iNODE

An update to MarsEdit (”the best blog editor”) appeared today, one that solves a long-standing issue: support for draft postings. Prior to this new version (2.1), it wasn’t possible to begin a post on your local machine then upload it as a draft to the WordPress server—anything uploaded was just published instantly. Now you can put posts on the server and pull them down later for fine tuning. Other improvements include: better tagging support, filter posts by keywords, and a more feature-rich preview option. Recommended.

http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/

Work on our first research portal (Bioinformatics) is just about complete.

To refresh, we’re combining two open-source products (WordPress and CWIS) to build what we hope will prove to be a valuable first-stop for Mason’s bioinformatics researchers. It is also a developmental template—one we’ll use to create additional portals for different subject areas. That work has already begun: in a few more weeks we hope to be near completion of another portal, this time for the Department of Communication.

One immediate benefit we’re seeing: WordPress makes the process of building a different look for each portal relatively simple (just tweak a theme) and widgets open up a host of ways to customize each portal’s functionality.

Victoria Shelton (our Bioinformatics Liaison Librarian) designed this portal’s resource classification scheme and then added over 350 web-based resources to the database. Here in the DPS division, after getting the basics set up and integrated we’ve spent our time adding new capabilities to the administrative module that ships with the CWIS software.

Our latest additions:

• check resources database for duplicates
• report broken links in resources database
• report resources that do not have a sample screen illustration

We’re now working on the documentation that will support creation of additional portals here at Mason and give us a document we can share with others who might wish to head down this path.

LibGuides

Clearly, a librarian serving as curator for one of these research portals will be doing quite a bit of work–identifying new resources, writing blog entries, chatting with clients, performing maintenance on links and more. I think it’s just as clear that not every subject merits this level of involvement/effort. Our intention is to build a portal for those programs with intensive graduate-level activity and use more traditional subject guides for other areas (e.g., perhaps course-oriented guides for undergraduates). At the moment I’m leaning toward licensing the LibGuides service from Springshare for this complementary purpose.

I haven’t spent a lot of time looking at the LibGuides site but then it doesn’t really require in-depth study to get a sense of what they’re providing. The integration with Facebook is a real plus as are little touches like RSS feeds, ‘widget’ linking to courseware products (like WebCT), usage stats, polls, comments, chat integration—well, the feature list is a long one.

To be honest, I’m most excited by a feature that’s really just a by-product of using the software: without even trying, all our subject guides will end up with a similar look and feel. That would be a huge improvement (this page always reminds me of one of those “memory games” that children play—only here you’re trying to remember which pages have matching styles).

Even though Mason would come in at the upper end of Springshare’s licensing fee range, I think we’d find that over the course of 3-4 years it was less expensive than funding the development of a comparable capability in-house.

Will report back after I gather some feedback on the idea from our public services staff and conduct a bit more research on the quality and reliability of service that Springshare delivers current customers.

Powerbook Surgery

The “failing” message I saw when checking the S.M.A.R.T. status on the out-of-retirement 12″ Powerbook I mentioned last week was right. The drive died. I was able to install a replacement drive in just under an hour but these 12″ machines pose a greater challenge than the more recent Macbook Pro. And yes, the 7200 rpm drive does improve the machine’s speed–the 1.33 GHz now feels more like a 1.67 GHz Powerbook.

Beyond needing a T6 Torx wrench to make this repair, here are two other things you’ll find useful should you want to consider this DIY project:

• a screw guide (basically a piece of paper with outlines of all the screws so you can keep track of them as they’re removed—and put them back where they belong.
• a take-apart guide (step by step how-to on disassembly).

Stumbled across a really interesting project earlier today: The Commons.

What a great idea. By putting their public photograph collections up on Flickr and then soliciting tagging by the universe of Flickr users, the Library of Congress is accomplishing two things at once: introducing a new audience to the wonderful objects in their collection and getting free metadata that will surely in aggregate improve discovery and thus use of the materials.

This was announced a week ago last Wednesday which means it’s been available for quite a while (at least in internet time). Nevertheless, it amazes me how much tagging there’s been on these images in just nine days. Sure there’s lots of bad spelling and poor word choice in the tags but with millions performing the work the price paid for even a particularly bad tag is negligible.

Bonus: these images are public domain so you can spice up your next presentation with a historical photo or two.

http://flickr.com/commons/

Microsoft’s latest iteration of Office for Macintosh (Office 2008) does one really odd thing during installation—it makes user 502 the owner of many important directories and files:

• /Library/Automator/ (unless it already exists)
• /Library/Fonts/Microsoft
• /Library/Application Support/Microsoft
• /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008

If you have more than one user on your Mac, you more than likely have a user 502 that will now inherit read/write permissions for these files. We like easy-to-remember usernames but OS X (and most other operating systems) actually know us by a user number. Under OS X, the first user account created gets the number 501, the second 502 and so on.

On my desktop machine, I have a “testuser” account I use for testing (if an application isn’t running right, to eliminate the possibility of corruption in one of my personal preference files, I log in as “testuser” and see if the problem follows). That was the second account I created on this machine. As you can see below, on my system this “testuser” account now owns the /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/ folder and all its contents:

-rwxrwxr-x    1 testuser  admin  6148 Jan 16 14:43 .DS_Store
-rwxrwxr-x    1 testuser  admin     0 Dec  3 03:00 .dock
-rwxrwxr-x    1 testuser  admin     0 Dec  3 03:00 .launch
drwxrwxr-x    7 testuser  admin   238 Jan 16 14:43 Additional Tools
-rwxrwxr-x@   1 testuser  admin     0 Dec  3 03:00 Icon?
drwxrwxr-x@   3 testuser  admin   102 Jan 16 13:21 Microsoft Entourage.app
drwxrwxr-x@   3 testuser  admin   102 Jan 16 13:21 Microsoft Excel.app
drwxrwxr-x@   3 testuser  admin   102 Jan 16 13:21 Microsoft PowerPoint.app
drwxrwxr-x@   3 testuser  admin   102 Jan 16 13:21 Microsoft Word.app
drwxrwxr-x   67 testuser  admin  2278 Jan 16 13:21 Office
-rwxrwxr-x@   1 testuser  admin  1197 Dec  3 03:00 Read Me.html

I hope Microsoft will offer a patch soon to correct this issue. You can, of course, fix things yourself via the “chown” command but there are a lot of files to fix.

Perhaps a social engineering fix will hold until there’s a patch: if you have multiple users on your Mac, make sure user 502 can be trusted to leave things alone.

The introduction of the MacBook Air (and the buzz over its size) got me thinking about the 12″ PowerBook I used to use. So, earlier today I dug it out of the office storage cabinet, did a clean install of Leopard and added a few “essential” applications (Nisus Writer Pro, Camino, MarsEdit, CSSEdit, BBEdit, iWork ‘08, Yojimbo, VLC and the DevonAgent/DevonThink combination).

Presto! A great little computer I can now carry around in my messenger bag for Latte-level computing (you know, the sort you see taking place at your neighborhood coffee shop) without feeling like I have a couple of bricks in there.

Syncing via .mac greatly simplifies the whole “keeping a second (or third) computer current” problem. If you don’t have a .mac account (or perhaps even if you do) you can also use a service like JungleDisk to help move files between machines.

The 12″ PowerBook weighs a pound more than the MacBook Air and it is definitely slower (1.33GHz PowerPC vs. 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo) but there are a few compensating features as well: smaller footprint (MacBook Air is 2 inches wider), Firewire 400 port, real keyboard, ethernet jack, 5400 rpm drive and more.

And no, it’s not all great. This notebook is sort of beat up and old (built 2004) and according to one utility I ran, the S.M.A.R.T. status of the internal drive is “failing.” Typing “diskutil info disk0 | grep SMART” returned “SMART Status: Verified” so I’m not quite sure which to trust. I guess the next few weeks will clear that up.

If I find that I am still carrying this thing around in a couple of weeks, I’ll use an iFixit takeapart guide and replace the internal drive with a 7200 rpm Seagate Momentus (today the 100GB Momentus with a 5 year warranty costs roughly the same price as a replacement battery).

OCLC absorbed EZproxy into the collective yesterday. Why can’t I see this as great news?

http://www.oclc.org/news/releases/200690.htm

Something tells me it would be prudent to download the EZproxy support website before it goes dark. If you’re a Macintosh user, I’ll recommend SiteSucker (donationware).

A number of small items to help break the 2008 writer’s block…

Annoying Leopard Print Spooler

If you’ve upgraded from Tiger to Leopard you may be seeing this problem: you print something and the print spooler just hangs around in the Dock. Yes, it’s annoying but I finally found a fix (perhaps I’m the last one to figure this out but that’s OK):

Next time you print, right click on the spooler that will be sitting in your dock, then click on “Auto Quit.” Once that has a checkmark, the spooler will go away after a print job—just like it did under Tiger.

I have no idea why this isn’t the default behavior. Could be that having an “auto quit” option available is easier to explain than defaulting to “auto quit” and then having to explain why there’s the option to “just keep the spooler icon hanging around on the Dock even after the print job finishes.”

E-Reserves moves

Moved our e-reserves system to a new server yesterday. That’s something I’ve been meaning to do for more than a year but there’s seldom a window of opportunity (demand for e-reserves extends beyond the academic calendar).

The move was complicated by the fact that we wrote the software in the late 90’s and it’s been tweaked and extended over the years all the while sitting on an old Sun E250. Written primarily in Perl, some of the code used the DBI interface to MySQL and some used the later MySQL modules. The new server (an XServe running 10.4) had support for the DBI modules baked in but nothing else. We already use that instance of MySQL for several other PHP-based systems so I was hesitant to begin recompiling MySQL or Perl.

The solution? Spent the day rewriting all code that didn’t already use the DBI interface.

It’s working now and dramatically faster. As the Spring term begins, I’ll discover and fix any remaining hiccups in the transition. Hoping there aren’t any (more).

Updated WordPress

Moved the WordPress software hosting this fine weblog up to 2.3.2 to fix a security problem that’s shown up in release 2.3.1.

Over-the-air HDTV

I live in a relatively rural area (I think rural now means a place where it’s not economical to pull cable), so my TV options are limited to over-the-air (OTA) or satellite. I have a WiMax internet connection (via RoadStar Internet) which is adequate for most things but real-time IPTV isn’t a dependable option with that “up to 1 Mbps” connection.

A few weeks ago I got very close to signing up with one of the satellite TV services—not so much for the programming but to get a clearer picture (for me TV is either an occasional sporting event or a place to indulge my Netflix habit). However, as I looked more deeply into satellite TV, I discovered there were all sorts of add-on charges for HDTV content and access to local channels. I began to lose interest…

Then over the holidays I had the opportunity to hook an Elgato EyeTV hybrid to my MacBook Pro and experienced an epiphany: HTDV is just UHF and it’s freely broadcast over the air. Yes, the HDTV signal is highly directional but it takes less signal to produce a perfectly clear picture. Very clear since unlike cable or satellite HD, the signal from OTA broadcasts isn’t compressed.

I attached the coax feed from my existing rooftop antenna to the EyeTV hybrid and was able to immediately pick up 6 crystal-clear HDTV signals from the broadcast towers roughly 35 miles away (I get 3 to 4 viewable channels on the standard analog (NTSC) signal). Inspired, I next added a dedicated UHF/HDTV antenna to the mast on top of my house and paying attention to the antenna’s orientation, boosted the reception to 17 clear channels (Thanks to antennaweb.org for information on aligning the antenna for my local address).

The EyeTV hybrid is a neat little device and the accompanying EyeTV software offers complete personal video recorder (PVR) services (support for the TitanTV programming guides is built right into the software). It can also be used to transfer VCR tapes to digital files (if you have a really slow Mac, you’ll want to invest in Elgato’s Eye TV 250 plus–to take advantage of the built-in hardware encoder).

Here’s a nice review of the EyeTV Hybrid, and another, and yet one more.

And finally, to give you some sense of the picture quality, here’s a snippet from the local broadcast of MHZ-TV 3 (France24 News Channel) I grabbed with the EyeTV Hybrid. To stream it, I later converted the recording to a “hinted” QuickTime movie and placed on the QTSS streaming server here in the office (click to view):