HCMC Blogs

Found some excellent Bash tutorials here:
http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/scripting/tutoriallist

The list points to two of the best - which I've found to be very good:
http://steve-parker.org/sh/first.shtml
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide

ER passed on some error messages from Tomcat-stable:

2011-01-25T13:40:03-08:00 
pear.hcmc.uvic.ca/pear.hcmc.uvic.ca/pear.hcmc.uvic.ca daemon.err tomcat: 
hcmc-stable
[ajp-8009-4]: Use of deprecated, since 2008-04-02, function 
fn:item-at(). It will be removed really soon. Please use
$x[1] instead.

It's not clear which project they're from, but item-at is used in xrequest.xq in Graves (line 365). I'll have to test replacing it.

Started adding some doxygen documentation to the code for the XML editor. This is a way of getting back into the project after a few weeks break.

Some texts (such as Varin) have quotes in them which are not signalled with quote marks; it's only clear they're quotes because of the surrounding text. These are being tagged with <quote type="noMarks">, which I've added to the schema alongside @type="italics", and added a handler to the XSLT.

I've completed my bare-bones version of the web-based record search tool. All of the logic for the search - both displaying the available options and parsing out a form submission - is contained within two classes, Search and Search_Form. The classes build the search query in an organized manner based on passed parameters. This format makes the search easy to change or extend, which I can foresee happening based on the needs of the data and the researcher SD. All of the code is documented using comments and standard docblock syntax.

The database-side of things is handled with Zend_Db, the Zend Framework's RDBMS adapter. Since the search form can result in some very complex queries, Zend_Db makes the process of building the select statement relatively easy. Plus, it's a more robust database adapter in terms of security and integrity than I could build in any decent amount of time.

The search form doesn't yet have any styling and is bare, but now that the functionality is done everything else will fall into place eventually. SD is coming in for a meeting Thursday Jan 27th so I hope to hammer out some more details then.

Had the province-wide earthquake drill today. The process of getting under desks etc. proves straightforward -- plenty of room under our desks -- but we also took the opportunity to look inside our earthquake kits, and make sure there was one close to every desk. There's a little battery radio (with batteries) in the master kit (under my desk), and one other radio which is in one of the kits in the RA room. The food and water is still in-date, but most of it will run out within the next year (some in November, some next February). I'll put that on my calendar to remind me to order replacements.

On ECH's behalf, I'm helping to convert a Carrier dictionary to a format that the FirstVoices folks can use. I received the dictionary today in Access format, and was able to take the following steps:

• Used MDB Viewer to open the db file, and exported the schema, as well as the contents of the two tables inside it. The tables are "Central Carrier Dictionary" and "export_file". The former has 3079 entries, and the latter 2213. They have the same fields in them, but in different orders. The field list in the former looks like it's in the wrong order, whereas the latter is in a more logical sequence. It looks as though I should be working with the data from the first table, but aiming at the order of the second, but I'm still waiting for confirmation from the authors. In any case, for FV purposes, the order of these fields is not really important.
• Took the exported CSV files and used OpenOffice Base to open them as a database. This seemed to work fine. I was then able to select each table, right-click it, and Copy, then Paste into a spreadsheet in OpenOffice Calc (opening the CSV files directly in Calc gave me an error suggesting that the maximum row count had been exceeded).
• From Calc, I was able to save as a FODS file, and then I opened the FODS files in oXygen.
• I've written two stages of transformation starting from the FODS file. The first "cleans up" the FODS by removing a bunch of fields we don't need, and by expanding all instances of empty table cells with @table:number-columns-repeated (a colspan setting). This gives a cleaner matrix to work with.
• The second transformation is specific to the first of the two tables in the db. It converts the modified FODS file into a customized XML structure which is simple, and has descriptive tags instead of the spreadsheet tags. It's specific to the one file because it names the columns with tags based on the column headers; since the columns are in a different order in the second table, it wouldn't work correctly without re-ordering.

The next stage will be to write the final transformation to produce whatever the FirstVoices folks need. Since I don't yet know what that is, I can't start on it, but I can start writing the Java collation class that will do the sorting. That's my next task.

The two latest texts have long and detailed tables of contents which need to be encoded. This is the recommended approach, which I've based on the Brown Women Writers Project guidelines, but which use examples from our own texts.

• The TOC as a whole is encoded as <div type="contents">.
• The main heading for the whole TOC is encoded as a <head> element.
• The TOC may then be divided into several sections (as in Le Bon Mariage), or it may be a single section (as in the case of the Ville-Thierry text). Each section should be encoded as a <list type="toc">.
• If a section of the table has its own subheader (as in the case of Le Bon Mariage), this should be included in a <head> tag inside the <list> tag.
• Each item in the TOC will be an <item> element inside the <list> element.
• Each item may contain three elements:
  1. <label> (containing a label such as "Chap. XXXII" in the Ville-Thierry, if there is one).
  2. <rs> ("referring string"), which contains the chapter title, heading or description.
  3. <ref type="pageNum">, containing the page number. This will have two other attributes:
     • target="p_1" (which points, in this example, to page 1 of the text). It is important that you later ensure that an element with the xml:id "p_1" exists in the document; normally this would be the <fw type="pageNum">1</fw> -- in other words, the <fw> tag which contains the page number "1".
     • rend="float:right". This designates that the page number appears on the right of the page, which is normally the case.

Here are some example encodings. This is from Le Bon Mariage:

<div type="contents">
  
  <head>
    <figure><figDesc>Motif décoratif</figDesc></figure>
    <hi>TABLE</hi><lb/>
    <hi>DES CHAPITRES</hi><lb/>
    <hi>CONTENVS EN CE LIVRE</hi><lb/>
  </head>
  
  <list type="toc">
    <head>
      <figure><figDesc>Ligne droite ray/e</figDesc></figure>
      <hi>LIVRE PREMIER.</hi><lb/>
      <hi>TRAITE PREMIER.</hi><lb/>
      <hi>De l'excellence & des fins du Mariage</hi><lb/>
    </head>
    <item>
      <rs>Des trois diverſes eſtats qui ſe retrouuent en l'Egliſe, page </rs>
      <ref type="pagenum" target="#p_1" rend="float: right;">1</ref>
    </item>
    <item>
      <rs>Combien le mariage eſt honorable. </rs>
      <ref type="pagenum" target="#p_6" rend="float: right;">6</ref>
    </item>
    <item>
      <rs>Qu'au mariage & en toutes autres actions ſe ſaut propoſer vne bonne fin.</rs>
      <ref type="pagenum" target="#p_10" rend="float: right;">10</ref>
    </item>
  </list>
  
</div>

This example comes from the Ville-Thierry:

<div type="contents"> 
  <head>
    <figure>
      <figDesc>Motif décoratif</figDesc>
    </figure>
    <hi>TABLE</hi><lb/>
    <hi>DES CHAPITRES.</hi><lb/>
    <figure><figDesc>Ligne droite foncée</figDesc></figure>
    <hi>CHAPITRE PREMIER.</hi><lb/></head>
  <list type="toc">
    <item>
      <rs>De la grandeur & de l'excellence du Mariage. pag.</rs> 
      <ref target="#p_1">1</ref>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <label>Chap. II.</label> 
      <rs>Qu'il n'y a rien de plus mal-
        heureux que l'état de ceux qui entrent
        mal dans le Mariage , & qui ne s'y con-
        duisent pas par les regles de la charité
        & de la pieté chrétienne.</rs> 
      <ref target="#p_19">19</ref>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <label>Chap. III.</label> 
      <rs>Quelles sont les fins que les
        Chrétiens doivent se proposer , lorsqu'ils
        s'engagent dans le Mariage.</rs> 
      <ref target="#p_26">26</ref></item>
  </list>
</div>

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