Did some updates to Pacific Asian site, on MK's instructions. I think more might be coming; there are other files in the dev site which are newer than those on the live site. Wrote for instructions on this.
June 4, 2010
May 27, 2010
I had some php running in an account on unix.uvic.ca which called a mysql database running on mysqldev.tapor.uvic.ca. the mysql_connect call failed. By moving the php to an account on lettuce.tapor.uvic.ca, the mysql_connect call succeeded.
In investigating this, I also discovered (with help of Greg and Martin) that the db username I was using was corrupted somehow, which obviously compounded the problems. We created a new user, and that username worked fine from lettuce, but not from unix.uvic.
history wrote to say that one faculty member's page had strange layout. This page included a caption under an image, which caused all the problems. The problem appears only in IE8. The image was align:right, but to get the caption under the image, both the image and the caption were in a div floated right. By fiddling with the width of surrounding objects, I was able to kludge something that looked OK, but it is fragile.
Department trying to update link to job announcement which appears in the right column of each page of their site. It's in a php include, and they don't know the URL of the include file, so can't edit it in Contribute. I edited the file, and told them how they could point to it in Contribute. I then discovered that the home/index.php file does not use php but had everything hard coded in html, so of course didn't update with the rest of the pages. I rewrote that page to replace whacks of html with php includes (as all the other pages have).
With Greg, found a handy URL for getting methods and fields of a javascript object class:
http://lpetr.org/blog/archives/reflection-in-javascript
RS contacted the Dean's office, who contacted me about getting the url http://humanities.uvic.ca/huma250 to point to http://chou.hcmc.uvic.ca/huma250 . Turns out that redirect is being handled by the sysadmins. We had earlier asked for a proxy for huma150 and they gave us a redirect instead (because it's pointing to a server other than theirs), so they're going to do the same thing for 250.
BS working for JP reports a problem connecting from his php to the mysql db. He's using a line like this:
$db_url = 'mysql://username:password@host/databasename';
I've never seen that convention before. I'm used to four separate variables which are then passed into a mysql_connect call. I had no problems connecting using the more conventional approach, so it has to be something to do with his specific setup or code. Had a number of back and forth emails.
JD of English emailed asking about legal and technical issues involving taking stills and short snips of an NFB work on VHS tape, digitizing them and including them in an academic conference presentation. Told him the technicalities are no issue, Greg can do that for him as it's such a small scale. Legally, I said I don't know of any problems with his proposed use, but I'm no expert on it and suggested he contact someone who was.
May 25, 2010
Some user feedback reminded me that the problem of the disappearing KEBI dictionary was never solved for the Indonesian website glossary (we had originally linked to the KEBI dictionary so that users could find words not in our simple glossary, but KEBI disappeared). I've now changed this to point to the Google translator, which works fine.
May 12, 2010
Finished javascript code in 8processOneToManys.html and make_inserts_from_csv.seq.xml
8processOneToManys.html now generates two outputs:
- the first contains sql comments on cross-reference and keywords that point to non-existent values, then sql statements to clear all records out of the four intermediary tables, then sql statements to populate those tables again
- the second returns the tab-delimited input, but in the cross-reference and keywords fields, only those values which are illegal remain, so it is easy to see where the problems still lie. That output (saved in the file 9_tabs_id_clean.txt) becomes the input for the last step in the Text Transformer.
make_inserts_from_csv.seq.xml is an instruction file used by the Text Transformer. It is designed to take as input 9_tabs_id_clean.txt and produce the sql statements to clear all records from the main table and then repopulate the main table again.
Am now waiting for BI to provide data with identified errors corrected.
If BI adds any new records to the lookup sheets (e.g. new keywords), then those will have to be added manually to the appropriate table in the database and to the javascript code in both the files mentioned here.
Full procedure to go from BI's spreadsheet to the sql files ready to populate the databases is in the file howto_xls_strings_to_sql_inserts.txt. It's kind of rickety and hands-on, but shouldn't have to be executed very often.