A few tech notes from Tom

Excerpts from potpourri e-mail Tom sent around this morning. Everything techy is included here:

TECH -- THE NEWSROOM PRINTERS: Mike P updated me yesterday.
The Ricoh (copy desk): Mike was trying to get repair folk out to fix it
Monday. His efforts were complicated by disputes in the service agreement.
We agreed on the need to get someone even if we had to pay out-of-pocket
costs.
Long term, we hope to have a new copier there by mid-November.
The Canon (main newsroom), as best I know, only has the usual problems
but nothing, um, catastrophic.

TECH -- THE NEWSROOM HARDWARE
Mike will replace all dead computers in the production areas this week
by taking Adelante computers on a temporary basis.
When we switch reporters to django, we'll add some reporter computers to
the production area and dedicate some of the reporting areas as laptop only.
By the end of the semester, we should be able to reduce total newsroom
hardware from about 80 computers to 50 or fewer, with more reductions in the
following semester. I don't ever foresee killing all the reporter tubes,
though.
Mike also hopes to increase the memory on the computers we keep.
Finally, the satellite newsroom will stay with its current complement of
computers because they're too old to use upstairs.

TECH -- DJANGO
By end of last week Noah had fixed three of the four major issues --
spell check, story search, and story length. He's fixing a few bugs on notes
mode that Jake found in a first round of testing. By week's end we should
have a more firm idea of launch date(s) for converting as much as possible
away from our friendly Falcon.