Dept requested that the course listings be updated. I thought this information was derived automatically from the uvic calendar site, but upon investigation it appears that the information (which is contained in a file called hist.js) is manually copied and pasted from the calendar site, rather than extracted automatically. I made the required edits
January 19, 2007
SCHEDULING:
HUMANITIES:
SEA 100B-LS01: Lab date & time change requested.
Result: re-scheduled to Wed; 8:30-9:30 am, Lab B.
German & Slavic Studies Dept:
German lab reservation assistance for 2007/08.
LAB B RESERVATION:
Date: May 7, 2007
User: AP French Testing (High School)
ROOM RESERVATION:
Request: Classroom May 7; 12-2; for written French exam
Booked: via Room Bookings, CLE C111 12-2 confirmed
Lab Request: Lab B for AP French Testing (12-4:00 pm)
Coordinators: Scott Gerrity, Joanne (Fr.Instructor)
HUMANITIES SUMMER INSTITUTE LABS RESERVATION:
June 18-22, 2007 both Labs B&C reserved full days for Humanities Summer Institute.
Ali ran out of staff and had to do a demo, so I filled in on the CALL counter for a while. Does no harm to re-learn CALL procedures and how wicket works once in a while.
ARCHIVE PROJECT ON-GOING:
January 2007:
1st "delivery" to German/Slavic Dept: will be sent
week of January 22nd. Additional deliveries TBA.
Boxes # included : 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 19 &
db #145 ( So sind die Deutschen slides and tapes.)
(Note:Documentation listing contents of boxes sent to Language Depts. and Continuing Studies filed with HCMC.)
Jan.19/07:
Physical access to stored Latin materials necessary; executive memo, additional personnel assistance requested to advance project.
BLOG INSTRUCTION MEETING:
Martin, Stew and Greg discussed with Judy best means
and locations of blogging administrative input within newly created sub-categories.
JANUARY 2007 SEMESTER:
FRENCH 155: Fridays, 8:30-9:30 am LAB B&C
Instructor: Christine Wadge
Enrollment is very large and instructor is using both Lab B & C simultaneously (accessing labs through projection room during lab session)
FRENCH 302: Fridays, 9:30-10:30 am LAB C
Instructor: Dr. Catherine Caws
Has 31 students using lab C, all workstations is use with some shared to accommodate large class number. All additional headsets in use to accommodate doubling up at each workstation.
RECOMMENDATION: purchase of additional headsets
LAB ORIENTATIONS: January 2007 new semester
PACIFIC AND ASIAN STUDIES
Japanese 149 - Lab demo
REQUESTED LAB ASSISTANCE:
Overhead data projector instruction for French and German labs.
Scott Woodcock prefers flat list to indented list, so reset that, also uploaded new pdf file containing same information.
Judy, Stew, Greg and I had a half-hour discussion to clarify the best ways of handling the kind of admin info Judy is going to be entering into the blog. We added a couple of categories to the Admin blog, and we'll probably add more in the future.
Complete: created a reasonable workaround for this on Feb 7.
Paolo Cutini is using Transformer to recover some old WordStar word-processor files, and encountered a problem reloading the sequence file he had saved. The file appears to be corrupted; a control character occurs throughout the document. oXygen reports:
F An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x1c) was found in the element content of the document.
That character is "INFORMATION SEPARATOR 4" or "file separator". It wouldn't normally be found in a Unicode document. However, that character is in the Unicode specification, so it ought to be somehow encoded in a format that UTF-8 can handle. This may be a limitation of the XDom engine I'm using for XML file handling, it could be a bug in my code, or it could be that I should automatically exclude control characters on the basis that they shouldn't show up in a text document. I'll look into it. Transformer is intended for working on Unicode texts, rather than ancient word-processor formats, but I do like the idea of using it to retrieve this old data; the program was written as part of a project to rescue some old DOS WordPerfect data, after all.
Entering this as a task with a long deadline, because it's not a major thing; what needs to be done is to investigate the code which uses XDom to save files, and see if the file data is being correctly encoded in UTF-8; if so, look into the specs and see if UTF-8 is supposed to handle this character, and if so, whether it should be somehow encoded or escaped.
January 18, 2007
Despite the ongoing problem with the eXist db on Lettuce, which Greg is currently working on, I continued working on the search page. I decided to learn how to use the kwic functionality built into eXist, which took a while because the documentation is sparse; in the end, I found a sample file posted by Wolfgang on the eXist newsgroup, kwic.xq, and that got me started. Managed to get the XML part of the system working (in other words, a query to find.xml returns a nicely arranged TEI XML document containing the search hits organized appropriately, with kwic hit strings).
Doing the actual search from the page still doesn't work, though; an HTML rendering of the data (serialized as XML) is being returned, but the JavaScript is gacking on it so it's not inserted into the page. I think this is because it has an XML header, and also because it's peppered with unnecessary namespace attributes. More on thie tomorrow.