Did a detailed review of the project progress, and created a list of 17 upcoming tasks, ordered by importance, ahead of a planning meeting with JL and CP tomorrow.
April 16, 2008
Spent some more time looking at the structure of the Yakubun document. In particular, I noticed that there seem to be no anchors linking endnotes to the position in the text where they actually appear, making it impossible to insert a note marker (or the note itself, if we're using TEI or something similar) in the right place in the text. Wrote to DB to ask about this, and also to ask in a more general sense what his plans are for editing the documents in the future. I think it might be hopeless, and pointless, to try to reproduce much of the original formatting, given that it's often repetitive low-level stuff that ought to be done globally anyway, in most document formats, and much of it will be irrelevant outside the context of the original printer.
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Steep learning curve.
Spent most of the day learning about the two modules mod_jk and mod_rewrite with little VP evident, but plenty of learning done.
For the time being, the server listens for http://rutabaga.hcmc.uvic.ca/ and grabs docs from the RAID array's htdocs directory. Any php/html docs will live in here, preferably with a <project_name> directory to house it. Servlets relying on port 8080/Tomcat (for our purposes, Cocoon apps) are handled by a JkMount directive in the httpd config file.
Each app needs an entry consisting of the servlet name and the worker set to handle it. Workers are declared in a workers.properties file, located in the same directory as the apache config files (although it gets declared explicitly in the httpd config file, so it can really be anywhere).
**more to come
April 15, 2008
Maryland's Upcoming Digital Diasporas Conference (April 30-May 2)
In conjunction with Digital Diasporas, our upcoming conference on digital humanities and African American/African Diaspora Studies, we will be running several workshops of interest. Registration for all workshops is managed through the conference registration form, available on the conference Web site:
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/diaspora2008/Took my Mac laptop into Lab C to connect it to projector in advance of presentation to French department in a couple of weeks. Connected the VGA from the splitter box to the Mac, set the monitors to mirror image. Image showed up properly on the monitor in the laptop and in the LCD monitor on the desktop, but the top 50 or so pixels did not appear through the projector (so menu bar not visible through projector).
Turns out there is an output format button on the remote for the projector which can be set to letterbox the image in various ways instead of just putting a 4by3 or 16by9 image through. We used that button to cycle through the settings until we got 4by3.
Also tested in Lab B, no problems. Thanks to Greg for help and finding the solution with the output format button.
Decided to try working on a larger document -- a full book, in fact -- so I took the YAKUBUN.SCRIPT file, and replaced all the import commands (.im) with the contents of the actual files, then started running my conversions against the full document (1.5 MB). The process takes a while -- maybe 20 minutes -- so I do other things, then check the results; so far I've found a few new things to fix, but I think I'll keep doing this till I get a well-formed XHTML doc, then I can take a proper look at that. While the conversions are actually running, I can do other work.
Had a meeting with CP to discuss the future of the project and how JH might continue to work on it; we decided the simplest thing right now would be the biographies, the introduction, and the files which are currently only in RTF and not yet converted to XML. We'll meet again on Thursday morning with JL to get some firm decisions on development over the next few months.
Through the day, worked on a few more notes, and fixed some marginalia issues and note numbering problems in a few docs.
CP called about noon asking if I would run the computer for his presentation of the library's database of historical documents of Victoria. It took me about an hour to work through his directions and confidently move around the site. Then the two of us went through the pages so ensure I was doing what he wanted, then we did the presentation in the midst of JL's history student presentations.
Talked with PaulVH on problems administering users and connections in Contribute. He confirmed similar problems involving pathnames and urls. We also did some testing with file permissions on the server and with email addresses for the user of the key and those didn't seem to have any effect.
I installed Contribute on an Intel Mac laptop and the program installed properly (as opposed to the PowerPC G5 where it does not seem to install properly).
Then I tried to create a connection to the French site. When I provided this for the URL to the site:
http://web.uvic.ca/french
at the start of the wizard, then later when it came to specifying the path on the server, everything went well
If I specified
http://web.uvic.ca/french/web_pages/index.php (which is the actual URL of the page - the index.htm page at the root is a redirect to web_pages/index.php)
then later when I specified the path, I got the "could not confirm" error message.
So, it seems that when I provide the exact information on the URL and path of the home page, Contribute is deriving paths from that information which are wrong, whereas if I provide the url and path to the root of the site and let Contribute work out the redirects itself, it gets that right.