20030625: Yet another IDV demo...and a question

>From: "Daniel Bramer" <address@hidden>
>Organization: UIUC
>Keywords: 200306252057.h5PKvFLd011354 IDV installers

Hi Dan-

>I just did another IDV demo for the NCSA-REVITALISE summer workshop. I had 
>about 10-12 teachers each with their own laptops working on the IDV as I led 
>them through creating 2- and 3-D vizs from an old eta nc file I found on 
>motherlode. They took to it very well. After walking them through some of the 
>features (and most of them didn't need too much hand-holding) they were making
>  
>their own viz's. I saw someone create a terrain isosurface and another 
>learning (the hard way) about the differences between surface pressure and 
>reduced sea level pressure.

Cool.

>Anyway, it was a very positive experience for all of them. They were using 
>1.2GHz Pent. 4 laptops with 512MB RAM. and were able to load all 11 eta time 
>steps for quite a few fields (kudos to the memory handling). 

good machines help.

>Finaly, more than one teacher told me that they will be using it in their 
>classroom when they have the opportunity, and I was wondering how you would 
>feel about allowing me or someone else from NCSA burn CD's with the current 
>Windows self-installer for IDV for them to take back to their schools. 

I have no problems with this as long as you are the point of contact
for any and all questions they have.  If they are K-12 teachers, we
can't support them directly.

> From what I can remember, the installers are only available to those who are 
>registered at my.unidata.ucar.edu. Is this still true? Either way, I would 
>understand if you'd prefer / require them to register, but maybe some of them 
>would have a hard time downloading that file -- just want your thoughts before
>  
>I talk to the NCSA people again.

It's freely available, so I don't think this is a problem.  

Thanks for pushing the IDV.

Don