In the words of Rachel Heck:
Plans were originally conceived of as a way for people who used
computers in the work place to let others in the company know what
they were working on. Today, especially at Grinnell, plans are used
for a variety of other purposes...most of which are not associated
with our current or future plans in life. Plans are a place where an
individual can write whatever comes to mind under the veil of false
secrecy. This is my feeling anyway. Though it is known that plans
are read by others, a person's plan can be a way to share the
thoughts that cannot otherwise be expressed in an everyday
environment. Whether one wants to make their readers laugh or
understand their thoughts, a plan is an easy and handy way to achieve
many goals.
In the words of Rachel Heck:
Ah, the VAX. Though there is a lot of sentimental attachment to the
VAX by Grinnell College students, the VAX is simply a well-made yet
archaic text-based computer system that is better left to history.
That is hard for me to say, but it is true. Before we had NT Storage
and the IMAP client, VAX was our access to the campus network. The
two main uses for the VAX shortly before its demise were to check
email and to read plans. Webmail, with its many little bugs, has not
been met with much enthusiasm. Yet, I believe that the main
emotional attachment to the VAX arises from the fact that there is no
campus-wide replacement for the plan system. The MathLAN does have
plans but many people on campus do not know much about this network
nor, unfortunately, want to learn. I hope to offer a possible
replacement for the VAX plan system.
In the words of Rachel Heck:
Contrary to popular belief, the plans program located at
http://www.math.grin.edu/~heckr/Finger/
is not part of a class project, it is not commercial software, and no
one is getting paid to develop it. The plans program that you have
been using, are going to use, or are thinking about using was solely
developed for my friends. After listening to everyone I know
complain about the end of plans for so long, I decided that I could
do something to make them happier. I am glad that so many others
have gotten use out of the program. It makes the environment much
more rich.
Send an email to us at plans@grinnell.edu. This will allow us to take note of the situation. If the system goes down for any length of time, feel free to send us a quick email as we may not know that it is down and will try our best to get it back up and working in a timely fashion. If you have any questions or comments, please email them to us at plans@grinnell.edu and we will try our best to reply quite quickly.
Rachel Heck
Graduated in 2001 with a double major in
computer science and english. Next year she will be attending
graduate school in Madison Wisconsin. She is
originally from Orlando, FL and that is
where she goes during her breaks. She is also a big movie fan.
Her (outdated) webpage is
http://www.math.grin.edu/~heckr/
. She created the Grinnell web based plans system.
Info on the Jonathans is coming.
If you belong to the Grinnell College Community, send us a quick email from your campus email account. Our email address is plans@grinnell.edu. Just tell us you want a plan and we will create one for you.
To make life easier for us and for others trying to find you, we do not allow people to pick their own usernames. We will give you the same username as your Grinnell username.
Hopefully a day at most. There are three people checking email, so it shouldn't take long for your email to reach one of us and then for one of us to set up an account for you. If, for some odd reason you do not get a plan within 3 days send us another quick email to make sure that your request has not been lost.
In the words of Rachel Heck:
When I created this program, I decided not to limit it to just my
friends. I decided that anyone in the Grinnell College Community
that asked for a plan would get one. I intend to stick to this
decision. When the VAX was still up, anyone could read plans. I do
not believe that the administrators that had plans then jeopordized
the community and I do not believe that they will now.
There are a few security holes that would take a ton of time to fix. One of these is that when you log out of plans, anyone can log back in as you just by pressing the back button on the browser window. What does this mean? This means that if you log out of plans and do not close the web browser that you are using when you are done, someone can sit down and change your plan. Since plans are not "high security," this is not a real big problem. If you don't want to run this risk, close down your browser window when you are done with it. Even if you are not using plans, this is good advice.
To put it bluntly, no. We will not give a second account to ANYONE. Why? Because then everyone will want one. That will create entirely too much work for us and confusion.
If your campus group has an email account, you can have a plan for it. Again, just send us a quick email from the group's email account and we will take create one for it.
Reg. Exp. is short for regular expressions. It's a way of describing a pattern in text. This gives you a much more flexible search.
The search utility now in use was written by Andrew Kensler. What follows
is his explanation of how to use Reg. Exp.
A . matches any character. For example, b.t will match "bit", "bat",
"bot", "but", "bet", etc.
Putting a series of characters in square brackets means that it will
match any one of those letters. Thus you can write b[iaoe]t which will
match "bit", "bat", "bot", "bet", etc., but not "but". You can also write
a range using a hyphen, e.g. [0-9] will match any digit. If you put a ^
right after the opening bracket, that means any character except
those. So [^0-9a-z] means any character that's not a number or a letter.
A ? after something means that whatever is just before it is optional
and may or may not be there. Thus bo?at will match will match either
"boat" or "bat". If you want to make more than one character optional,
you can put it in parenthesis. Thus mount(ain)? matches either "mount" or
"mountain.
A * works similiarly except that it means that it matches something
zero or more times. So ba*h will match "bh", "bah", "baah", "baaah",
etc. Again, you can use parenthesis so b(an)*a will match "ba", "bana",
"banana", "bananana", etc.
If you want something like that but where it must appear at least
once, use a + sign. Thus bana(na)+ will match "banana", "bananana",
"banananana", etc. like above but not "banan" or "bana" or anything
shorter.
You can also give multiple possibilities and seperate them with a |
Thus if you had a thing for fruit, you could search for
banana|apple|pear|peach to find any of them.
You can combine all of these however you like. You're welcome to
search for (captain [0-9]+)|(b(an)*a) or something like that.
One last little gotcha, though: if you want to search for any of these
characters litterally, put a backslash, \, before the character. So if
you really want to search for a question mark, use \? as the regular
expression.
If this doesn't make sense, then just leave the Reg. Exp. box
unchecked and it will search for whatever you typed literally.