One of the authors of a vol 17 article wrote with a change to her email address.
January 28, 2009
Left early because Claire sick.
January 27, 2009
Started working with a sample image for the footer of the site; I think I'm half-way there. Met with JS-R and JR, and got information about events, hotels etc. I'll do updates tomorrow.
Managed to get the following working, in the following ways:
- Sunbird: exported old data to an ICS file on Windows, then uninstalled Sunbird on Ubuntu, deleted all profiles, reinstalled, then ran it and imported the data. Importing took a while, but it seems to work now.
- Firefox extensions: Added Ubuntu extensions (most of what I need is there).
- Firefox Java: A hard one. This required me to download a snapshot from here (jre-6u12-ea-bin-b03-linux-amd64-22_dec_2008.bin), then unravel it into
/opt/, and then point Firefox at itsjavawsto handle JNLP files. - Got WinSCP installed under Wine (it's still the best tool for that job).
- Began rebuilding my bookmarks and bookmarklets (they needed prining anyway).
Cloning the old computer to create a VM has now failed several times, so these are the remedies we've tried:
- Removed all software I can do without.
- Cleared out temp files and any other cruft.
- Cleared lots of space on the target drive (an internal drive, as the USB drive didn't work).
- Defragged both source and target drives.
- Ran chkdsk /R on both drives.
- Disconnected all USB devices, replacing them with PS2 devices.
- Logged in as administrator.
- Turned off all non-windows services except the vmware ones.
VMWare Converter has now failed so utterly that we're having to give up on it, and use BartPE/Ghost to create a ghost of the C drive, and try to use that in VirtualBox.
We didn't expect this to be simple, but we weren't expecting VMWare Converter to fail so spectacularly.
January 26, 2009
On late duty, and also busy setting up overnight task to build a VM from my Windows box.
Started the process of building the new PC using 64-bit Ubuntu installed by Greg. In the proprietary AMD driver, it seems impossible to specify portrait orientation for dual monitors, so I'm living with landscape for the moment; because of that, I've also switched my old Windows install back to landscape so a ported VM is more likely to work. Downloaded and installed VMWare Converter to convert the old Windows install to a VM on an attached USB disk. The first few tries failed at 2%, so I then went through all the running processes and turned off the firewall and AV checker (after disconnecting the network cable), as well as any processed initiated by VMWare, which is installed on the Windows box. After that, the process seemed to get going, although after 20 minutes it['s still showing 1%, so it may be failing after all. I'll have to let it run overnight to see.
On the new box, I installed OpenOffice 3 from downloaded 64-bit debs, alongside 2.4; and I also installed Midori (to get WebKit), and Opera (which is available in 64-bit). I copied over my Thunderbird profile, and that's working fine; I also started the process of downloading all my working data off Rutabaga. That's trundling along happily (in fact, very fast indeed). I have oXygen running, and I've installed NetBeans, although I haven't run it yet; I want to bring down my NetBeans project files first, and point it at them.
Sunbird is proving problematic, because the repo version is older than the version I've been using on Windows, Pulling the latest off the Mozilla site gives me the right version, but I can't get the data into it just by copy/pasting from my old profile, so I'm going to have to do an export/import via an ICS file to get the data across, once the virtualizing process has finished.
RS is hiring a project manager. The hiring committee interviewed candidates this morning and arrived at a recommendation. Ray and I discussed that recommendation to see if I had any comments about it. Everything seemed well considered and fair, so I have no problems and agreed to put my name to that. RS will implement the decision.
On request of SR, removed a couple of fields from the form used by the department to review grad school applicants. Also adjusted the scoring on the remaining fields as requested.
Tests were successful, but revealed that the url containing a redirect through "hrd" fail due to tightened security settings on the server for php files, so I had to find the couple of instances where URLS are provided in the files and ensure that they did not use the hrd redirect any longer.
ML asked to have treatments added to list of fields that one can use to search the database. Added that to the GUI in searchformbasic.inc and to the where clause code in search.php. Latter pretty straightforward after I'd made the necessary changes to get the two treatments to display properly in a recent bug fix.
Decided to add treatments to the list of fields that one can sort the results by. Added value to order-by table in database and modified php switch statements for order_by_1_text and order_by_2_text in search.php.
In testing, it looks like the order by 2 isn't doing what I expect it to, so I'll have to look into that further. That argument seems to be having no effect at all.