HCMC Blogs

May 11, 2010

Upgrade to Lucid from 64-bit Karmic

Posted by on 11 May 2010 in Announcements

Took the plunge and upgraded to Lucid today. Here are some notes on what I had to do:

  • Standard dist-upgrade worked fine, no issues with drivers.
  • Thunderbird was upgraded to version 3. My QuickText plugin stopped working, but I was able to install it again from Add-ons, which worked despite complaining that it wouldn't.
  • QT Phonon is still broken. This is the bug, and none of the workarounds work for me, unfortunately. But this is not a regression; it was broken in Karmic too.
  • Mozilla Sunbird was uninstalled for some reason. Went and got another copy, which installed fine and found all my data, but the site says it's the last Sunbird release, and we should move to Thunderbird + Lightning. All very well, but the default Lightning plug-in is not 64-bit. Had to find a 64-bit download here. Installed that in Thunderbird, and then exported my calendar from Sunbird as ICS and imported it into Lightning, without problem.
  • Lots of 3rd-party sources were disabled; re-enabled them, switching "karmic" or "jaunty" to "lucid" in the paths, and did updates, getting a new VirtualBox in the process.

If any other oddities appear, I'll document them here.

Bug fixed

Posted by on 11 May 2010 in Activity log, Half-Baked Contributions

Fixed the duplicate item bug in the string list filter, and fixed an unused parameter issue in the constructor of HcmcImtDoc. Also spent a bit of time narrowing down an error message when running the application: CRITICAL **: atk_object_set_name: assertion `name != NULL' failed. This turns out to be a bug in GTK/Gnome, which is Ubuntu's problem, not QT's. If you run the app with "-style windows" you don't see it. It doesn't affect anything.

The next task is to figure out how to hook together selections between the two views of the document (the tree view and the xml:id list), so that if you select something in one view, it gets selected in the other. I suspect this will be something like:

  • Get the model index for the selected item, and derive the source item from it.
  • Get the model index for the same item in the parallel view (if there is one).
  • Set the selection in the parallel view, without triggering the reverse process.
May 10, 2010

MDH: 93 + 1 = 94 hours G&T

Posted by on 10 May 2010 in G&T Hours

Working to get enough maps marked up for the Coldesp gallery to look worthwhile, in time for the launch.

Meeting about graphics for launch

Posted by on 10 May 2010 in Activity log

Met with JL and KSW to talk about graphics for the launch. Foam boards are more or less organized; we've selected a map (co_700-bc_2_van_isl_1854), and we'll work on the "splash" poster tomorrow. Also made a tweak to logos on CP's instructions.

Marked up one more map

Posted by on 10 May 2010 in Activity log

Time-consuming markup of one of the Spanish maps of Juan de Fuca Strait. I'm slowly getting familiar with the placenames, though.

domain names and relative URLs

Posted by on 10 May 2010 in Activity log
MF wrote asking why when someone goes to canadianmysteries.ca/en/index.htm and clicks on the French button, they go to canadianmysteries.ca/fr/index.htm and not to mysterescanadien/fr/index.htm. The two domain names point to the same place. All the French and English buttons use relative URLs, so of course the domain name does not change when the browser follows the relative URL. There are 54 pages in the GUMICH site, hundreds of pages in the Cybermysteries site and thousands of pages in the mysteries sites, each of which would have to have the link edited. If all of them are to be done, it might be faster and cheaper to write some code to generate the appropriate absolute URL. If we do only a few (e.g. in the GUMICH site, the home page of each of the Mysteries sites and a couple of pages in the mysteryquests), then it would be cheaper to make the edits manually. Left the options for MF to consider.

GRS : problem with link csonline link

Posted by on 10 May 2010 in Activity log
SB reported a problem with a link from her site to a job posting on the Career Services Online site. Turns out that site requires authentication to see a site, but that is set up so that one can authenticate only on a specific page and then browse to other pages on the site. So, it's cumbersome to provide instructions on how to get from her site, through this special authentication page, to the specific job posting page. Not much to be done, other than fix the way the Career Services site is working.

hist : modify excel charts

Posted by on 10 May 2010 in Activity log
MH sent me two bar charts and a pie chart. He needed them turned into grey scale and some of the chart-clutter removed which I did. I couldn't figure out how to specify patterns on each pie wedge (other than getting image files of patterns and applying them to the wedges). Also, the only way to increase the size of the box in the chart legend was to increase the font size of the legend text. Did the three charts and sent them back to him for approval.

add HCMC staff to FAMIS list

Posted by on 10 May 2010 in Activity log
Facilities Management has an online service for requesting work (FAMIS). I put in a request to have that service added to those available to JN, GN, MH and me.