Maintenance

If you want to change the icon of a specific folder/file for some reason, you need to edit the gvfs metadata that is stored in a binary file.
This can be done using built-in gvfs methods like the following:

To get the current, custom icon value
# gvfs-info -a metadata::custom-icon ~/Desktop/foo (file:///home/yournamehere/Desktop/foo also works)

To set a custom icon
# gvfs-set-attribute ~/Desktop/foo metadata::custom-icon file:///usr/share/icons/Humanity/places/48/folder-music.svg

To reset icon to stock
# gvfs-set-attribute ~/Desktop/foo -t unset metadata::custom-icon

Unlike .desktop files, you cannot refer to a canonical FreeDesktop-type icon. You must use an explicit path to the icon you want to use.
NOTE: in a .desktop file you can ref the icon like ICON=folder-open and you'll get the icon theme's icon for folder-open. This icon will change with the theme.

Show other editable attributes for a file
gvfs-info -w ~/Desktop/foo

Which will return something like this
Settable attributes:
standard::symlink-target (bytestring)
time::access (uint64, Keep with file when moved)
time::access-usec (uint32, Keep with file when moved)
time::modified (uint64, Copy with file, Keep with file when moved)
time::modified-usec (uint32, Copy with file, Keep with file when moved)
unix::gid (uint32, Keep with file when moved)
unix::mode (uint32, Copy with file, Keep with file when moved)
unix::uid (uint32, Keep with file when moved)
Writable attribute namespaces:
metadata (string, Copy with file, Keep with file when moved)
xattr (string, Copy with file, Keep with file when moved)
xattr-sys (string, Keep with file when moved)

The migration of ten workstations from the old lab space to the new one is complete.

The latest incarnation of the HCMC website has been launched at http://www.uvic.ca/humanities/hcmc. On Monday, we will implement redirects from URLs pointing to the old site (i.e. about seven subdirectories of the form http://hcmc.uvic.ca/).

May be of use for departmental sites and project sites. Web coordinator pointed to use of google map with location points at
http://www.uvic.ca/law/jd/exchangeterms/outgoingexchange/index.php

based on using a map in a google account, as described here:
https://support.google.com/mymaps/answer/3024454?hl=en

She also said that embedding iframes in a cascade page is not a problem.
Previous communication with systems people indicate embedding iframes is a problem in OAC online academic community wordpress instance.

To get Thunderbird working with UVic's Exchange calendar you need to have a version of Thunderbird that incorporates the fix for sending passwords in the clear - this means at least v43. There is a version 44 beta out right now that works quite well, so I went through the process of documenting how I got things going. This also works with v45, which was just made available on the PPA.

Install

1. Add the PPA and install/upgrade in the usual apt-get way.
2. download Lightning plugin - note Thunderbird version requirements for each version
3. download the Ericsson exchangecalendar plugin - currently v3.6-beta1

Email account settings
Account settings->Server settings
Server name: mail.uvic.ca, port 993
Connection security: SSL/TLS
Authentication method: Normal password
Outgoing server (smtp): mail.uvic.ca, port 465
Outgoing server connection security: SSL/TLS
Outgoing server authentication method: Normal password

Configure calendar

1. Click the 'Switch to the calendar tab' button (top-right) to view your local calendar (called 'Home').
2. Add new calendar by right-clicking below your 'Home' calendar, and choose 'New Calendar'. Select 'On the network' for location.
3. Select 'Microsoft Exchange 2007/2010/2013' for format, then name the calendar.
4. Check the 'Hosted Exchange' option, not the 'Office 365' option.
5. Check 'Use Exchange's autodiscovery function. Fill in Username (Netlink ID) and Domain (UVIC). Click 'Perform autodiscovery'. You should be challenged for a password.
6. If you got this far you'll be asked to choose an EWS server. I only got one to choose from: https://mail.uvic.ca/ews/exchange.asmx

We have a shared calendar for vacations and so forth. To share a calendar, log in to the account that owns the calendar (through OWS) and right-click the calendar you want to share, and choose 'Share calendar'. In the dialogue that appears, add the email address of the person you want to share with (note that this can only be a UVic email address). It will send an email to this person that has an XML attachment. They can create a new calendar based on the information included in this attachment.

Add shared calendar

1. The email that the share recipient gets has an XML file attached (called 'shared_metadata.xml'). It contains two things we need: SmtpAddress, which is the email address of the person that shared the calendar; and FolderId, which is a very long string (hex?). These are XML elements, and we only need the text values, nothing else.
2. Add a new calendar as above, but in the 'Primary email address' field, use the email address of the person that shared the calendar - not yours.
3. Use your Netlink ID in the 'Username' field.
4. In the 'Share folder Id' field, add the hex value of the FolderId element (from the shared_metadata.xml file).

That should be it. I've had no trouble with this setup, other than being unable to see nested folders - but this problem has been there for ages. For example, I have a folder for the Humanist list that I've placed inside a 'Lists' parent folder. Thunderbird shows me the Lists folder, but not the Humanist folder. This is true for all folders more than one layer deep.

My Dell U2412Mb monitor has been acting up for a while now: dark corner and flickering. The problem was temporarily resolved by power-cycling but the issue always came back, usually after going in to power-saving mode. The other day, though, I decided to RMA it.

As I understand it, we have 'pro' support, which is supposed to make this kind of process simple and quick. However, it was stereotypically bad in reality:
- Lots of different people pass you from one office to another, making you wait on-hold for at least a few minutes each.
- You finally speak with someone that will help (which may or may not be 'Basic Warranty Support' - it's very difficult to be certain, but it *definitely* wasn't Pro Support) and you go through a diagnostic exercise, followed by a proof-of-purchase test (send proof-of-purchase by email - and wait for 15 minutes for the email to arrive in the inbox of tech support). In the end, you've spent half a day sorting things out.

Next step; I will receive an empty box in 1 or 2 days, and I will place my failing monitor in the box and send it off. It should take 7 to 10 days to get to a Dell depot. At this point, I don't know what kind of turn-around I'm looking at, but I have to imagine that it will be at least a few days - maybe 10. I suspect that I will be without my monitor for at least 3 weeks.

I had heard that the process is relatively painless (because Pro-Support FTW!), ending in another monitor being shipped immediately (that is, before I sent my failing monitor). As it turns out, the process was excruciating - in the last two days I have spent about 4hrs to get to this point. And I still have to ship/receive/set-up/tear-down before I'm done.

A conservative estimate of the cost of me handling this is roughly $300. The monitor cost $297 before tax.

I received the first primary source documents from Jason for the Victoria Holocaust Archive today. Helga will send some more shortly and I will commence my design mock-up.

Images are lowish resolution, but I should be able to work with them.

Not a casual job...
Install notes

rvm install jruby-1.7.16 --2.0 doesn't work. RVM looks in a config file to see about 'know-strings', and jruby-1.7.16 isn't one of them. It apears that jruby-1.7.22 is the only one it finds. So, change that.
Also, the $JAVA_HOME it sets isn't right. Set it in .bashrc, like this:
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64
PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64
then, do 'source ~/.bashrc' to let your tty know about the change

Also, javac is not installed when RVM does the java install. I installed java-default to compensate, but it adds ~200MB to your install base - there's probably a more economical method of installing javac.

Setting up postgresql: instructions say 'psql -d template1 -U postgres'. But that won't work. Do this instead: 'sudo -u postgres psql -d template1'

Configuring Panoptes: seems to have changed slightly, or docs are bad. Filenames now use a .hudson extension and include test and development settings.
The db:migrate command I change from rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=development to rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test because the .hudson config files ref'd development and test - with test having the localhost ref from docs
Running the db migrate command fails like this: no such file to load -- bundler/setup
It's because bundler isn't installed, so: gem install bundler
Run rake again: git://github.com/edpaget/cequel.git (at update-cql-version) is not yet checked out. Run `bundle install` first.
Ran bundle install
Then got this:
======================
Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory - /home/hcmc/.rvm/gems/jruby-1.7.22/gems/jruby-kafka-1.0.0.beta-java/deps.lst
An error occurred while installing jruby-kafka (1.0.0.beta), and Bundler cannot
continue. Make sure that `gem install jruby-kafka -v '1.0.0.beta'` succeeds before bundling.
======================
So, did this:

then ran rake db:migrate... again. Kept getting same error. Online suggestion=move on and see if the problem matters. I did that and MAYBE it worked.
Got further errors suggesting that I needed more gems, so I did what it said.
Stuck here

We do need to be able to print the odd page, so I've set up the Brother printer on the network by:

1. Plugging in the ethernet cable from the regular printer.
2. Changing the ip address in the Brother printer setup to match that associated with the old printer and printer.hcmc.uvic.ca (196.214).

It works fine; Linux found it automatically, and so did OSX. I haven't installed it on any student workstations.

This entry is to help me next time I need to do the same thing.

I frequently run XPath in oXygen to find stuff. For example, I just wanted to find all the non-conformant xml:id attributes in a file. So, I used this XPath expression to find them:

//person[matches(@xml:id,'[a-z]{5}')

and it responded with output like this:

System ID: /path/to/my/file/FILENAME.xml
Description: xml:id="feefifofum_3"
XPath location: /TEI[1]/text[1]/body[1]/div[1]/listPerson[2]/person[166]
Start location: 1703:21
End location: 1708:30

ad nauseam

I'm only interested in the actual xml:id value (feefifofum_3) so I ran this regex:

^System.*\nDescription: xml:id="(.*)?".*\n.*\n(^Start.*\n)?(^End.*\n)?

and replaced the match with the first group \1 (or $1 in oXygen)