HCMC Blogs

NOTE: THIS IS OBSOLETE. See later post.

Just for the record: I'm backing up all the processed images from /home1t/coldesp/www/jpg_scans/ to Rutabaga, by ssh-ing into nfs.tapor.uvic.ca and running:

rsync --stats --recursive --times --delete --verbose -e ssh jpg_scans/ "mholmes@rutabaga.hcmc.uvic.ca:/home/mholmes/backups/Martin/Colonial\ Despatches/www/jpg_scans/"

This needs to be run periodically to keep the backup up to date. Of course home1t is backed up as a matter of course, but these images represent such an investment of time that I'd like to keep multiple copies. I'm also going to look at making a Rutabaga backup of /home1t/coldesp/archive/, which contains all the original image sets from which these were generated.

On late duty.

I've implemented a metadata display system that works like this:

• In text documents, a menu item "Métadonnées" is added.
• Below the menu, a hidden div contains metadata.
• Clicking on the menu item hides and shows the div. There's also a little X in the top right of the div which closes it.
• The div contents are generated from the teiHeader.
• Each node or text element in the header is processed. In the case of a node, a div is created, and the node's local-name() is used to look for a possible caption in a specially-configured variable in the project_globals.xsl. If a caption exists, it's used as a label.
• In the case of text, it's simply output as text.
• The encodingDesc node is filtered out, because anyone interested in that information will most likely prefer to see it in full, in the XML itself, while to others it will be confusing.

We have a couple of problems that should be resolved ASAP:

• Our metadata is currently a blend of English and French. It should all be converted to French, I think.
• Some metadata is irrelevant or unnecessary ("An Electronic Edition", or the <extent> tag), and should be removed.
• Some headers are more complete than others.

However, this should encourage us to go back and look again at our headers.

Tonight's talk cancelled because the speaker can't travel due to the weather. Posted warning messages on the home page and the Lectures page.

Meeting with CP and KSW about grant report due now, and future plans.

I've now ordered and divided the affix.xml file. First, I sequenced the entries in the affix.xml file by @xml:id attribute, using our Moses collation. (You can use a collation through the normal Saxon mechanism in oXygen if you add the jar file as an extension in the oXygen transformation scenario.) Then I split the file into four roughly equal-length files, using initial-letter boundaries in the @xml:ids.

I've documented my changes in the revisionDesc, but ECH will have to update the TODO comment; part of it now only relates to one file, and the other half is problematic because it refers to a particular line number. There's also the issue of knowing which entries have been checked against the original cards and which haven't, now they've been re-ordered.

PAB requested that a Humanities page about the Beck Trust Travel Award be linked from the main menu of the Beck Trust site. Rather than do that, I've written a page on the Beck site that curls the core content from the Humanities page and displays it, so that it will stay in sync with changes to the Humanities page, but the Beck site still gets a page about its own travel award. Had to do a bit of preg_replace to get rid of some invalidities in the curled code.

Converted the remaining JBC files to JQZ on Onion, and amended Masher files where required. I then looked at the possibility of doing the keypad conversions on all files on Onion in advance, but it turns out that many are unchanged from the days before the keypad was even available, so it makes more sense to let them all get edited by TB first, thus updating them to the current HotPot 6 structure, and then run the search-and-replace operations on them.

Spent an hour putting together some background and some ideas regarding the grant application, in the form of an email to KSW, NB and RP. I won't put it up here since it'll need a lot of work yet, but it's a reasonable start on the part of the grant application that will fall to us.

KE provided a new video of the JL talk for the CityTalks site, but it was extremely large (900 x 565, and well over 500MB). I've created a version at the same size as the previous video, using HandBrake, and I'm currently generating an OGV file. Both are still pretty big -- the MP4 is 156MB -- but it's a long video. As soon as the OGV is done, I'll post them on the site.