HCMC Blogs

SB reported that events that she posted to the UVic events calendar appeared fine on the UVic site, but on the GRS site which scrapes from the UVic site, html entities appeared instead of the literal characters (space, ").

I created a test event containing the literal characters and the entities, and they behaved as I expected they would. It appears that the events system and scraper are behaving OK, which makes me think that there must be something about the data she's entering which explains the behaviour she reported.

Wrote back and told her to try editing the event postings.

We had a long meeting this morning, and I'm still committed to getting something workable ready for GR in GRS (the Roman Law db project), so I stayed late a couple of hours to catch up. It'll still be close to the wire, though...

Wrote the final GUI and backend code to handle editing the values of fields in the Keywords and Projects listboxes. Also added an idle loop to the GUI, to disable and enable buttons when appropriate. You can now manage the keywords and projects lists entirely through the GUI. Next I can go on to the slightly more complicated issue of editing the documents, and then finally move to inscriptions.

Endless interruptions have made this project drag a bit, but I've been learning a lot, especially with regard to mySQL 5 functionality.

Had a meeting with two sysadmins regarding the deployment of an ISE-only box. This machine will be similar in status and composition to other TAPoR machines, except that it run all necessary software for the operation of the ISE website/application, including databases. Sysadmin feels confident that we (R&D and ISE developers) will be able to begin working on the machine by mid-October.

I've also had some follow-up discussions by email with sysadmin and ISE people to finalize some of the issues.

Request from JT for simple method of printing screen captures of DVD movies.
All vanilla DVD players for Mac OS seem to restrict this or at least not provide simple methods. Many cost money. In the case of OS X's built-in DVD Player, when you try to use shift+cmd+3/4 you get an alert that tells you "no".

To get around this I wrote a simple AppleScript (in Script Editor) that looks like this:
do shell script "screencapture -iWP ~/Desktop/screenshot.png"
"i" is for interactive, "W" is for window (in combination these let you interactively choose the window you are capturing) and "P" is for open it in Preview. The rest is just an output path and file type. Alternatively, you can pass it to the clipboard.
Then I saved it as an application and gave it a handsome icon I made from this.

Here's a zipped copy of the app.

Link: http://hcmc.uvic.ca/blogs/index.php?blog=14&p=3829&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

Posting time spent on various bitty tasks, such as tracking down the source of a problem on the GRS events calendar display (bad input data, we think), meeting new research assistants, discussing the Liddell Award, etc.

Very productive meeting -- details coming on future blog posts from one of us.