HCMC Blogs

Our RAs are beginning to mark up forme works (running titles, page and folio numbers, etc.), so I'm adding in some handling for those on the site. I've taken the opportunity to do some more thinking with regard to the integration of CSS. These are some points, exemplified in the Amboise 2 text:

• <fw> tags for page numbers had best precede those for running titles, even if they appear on the right of them, because they're essentially floated, while the running titles are centred. This is an easy convention to work with, and makes rendering much easier too.
• The dimensions of the actual pages, rendered in ems, are now stored in a <rendition> element in the header:

  <tagsDecl>
    <rendition xml:id="layoutDesc" scheme="css">width: 15em; padding-left: 3em; padding-right: 3em;</rendition>
    <rendition xml:id="pageBreakMargins" scheme="css">margin-left: -3em; margin-right: -3em;</rendition>
  </tagsDecl>
  

• These are linked in a general-purpose way like this:

  <text rendition="#layoutDesc">...</text>
  

  and in a specific way for the page-break elements (this is rather a kludge, but it allows us to put page-break lines which are the right width):

      <xsl:template match="pb">
          <xsl:element name="div">
              <xsl:attribute name="class">pageBreak</xsl:attribute>
            <xsl:if test="//rendition[@xml:id='pageBreakMargins']">
              <xsl:attribute name="style"><xsl:value-of select="//rendition[@xml:id='pageBreakMargins']" /></xsl:attribute>
            </xsl:if>
               <xsl:value-of select="@n" /> 
          </xsl:element>
      </xsl:template>
  

  There may be a much more generic way of doing this, but I haven't thought of it yet. I could have a convention that links a specific <rendition> element through its xml:id to all instances of a particular tag.
• <fw> tags are styled and positioned with @rend. We'll probably dispense with @place.

This is still very much a work in progress, but we're getting there. Another couple of days should result in some clear guidelines and usable output formats.

Spent the morning analysing the Rails app with KSW, and figuring out what needs to be done to make it usable for this year, and for the future. Fixed a couple of obvious bugs that were easy, and worked out a couple of ways the project could move forward, depending on who is available to work on it.

In all browsers other than FF for Mac, the css for the items in the popup list of options is corrupted. The cause is that in search.css.php the code is looking for variables such as $_browser_is_ie, and I'd removed the code that defined (in config.php) and set values for (in browserdetect.inc) those variables.

When I inserted the appropriate code, then the css in the popup window worked properly, but the css in the main search window appears to be compeletely disabled. Obviously I'll have to figure out why that is happening. ML has said this is a lower priority than other issues, so I'll deal with those other issues before returning to this one.

Went to UofI (NCSA) with Ray and Brett for the SEASR workshop last week. Aside from travel problems the workshop was great. This post is mostly for the links, so...

The main site is: http://seasr.org/
The main app is MEANDRE: http://seasr.org/meandre/
MEANDRE workbench demo: http://demo.seasr.org:1712/Workbench.html
Example app (Cast of Characters): http://demo.seasr.org:1714/public/resources/data/emotions/ev/CCV.html
SEASR development server (to see the latest/greatest): http://com-hub-dev.ncsa.uiuc.edu/seasr/
Son of Blinkie (example app): http://nema.lis.uiuc.edu/fdeliege/blinkie/nema.htm

It was recommended that if we need a cluster, and don't want to/can't use the NCSA set up, we should use a Condor cluster. It appears as though UVic has one already (although I can't find a direct ref to Condor at that site, I'm pretty sure I've seen one there).

I can't really claim the whole time I was gone, but I also can't really calculate claimable time spent so: 1080 minutes travel to workshop + 960 minutes actually attending workshop + 1320 minutes travel home = 3360 minutes, which seems absurd.

Stuck late trying to fix connectivity problems in collaboration with the help desk.

Three of our RAs were working today, and we worked out a lot of issues that relate to forme work. Page numbers will be marked up using <fw> tags, along with running headers, and printer's marks such as signatures at the bottom of the page. Arguments -- topic labels in the margin -- will be done with <argument>, at the beginning of the line group to which they apply, and positioned with CSS relative to that location.

Learned how to migrate a Rails app to accommodate changes to the database:

• ssh into the server
• Go to the root folder of the app (dhsi, in this case)
• run ruby script/generate migration what_you_want_to_do. This generates a framework file in the db/migrate folder. This will start with the migration version number.
• Edit that file to make the change you want to make to the db structure. (See Ruby docs for detail.)
• run rake db:migrate. When we did this, it successfully created the new field in the mySQL db, and modified the /db/schema.rb file.
• Restart the rails application (see instructions in ETCL docs).

However, although this seemed to go well, it didn't solve the problem; apparently it goes much deeper. ME is providing assistance at the moment; I've sent him some files, and I'm waiting for a response.

With some help from the Cocoon list and from my own experimentation, it seems that {system-properties:os.name}, {system-properties:file.separator} and other similar variables are available in the sitemap using the SystemPropertiesModule input module, which is enabled by default.