Met with CALL staff and Vancouver Island Health Authority guy on possible instance of communicable disease and what steps we need to take next to confirm exactly what's going on. Circulated information to rest of HCMC staff (except Judy who was off for the day).
February 10, 2009
One word on one page in the English version of the Angelique site was incorrect. The researcher changed the character in the DB and wanted the entire site regenerated and ported. After confirming the scale of the modification, I decided to manually edit the html file in the dev site and the html file in the production site manually instead.
In and out day - getting Claire to school and HBS meeting with accountants.
The novel text we have so far (Amboise) has very short lines on very small pages. We are accurately reproducing that layout of the document, but it's not ideal for screen reading, so I wanted to provide another option for readers who want to see a continuous text.
I've implemented a parameter switch called proseView, which changes some of the XSLT processing to remove forme works, page breaks, page numbers, and linebreaks inside paragraphs. I've also added a switching mechanism, in the form of a pair of links, at the top of the page. This code is only invoked if the <classCode> contains "prose" or "roman"; it's ignored for verse. That might change in future -- although verse does need its linebreaks, it might be beneficial to be able to turn off the page breaks. The switch has text in English right now; I'm waiting for the appropriate French labels.
February 9, 2009
Simplified the FormState library so that it only uses XML files, and also added a new feature so that non-modal forms can be shown at start-up if they were showing at shutdown.
Next, the translation code...
On restarting the Windows VirtualBox VM this morning, I initially got warnings that previously-mounted drives were not connected; this was true (Drive2, where the VDI hard drive file is located, wasn't yet mounted, and there was no CD in the CD drive). I mounted Drive2 and tried to start the VM again, but it crashed and restarted Linux; then it told me the VM was unusable, and I would have to revert to an earlier snapshot. This I did, only to discover it had rolled right back to before the Delphi 2009 install. I had to start again with Delphi 2009, further impeded by the fact that my CD drive seemed unable to read the Delphi CD (Greg made me an ISO, which worked fine).
Digging into the Help file, I found this:
When, on VM startup, a CD, DVD or floppy device is unavailable, VirtualBox by default prints an error message and refuses to start the virtual machine. In some situations this behavior is not desirable. The behavior can be changed for the CD/DVD drive with the following configuration change command: VBoxManage setextradata "YourVM" "VBoxInternal/Devices/piix3ide/0/LUN#2/Config/AttachFailError" 0 The equivalent command for the floppy drive is: VBoxManage setextradata "YourVM" "VBoxInternal/Devices/i82078/0/LUN#0/Config/AttachFailError" 0 You will still get a warning message that a device is not available. Some guest operating systems may show strange behavior when using saved state or snapshots, especially if a previously mounted medium is no longer available when the virtual machine is resumed.
This would seem to be at the heart of it. I had previously suspended the VM rather than closing it down; I'll avoid that in future. I've also run the two commands above to make sure a missing drive is not an issue, and I'm going to take several snapshots in quick succession to make sure if I have to roll back, I don't end up rolling back too far (although it was VBox that rolled me back too far; I only requested to go back one snapshot). I've also backed up the whole VM after the Delphi 2009 install.
This has cost me a day, and it's a bit worrying. If it happens again, we may have to conclude the VBox isn't ready for prime-time, and look at other options.
Greg stumbled across the php variable ($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER') to return the username of the currently logged in user, if any. He was using an htaccess file to do the authentication. There's also some php which you can use to send the authentication request. Details and simple example at http://ca2.php.net/features.http-auth . I'll likely implement this in a new version of my MA and PHD applicant review instance for English and let Political Science know about it for their instance
February 6, 2009
Left a bit early to meet PGL.
Ported several libraries to D2009 today, including GenFunctions, SplashAbout, VersionInfo, Icons, and FileOverwriteConfirm, and I'm beginning work on FormState, which requires several of the others. Everything is going very smoothly indeed so far.
Ported the Nuvola-based image DLL project, and its GUI browsing tool, over to Delphi 2009, and compiled successfully. Both the DLL and the executable end up being slightly bigger in D2009 than D2005, but that's probably to be expected.