- Mac User Meeting NKI/AVL
- On Thursday November 25th we had a meeting at the NKI-AVL for Mac-Users in the institute. The meeting was organized by the Dienst Automatisering (IT-department) and included invited speakers of Apple and MacSupport.
The meeting was opened by Tjeerd Carinus of the DA department. He introduced two people of Apple: Bram Elderman (Consulting Engineer, Apple, The Netherlands) and Serge Robe (Software Product Line Manager, Apple Europe). The former gave a presentation about the upcoming version of Mac OS X: 10.4 aka Tiger. He had to illustrate the new features of the new version because he also was not allowed to give a real demonstration of Tiger (NDA). The presentation was nice anyway and most people did get a good preview of things like Spotlight, iChat AV, Dashboard, and for scientists also very interesting: Automator.
Serge Robe, a French employee of Apple Europe, gave a more general overview about Apple, it's products and possibilities for the scientific community. Because of the wide variety of attendees (first time users, people of the IT-department and more advanced users up to developers) in the conference room, the aspects presented by him were differentially interesting for the groups. He introduced Grid computing with Xgrid, the connectivities of the Mac to a LAN and other networks, and the cooperation of Apple with scientists with BioTeam Inquiry as an example. The talk was interesting, but due to problems with time and traffic problems due to fog he could not completely finish his story.
- After a short break we went on with presentations of the IT-department, by Ilja van der Pavert and Duncan Bool about Macs in the NKI-AVL and their connections to the network(s), the network structure within the hospital and the institute and current/future possibilities for connecting to the networks from outside the institute. The presentations were followed by a short discussion about integration of calendars and LIMS (Laboratory Information Management Systems) in the Institute. It was then decided that we were running out of time and would continue on another day with a more informal meeting with more time for informal discussions about the network, the IT-department and the software we have made.
- The last presentation was of MacSupport, the supplier for Macs of the NKI-AVL. We got an impression of the company by a 'guided tour' through the company which now has shops in Uitgeest and Amsterdam. All attendees got a t-shirt from MacSupport and we agreed to continue our program at another day soon.
