All HCMC Blogs

Spend just over half an hour with each of two candidates for an opening with the French department. Talked about the services (and terms) provided by the HCMC and how those might be applied to their research and teaching interests. Submitted notes to CC of French.

MF asked if I could download the audio source files of an interview of the CanMys principals on an external site (she had permission from the owners of the site). Found the URL in the flash object code, downloaded them and then uploaded them to an "audio" folder in the account housing the production CanMys site for safekeeping until they decide what to do with them.

JJ reported that links to the bibliography page were failing. Confirmed that report and discovered that the bibl.php was missing from the site. Found a backup copy of the site and uploaded the bibl.php page. I did notice a bibl.xml file in that folder, which seemed odd. Apparently someone editing the bibl.xml file uploaded that to the web site (and deleted the bibl.php page in the process) rather than uploading it to the eXist db collection. We then uploded the xml file to the collection and site working again with updated information.

RS of English enquired about moving email account from webmail.uvic.ca to mail.uvic.ca (Exchange server). Asked around and it should be no problem for permanent employees, but might be an administrative issue for contractors or students. Put him on to DCST to formally request.

The OJS provides an "author" field and a "title" field. Those field names are reflected in the GUI for the search and browse features.The Philosophy in Review (PIR) journal wants to be able to search by author of review and by author of work being reviewed, as well as by title. To cram those three bits of information into two fields, the PIR put Title and Author of Work into the Title field (e.g. Charlotte's Web, E.B. White) and used the author field for the author of the review.

To make the GUI more clearly reflect the contents of the fields, I used advanced selectors and the :after pseudo-class to append texts to the labels in the GUI. The library reported that my CSS did not work in IE. Some of the problems caused by IE not supporting the selector I used (nth-child) so I then used a selector based on an attribute and value. IE still could not display the appended text in the options of a select item (known limitation). Once I'd exhausted all possibilities, met with IK of library to discuss how to proceed (i.e. dumb everything down so that interface was consistent across browsers and across different kinds of controls in IE, or have better interface in all other browsers and poorer, inconsisten interface in IE). She decided on better but inconsistent option.

Also made a number of tweaks to the banner to ensure it would always appear as white text on green background and could be resized. IK reported some problems with the style rule being ignored in certain browsers (which I couldn't reproduce).

RP wrote asking if it would be possible to create smaller versions of the videos of the keynotes from the conference. We currently have the frame rate at 15, mono sound at sampling and sample-size numbers about as low as we want to go and frame size of 320 by 240. Given that the video is typically of a stage only a small fragment of which is occupied by the subject, if we go any smaller, there won't be much point to video at all, so (with Greg) we suggested that we strip the audio track out and make that available as a download. RP agreed to that and Greg has it on his job list.

The Dean asked me to be the web communications coordinator for the faculty of Humanities, a member of a committee of UVic communications with representatives from each of the faculties with task of improving utility of and use of resources provided by the university for creation and maintenance of standardized web pages.

Took existing siberia site home page prototype and added some php and javascript to it to store the language as a session variable (I guess I could have done it as a cookie, not sure why I didn't). Amounts to an Ajax call that just updates the value of the session variable and then reloads the page. Also allows for lang to be passed as a get variable in the URL to force the language of the page. If no lang variable is passed, then page checks the session variable for value, if variable has no value, then it is set to English.

RS informed me that discussions of the use of the CALL and TETS are not part of the mandate of the DH committee. Let MT know that the information he had gathered should go to specific interested individuals that RS mentioned, rather than to the committee.

Added a new edition of the medieval studies newsletter to their site: created a thumbnail of the front page, turned that and caption into a link on the newsletter page, uploaded the PDF file of the newsletter.