caulk, RADSAFE will be moving to a new machine sometime in the near
future.

RADSAFE is currently running on what is an 8 or 9 year-old NeXTstation
that is pretty far past what would normally be considered its useful
lifetime (one of its hard drives has gone through some "interesting"
failures in the past).  The new machine is a SUN UltraSparc 1 which
will hopefully be enough to keep things running for another good long
stretch.

So, what does this all mean?  Well, I'm hoping it means that RADSAFE
will become a better service to the radiation safety community (but
mostly I'm hoping I'll have fewer problems babysitting the machine at
this end).  

One of the improvements I have planned is a replacement for how the
RADSAFE archives are currently being handled.  An *extremely* pre-alpha
test version (i.e., please don't beat on it too hard) is temporarily
available as a "sneak peek" at 

http://shade.ehs.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/lwgate/RADSAFE (case sensitive).  

Of particular interest should be the link called "Browse List Archives
in HyperText Format," which I believe can make reading RADSAFE messages
a great deal more convenient for a lot of people.  Please note that
this copy of the archives is not being updated and runs only through
the morning of September 2nd.

The down side of all of this is that change will almost inevitably
cause problems, particularly since I'm having to switch between two
very different flavors of unix in setting up this beast.  So, I'm
asking everyone to please be patient during the transition period,
which will begin once I've had things running long enough to convince
me that things are stable at this end.

More news to come!  (Comments/complaints/insults/etc. should be sent to
me via private e-mail at m-woo@uiuc.edu, not to RADSAFE.)

Thanks for your attention!

Melissa Woo
RADSAFE List-owner/manager

--
Melissa Woo, Health Physicist                    |m-woo@uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign       |ofc 1.217.244.7233
DEHS, MC225, 101 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL 61801|fax 1.217.244.6594
http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/m-woo                 |