Blog Posts

Hello from San Francisco

This is a test post to show Peter Samis how to use ecto.

This image was taken from the meeting room on the 36th floor of the Grand Hyatt San Francisco, overlooking Union Square, Macy’s, etc… That’s a loooong way down.

iTunes Music Store does RSS!

Thanks to Bill Bumgarner for the heads up. Looks like Apple really gets the whole syndication thing.

They’ve got a cool interface to generate a custom RSS feed of new releases in the iTMS. Now THAT’s a way to keep people buying new stuff… Send reminders into their news aggregators (or websites, or whatever).

Pachyderm Meeting

In San Francisco for a few days for the Pachyderm meeting. It’s weird having green stuff around in January. That just ain’t right.

About to head into the first session of a 3-day planning marathon. Should be fun. We’ll be spending a bunch of time working on requirements for the current software and for the new build, as well as some Bigger Picture Stuff.

Mike and I just went for a walk, hitting CompUSA to score a copy of iLife ‘04 - except they’re completely sold out. No copies for another week. Got to play with Garage Band on a shiny new G5 with a 23" display. Cool stuff. Scary that a hack with negative musical talent can create finished-sounding music. Brace for the clip-music revolution. Flashbacks of the “Desktop Publishing” era. Oy.

Upgrading MacOSX

I had to ignore my unwritten rule about never ever installing MacOSX as an “Upgrade Install”. I have always used either “Erase and Install” or “Archive and Install” to avoid issues wrt versions, overwriting etc…

When I upgraded the OS on commons.ucalgary.ca, I didn’t have a spare drive to use (well, I have the drive, and it’s sitting in the server - it just isn’t hooked up) so I did an upgrade. Big. Mistake.

OSXPlanet

I just came across OSXPlanet via MacUpdate.com. One of the reviews there mention that it’s an app written by 15 year old Gabriel Ott.

It takes the NASA “cloudless earth” and “earth at night” images, projects them into whatever global projection suits your tastes, and can also overlay current cloud coverage. It also shows the day/night areas of the globe, showing either “cloudless earth” or “earth at night” as appropriate. VERY cool.

MySQL on MacOSX 10.3 Panther Server

Boy, was Alan right… Don’t use the version of MySQL (4.0.16) that comes prepackaged in MacOSX 10.3 Server. Man, does it stink.

Update to 4.0.17, using the handy dandy installer provided on MySQL.com/downloads - it works great, and even starts on boot (unlike the version that comes with panther…) Just bit the bullet and updated versions on careo.ucalgary.ca, and the weird database behaviour has apparently disappeared.

Repository Folly...

Alan’s writing about what he calls “repository folly,” where people get so hung up on the “R-word” that they forget about what’s important. Metadata becomes king, content and users fall through the cracks.

I couldn’t agree more. Metadata, and the “R-Word” should be merely tools, serving specific roles, building to a well defined goal. They shouldn’t be the whole widget. Nobody in their right mind would care about either.

I think it’s got to be all about getting compelling content created and used. Everything else becomes means to that end. Including CAREO, Pachyderm, the iApps, etc…

Learning Commons Server now updated

Almost done updating the Learning Commons webserver to MacOSX 10.3 Server. Process went ok. Not as smoothly as I’d hoped, but better than I’d feared. The installer wouldn’t let me do an “Archive and Install” so all I had to choose from was “Erase and Install” and “Update” - 2 options I never use when installing MacOSX. I chose “Update”.

It kept all settings, accounts, etc… and the whole process was pretty painless.

CAREO Now Pantherfied

We finally had to upgrade CAREO to MacOSX 10.3 Server (it was still running 10.1.5 before that!). Over the Christmas break, we had a nearly catastrophic failure of the hard drive in the CAREO server. Not a good thing. We’ve got everything backed up, so I just slapped in a new 75GB drive (well, it’s old - inherited from a previous project).

The installation of Panther was dead easy. Configuring WebObjects was more trouble that it needed to be (permissions on the /Library/WebObjects/Configuration directory were too strict, and the app_server user couldn’t write the config there, so wotaskd bailed. not good).

Expose Blob

It just struck me that the fancy Expose Blob on MacOSX 10.3 is really quite useless. It’s not that convenient to mouse over to it and click the button. Much easier to just hit F9 or whatever you’ve set your Expose Key to…

It would be MUCH more useful if you’ve got a touch screen. Like, say, a SMART Board, or, say, a tablet. Newton could have used the Expose Blob.

eXistDB Prototype Database Server

I’ve got a prototype eXistDB server, built as a WebObjects application, running on an iMac on my desk. Works pretty well, and it does some great XQuery stuff. I’ve entered the CAREO metadata, current as of a week ago, so it’s got 3733 IMS LOM records to play with.

Check it out.

It has a simple search (just enter a term and hit the button), as well as a generic XQuery entry panel. Feel free to experiment on any XQuery statements you want (do a simple search and look at the source HTML for the result page for a starting point…) Go ahead and try some funky boolean searches like “earth image satellite”. Still some refinements left to go (like limits on search results - it’s currently possible to return the entire database as a result of a query - not recommended). I also have to play around with handling multiple schema - IMS LOM, DublinCore, MPEG7, IMS CP, METS, … for both querying and retrieval.

Merry Christmas!

I’ve been trying to be offline for the last few days (and will keep trying until Jan. 5, when I’m Back In The Office). I’ll likely be lurking online, though.

Took Evan to see Santa last night. He has been fine with Santa before - sat on his knee several times, for lotsa photos - but last night, he decided that Santa Is Evil. Crying and fussing must be associated with attempted Santa Knee Sittings. Oh, well… It was still pretty cute.