HCMC Blogs

On late duty.

Sent it to JSR as a docx.

Ordered remainder of staff business cards through on-line printing.

Leaving early.

Pat and I met with Shamma Boyarin and his workstudy student about creating a small website for a conference happening in June. He needs a uvic hosted site as the registration front. He reports the uvic ecommerce service requires the calling site to be in the uvic.ca domain.

He will provide info on graphic treatments (grey-scale misty forests might be an option), a logo and other related graphical elements, list of fields required for registration form and cost items, and text content.

I have created empty pages for the site (copied and pasted TEI conference site and then added in the confirm.php, process.php and config.php files to support the registration form and submission of form values to database. The mechanics of that are working.

Discovered that the library is no longer offering ecommerce support, but systems is in process of setting something up. Will get update from them in next day or two once they have provisioned an account for us - I suspect we might be the first clients of that service.

SB wants the registration and accommodation pages working by Feb 24 - that will depend on him getting us stuff and the systems people having a working ecommerce account for us. Pat thinks he can do the necessary graphical treatments etc. next week.

Before Christmas, arranged to chat with JS on Graduate Certificate. After DH committee meeting added in topic of plans for MakerLab and how Pat might help support that (as part of his lab-support duties).
Re Graduate Certificate : JS is leading effort (along with MC in Dean's office) of redrafting academic terms of program. Currents students are being supported. He's looking at a "certificate" model and a "concentration" model, which have different implementation implications regarding nature of integration with rest of graduate course and project work. Concern is to keep amount of work reasonable within a 2-year MA program, and providing qualified instructors across various disciplines.
Re MakerLab : JS with Deans of Humanities and Fine Arts are working out a deal to have the lab supported by both faculties and providing activities that entail participation by students from both faculties. Sees an opportunity for Pat to possibly provide user support and training on the technologies in the lab (likely fine arts people would provide technical support on the equipment).

Reviewed format for committees and decided to go with the tab layout; format provides more space for information on same page. Commented out example #1 and kept the tabs block; republished page.
Sent email to PGL advising final format layout on page.

Lots of back and forth with SK at NNM to complete retrospective report on activities (Research, Dissemination, Training) in both parts of our cluster, and to set major milestones and budget for upcoming year. Also worked out location of student labour (almost all at NNM) and workflow and tasks for stuff project needs for integration with material developed by other clusters.
Submitted 2 documents to JSR for review by Executive Committee.

I've made a lot of progress. This is the current state of play:

• Basic working XHTML documents are being produced from the P4 source.
• The main set of templates used to achieve this is harvested using a special XSLT stylesheet from the old XSLT files.
• However, many of those old templates prove to be broken in odd ways; they're a sort of hybrid between XSLT 1 and 2, and when run with Saxon 9 they cause errors, mainly due to string functions being called on input which is a sequence rather than a single item.
• All of these errors occur in the horrible MLA Bibliography processing library, and they're caused by oddities in specific biblStructs.
• Rather than fix the original code, which would mean maintaining two trees, it seems more sane to turn the old biblStructs into bibls where necessary; the output will be the same, but the code complexities should vanish, and we won't be producing any more biblStructs anyway.

So this gives me a path forward, and I'll start working through the odd cases when I have a chance.

PGL sent new links; updated benefits with appropriate links.
Republished page, sent email confirmation to PGL.