HCMC Blogs

COMPLETED TASK: One more tweak we need

Posted by on 27 Nov 2006 in Activity log, Tasks

I spent a little time playing with the system and thinking about the reports, and it seems to me that we need to include in each report item (ie blog posting) a link back to the original posting. I'm already using the reporting interface to find stuff in previous posts, so being able to jump back to it will be handy.

Other than that, I think we have a system we can work with for a few months, till we're used to it, and then we can revisit it and perhaps do some more customization.

Reviewed four more papers

Posted by on 27 Nov 2006 in Activity log

Stuck at home due to a combination of a bad cold and a snow day that shut down the city, I worked through the remaining four reviews assigned to me.

Put course postings for hist 130 into new site

Posted by on 24 Nov 2006 in Academic

Urgent request from Dr Sager to provide access to his hist 130 course readings, which became inaccessible when new website posted.

Found files, put them into subfolder of files folder
Created tree based on old URL and put redirect file in at old index location.
Recreated .htaccess and .passwd files to restrict access to his specs

minutes worked on get report format working

Posted by on 24 Nov 2006 in Activity log

minutes worked on get report format working

Wrote 3rd review for DH2007

Posted by on 24 Nov 2006 in Activity log

Reviewed another paper.

TASK: Fixed locale-related character-encoding issues

Posted by on 24 Nov 2006 in Activity log, Tasks

In the process of working on the report backend, I discovered some problems with the language settings. Users can choose to post in various languages, according to the locale they choose, and then their posts will be stored in that charset. When any page combines posts from different locales, some characters will be garbled. This needs to be fixed, but the nature of the system is such that it can't be fixed without re-working the entire language system of B2Evo. This requires substantial research ahead of time. Discussed this at length with Greg.

Got report formats working

Posted by on 24 Nov 2006 in Activity log

Finished the core PHP for reports:

Finished tidying up the SQL (stripping off a WHERE at the end where no params were supplied, so a query for everything now works).
Added some controls for what columns should be included in the table.
Rewrote the output code to respond to those controls.
Added header and closing tag generation for the standalone page, based on code in /blogs/a_noskin.php.
Tested the standalone page for validation errors; found lots, mainly due to ampersands etc. not escaped. Fixed those.
Hooked in the CSS and JS for the report form. Kept it absolutely simple (no fonts specified, for instance), because it is a report and shouldn't really be decorative. Most often it will be saved and massaged in another program.
Tested and tweaked.

(Worked with Stew for some of the time.)

Create common entry point for all HCMC sites

Posted by on 24 Nov 2006 in Activity log

The current setup for accessing HCMC sites is rather ad hoc. Martin, Stewart and I discussed a strategy for tidying things up on the front end by using a number of methods to make everything accessible from a single entry point, namely http://hcmc.uvic.ca/
This is the beginning of a map for this - please edit or comment if you have something to add.

The URL http://hcmc.uvic.ca/ will point to web.uvic.ca/hcmc for its content. The existing website will continue to be available via http://web.uvic.ca/hcmc/.

edit: An adjustment to the above
Some URL "duplication" should be built in via Apache. For example, having logical "containers" for software and so forth works well, and having containers for projects, journals, collections etc. might make sense, so if we get an Apache directive that "listens" for requests on several levels and then rewrites the URL to point at the "real" location we're better served than if we manually set all possible URLs.
* pardon the excessive use of "quotes".

These URLs will draw content (notionally at least) from various sources. For example, the katakana site will remain available at http://tapor.uvic.ca/cocoon/katakana, but will also be available at the new URL.
When this post is finalized amongst us it will constitute a task.

**note: for this to work we have to come to a conclusion about where the hcmc site is going to live - web.uvic.ca or on a tapor box.

Set up the blog

Posted by on 24 Nov 2006 in Activity log

Set up the blog for ScanCan. I'm the only member at the moment; next time I meet with John Tucker I'll see whether he wants to post as well.

Meeting with Kim Lewell

Posted by on 24 Nov 2006 in Activity log

I had a meeting with Kim Lewall and Ryan Enge regarding TAPoR servers yesterday. Things we discussed, conclusions we reached:

Samba will be installed on a TAPoR host (probably spinach) by Christmas and will provide home directory access for TAPoR users.
PHP 5.2 has been installed on lettuce. We need to test it before it becomes the default php interpreter on lettuce. I sent an email to Martin, David and Stewart outlining the process.
SUPHP will be edited to accommodate scripts that have a group writable flag set. This will help when there is more than one person editing php files. The switch will take place on the 28th of November sometime in the morning. Ryan will call beforehand.
MySQL on chard is currently v4.0.x. It will be upgraded to 4.1 at 0730 on the 5th of December. There is a plan in place to ensure minimal downtime and maximum recovery in case of a problem, but Ryan is fairly confident that there will be no issues.
MySQL 5 will be installed on cress early in the new year, hopefully by the end of January.
Kim encouraged me to set up TSM clients on our workstations, including Linux. This will need to be a task for me.