I’ve mentioned before that we’ve traditionally struggled with access to the NGS (National Grid Service). This has taken a variety of guises, from either impenetrable or non-existent documentation to problems with trying to get the multitude of firewalls opened up to access the service (and the local problems that ensue, when you have a diligent IS team trying to prevent hacking). In the last couple of months, one of my students managed to get most of the access organised, and in the interim, the NGS have made major improvements to make both the site and documentation much more accessible.
Today I finally had some time to spend to see if I too could finally log in. From the Home page, things have improved substantially, and it is easy to find the areas to access the page. I could get to the programmes I needed to remotely access the machines (after a couple more firewall hiccups), and after that, by following the guidance, managed to get jobs running!
So in the interests of helping out my students and other people wanting a really quick (<11 min) guide to getting started (once you have your account), I’ve made a screencast (my first, so sorry about the glitches). Thanks to Cameron for suggesting Screenflow – it made the process relatively straight forward. (Then the rest of the 5 hours was spent planning and cut and pasting, but for a first go, this isn’t too much time :)
If you’re interested in watching a horribly degraded version of the final product and in starting using the NGS, you can do so here:
or try scivee:
http://www.scivee.tv/node/14686
and another test version at (hopefully higher res):
Next time: how to get high-res videos :/
