HCMC Blogs

Judy and I met with SB of History. She is a member of the Early Modern Research Collective and they want to have a website for their activities.

We discussed the objectives of the site, which would be to show undergraduate and graduate students the range of courses that have an element of interest in them, provide profiles of faculty researching and teaching in relevant areas and to provide notice of upcoming events of potential value to anyone with an interest in this historical period.
They will likely use the UVic templates to minimize the implementation work. She will talk with her colleagues about the degree to which they wish to maintain content themselves and the degree to which they wish us to maintain content under their instructions.
Also talked about managing a collection of images and metadata for those images and commentary/annotations on elements within each image.

AR requested more detail on cost of virtual server. Talked with Greg and looked at previous arrangements. Turns out that in addition to the cost of the hardware, there is the cost of the VMWare licence each year and the cost of sys-admin maintenance. We can reduce the VMWare licence cost from $1000/year to 0 by not allowing any administrative or commercial material on the server. We can negotiate the amount and frequency of payments to sys-admins starting from $1500/year (i.e. we could probably work out a better overall cost if we paid one lump sum). I don't know what the dean's priorities are, so just laid out the options and gave him recommendations 'all other things being equal'.

HR having problems establishing an maintaining a connection to the DB. It appears to be a problem with the ordering of code that initializes variables and includes of files that assign values to those variables. Also, she requested a listing of all the tables and field names, so I generated an SQL structure-only file and sent that to her.

Met with AR and RS on virtual server and how it fits into larger plans. Asked to provide information to justify expenditure. Confirmed some information with Greg and prepared a document and sent VirtualServer.doc to AR with a paragraph summarizing the benefits for stakeholders a list of the technical pros and cons a discussion with context and details Also asked to prepare statement of how HCMC might fit in to larger plan. Timeline on that not immediate, so will prepare over next week or two after discussion with Greg, Martin, Judy.

Uploaded all of PAB's latest changes to the db, tested, and found a couple more errors in the files, which we fixed. Then I added links to related items, based on new <relatedItem> tags added by PAB.

Then, while testing, we discovered that character encodings are getting garbled in form submissions on the server; although all of the Cocoon setup is using UTF-8, Tomcat seems to be stuck on 8859-1. This doesn't happen on my local machine, so it's something specific to the server setup of Tomcat. I confirmed that this happens both with Tomcat-dev (hosting MyNDIR) and Tomcat-stable (hosting Graves and ACH). Did some research on our blog, and found a couple of possible causes, both of which I reported to RE:

• Tomcat needs to be started with the UTF-8 flag on the VM. You can do this with a separate script file, as I described here (#19), or you can do it in the CATALINA OPTS, as detailed here.
• The URIEncoding parameter needs to be set in Tomcat's conf/server.xml, as explained here.

week of Apr 19 - Apr 23 (M +1 new filters for RenMedic, T+1 virtual server notes for AR, W -2 CSG, R +1 Cascade comments, F +1 administrivia)

SA and I have decided that an effective way for Half-Baked to prepare for writing Hot Potatoes 7 would be to sponsor the development of the Image Markup Tool version 2, allowing us to develop a set of core libraries and functions, as well as gaining familiarity with the issues involved in compiling and releasing for different platforms. We also intend to use IMT 2 for creating end-user documentation in HotPot 7.

For this reason, Half-Baked will pay SA and myself to work on the development of IMT, and this work will be tracked in the "Half-Baked Contributions" post category, as well as in the "Activity Log" category.

I've started the process this morning by checking out the project and confirming I can build the DocModel subproject.

I organized the xml:ids for 133 vocabulary terms for the names file which I will start work on tomorrow. I have divided the list into thirteen groups:

• Animals, Birds, and Monsters
• Artifacts
• Events (mythical and historical)
• Giant-god
• Giants and Giantesses
• Gods and Goddesses
• Myths
• Persons (mythical and historical, i.e. from the Eddas, Heimskringla, sagas etc.)
• Places (mythical and historical)
• Plants
• Source Materials - mss. and books
• Source Persons - authors, illustrators, editors, collectors

I revised the projectDesc in NKS and uploaded the xml files.

1. took f. out of biblScope for SAM66 and NKS1867, and added the attribute type="ff"

2. added a relatedItem element and a target attribute to SAM66 and NKS1867 for the 15 illustrations that are very similar in the two manuscripts in their groups of 16 Edda illustrations

3) deleted: scale="000" from the graphic attributes in SAM66 and NKS1867

4) revised my projectDesc in NKS1867 and SAM66

5) uploaded the revised NKS1867 and SAM66 files

6) uploaded new SKng files which already have images and thumbs in place: SKng-1899-Oslo-020-02-vgNet.xml; SKng-1899-Oslo-138-01-vgNet.xml; and SKng-1899-Oslo-163-01.xml

I have processed the images for CO410, Volume 1. But, I am concerned that there is a page missing, so I have asked Chris to re-order the reel. Better safe than sorry. Once the reel arrives, it should take only minutes to find and incorporate the file, if it is indeed our mistake.