Caveat Lector

Sober monochromatic jacket-blouse-skirt ensemble for the first day, check. Rather snazzier (but still professional) outfit for the second day (when, presumably, the Ruritanians will have divined that I’m not an ax-murderer or the like), check. Appropriately restrained makeup, check. Earrings, check. Newly-shined shoes (have to pack them because their metal shanks won’t go through airport security screens, and have I mentioned lately that I hate air travel?), check. Neatly-trimmed hair, check. Static Guard for the fleece cape that’s rather classier than my grungy patchwork coat (it’s a nice cape, but it does get staticky), check.

I could say something about gilding lilies at this point, if it weren’t more a case of sow’s ears and silk purses, you know what I’m sayin’?

Him: “Is this an outgoing box here on the front porch?”

Me: “Box? I didn’t see a box. You’d better bring it in.”

Him: “Okay.” (Various sounds of box opening.) “It’s a sweater. Without a card or anything. An anonymous sweater.”

Me: “Maybe it’s poisoned.”

Him (at the same time): “Didn’t Hercules once get an anonymous sweater…?”

What this says about us, I’m not at all sure I want to know.

Well, I’m through all of next week’s homework except for a quick library-consult that I’ll handle on Monday, and I’ve written up my talk notes for Ruritania. Written them all the way out, actually. I don’t normally do this because I prefer to speak semi-extempore, but I’ve got so little time this time that I thought I needed to. The blog has given me plenty of practice in writing (more or less) how I speak, so I shouldn’t sound too horribly canned.

The blog, ah yes, the blog. The Ruritanians have been giving CavLec a pretty thorough going-over, judging (again) from my server logs. Though it wasn’t a Ruritanian who searched today for “career development” and nearly gave me a laughter-induced hernia.

Career development? Me? Honey, are you ever in the wrong place for that. I’m doing this all wrong, you see. This isn’t how a job hunt is supposed to go at all.

Because what I’m supposed to do is duck into the nearest phone booth and turn into Perfect Plastic Person. I then appear before the Ruritanians, who search me obsessively for flaws that (as Perfect Plastic Person) I gamely try to pretend I don’t possess. The Ruritanians aren’t supposed to see my warts until they’re stuck with ’em, because who hires a person with warts?

Obviously I’m not playing this that way. I mean, I’ve gone and nicknamed my potential future employers and colleagues as a nonexistent European country notable mostly for swashbuckling and all. And if the Ruritanians hadn’t found CavLec themselves, I’d have told them about it during my visit and invited them to take a look.

Because when you get right down to it, I don’t believe in employment surprises any more. I’d far rather build job relationships based on real knowledge. Here are my warts (I’m human, so I have ’em), say I, and oh, that’s all right, we think we can live with that, say they. (Or in an ideal world I don’t ever expect to find, they say, warts? What warts? We didn’t see any warts.)

Call it an acid test, if you will. Anybody who can look past CavLec and still hire me is likely to be good for me, and I for them. Anybody who likes CavLec—well, how can they not be my kind of people?

Anybody who gets antsy about CavLec, worried I’ll say or do Bad Things with it, or that it will Reflect Badly on them… probably needs to look at hiring somebody else. I’d rather work for someone who trusts me not to be a jerk or an idiot for the most part, not to mention someone willing to forgive me on the (reasonably rare) occasions that I am. In return, I can serve up a mildly self-deprecating, humor-laced straightforwardness that Perfect Plastic Person will never offer.

It’s about fit, really. A good employment relationship is about fit, rather than either employer or employee bending all out of shape to accommodate the other. CavLec is definitely an acid test of fit, because I’m pretty much all here. This is me. This is what you’re getting if you hire me. No surprises.

If I were the employer, I think I’d find that reassuring… but with weblogs so new-and-all, I don’t know how many employers think that way.

I’ll be finding out soon, though.

Before I buckle down to that database-comparison assignment, I wanted to retail a tidbit from yesterday’s class. We had a really stellar presentation on reading and negotiating database and e-journal licensing from guest speaker Julie Schneider of Ebling Library. (If any professional organizations need a speaker/trainer on this topic, grab her and pay whatever you have to. She’s that good.)

She pointed out a number of features and requirements to search the license for, and invited us to suggest other ones. “Accessibility!” I did not raise my hand and say, because everybody knows that’s my own particular hobbyhorse.

What do you know, the professor himself raised the point. “I wonder about ADA compliance,” he said thoughtfully. “Do you ever have that come up?”

“Why, no, I don’t think so,” she answered. “I don’t even know if any of our resources meet ADA standards.”

“They don’t,” I grumped. “None of ’em do these days.”

“Well,” the professor said, “something with a text-based interface like DIALOG, that should work… but anything web-based or with a fancy GUI, I’m betting you’re right.” I am right, at least about web interfaces; I did the research last year. But the point had been conceded, so I shut up.

Ms. Schneider said that she’d add that to her list of things to talk to vendors about—which makes me deeply happy. Because, really, all fancy-schmancy usability gripes aside, database interfaces need to grow up and become accessible post-haste, and it won’t happen until people ask for it.

Not three times three, but six times six for today’s birthday boy…

We both woke up at crack-of-dawn-thirty this morning; when I leaned over to kiss him and wish him a happy birthday, he opened his eyes and said “Oh! So I can open the big box now.”

Which he proceeded to do:

Like the other Lord of the Rings prop replicas I’ve bought him, this one is a pretty darn nice hunk of metal. It is also, erm, quite large. We haven’t quite worked out where we’re going to hang it yet.

It can wait until after his birthday.

In lieu of an actual post, a to-do list for today through leaving for Ruritania in a week:

• Get house ready for Wednesday-night houseguest.
• Bake David a birthday cake. Frost same. (By tomorrow. Knew I shoulda done it yesterday.)
• Research and write fairly hefty database-comparison paper. (Tuesday. Yikes.)
• Do up online survey for systems-analysis, on local and commercial survey software. (Next Wednesday. Have the questions, basically; just need to figure out the software.)
• Answer can’t-be-put-off-any-longer emails.
• Shop for food, including plane food.
• Chug through next week’s networking and search readings.
• Download the following week’s e-reserves to read on the plane coming back from Ruritania.
• Back up Silver Surfer (I always try to before I travel with it).
• Pack.
• Review/edit PowerPoint; refresh memory on a few of the obscurer topics; write up talk notes.
• Pack whatever I forgot to pack the first time.
• Last-minute fix to search lab exercises due Thursday. (ugh, almost forgot this)

I think that’s it. If nothing else hits me in the meantime. I really ought to get cracking on the planning software, too, but I’ve given myself an extra week on that because I’m seriously running out of life here.

Right. Time to put down the GIS books (so shiny!) and get to work.

Nearing the top of my rapidly-expanding to-do list is acquiring a book on Geographic Information Systems to read on the plane to Ruritania next week. (Going to try to dig one up tomorrow morning, if I can get down to campus early enough. Recommendations welcome.)

The latest RLG DigiNews just happened to include this article on digitizing maps from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which contains a clear and (to my admittedly unsophisticated eye) fairly comprehensive description of how they did it.

My gosh, is this GIS stuff gorgeously elegant or what? I love it! I wish somebody at SLIS taught it—I would have hung on every word. And the bit about cross-referencing place names through a gazetteer is brilliant.

Poor Walt is trying to do a nice thing for me and people like me who read onscreen, and all I can do is kvetch. It’s bad of me, no doubt about it. So I’m going to turn it into an opportunity to talk a little more about desperate-hacking, hoping to bring a little good out of evil.

I’m using a loose definition of “hacking” here. It’s not necessarily scripting or heavy-duty programming—sometimes it’s wading through a program’s configuration options to make it behave in a particular desirable way. For me, it’s sometimes writing a regular expression search-and-replace instead of fixing several instances of the same problem by hand.

Just to be clear, I’m not trying to push Walt to go in any particular direction. He’ll do whatever works for him, and that’s fine. He just makes an extremely convenient example.

Walt’s problem is a not-atypical one in markup circles. He’s got stuff in Microsoft Word (version unknown, so don’t talk to me about WordML) that he wants to put on the Web in HTML. He wants to keep typographical niceties such as curly quotes and em dashes. He wants a certain amount of typographical attractiveness in the final result, but he isn’t horrendously picky about his layout. He is extremely unwilling to hand-tweak HTML code. He is also extremely unwilling to learn new tools (especially if he has to manually chain tools together) or futz around with the process once it’s working, because this is not a one-time conversion deal—he wants to keep doing it as he creates new articles.

I want a few additional things, as it happens. I want Walt’s web pages to look at least half as polished as his PDFs. I want links and some basic navigation. I want reasonably clean code under the hood, because who knows what Walt (or someone else) may want to do with these in the future? (No, I’m not insisting on XHTML 1.0 Strict. Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional will do fine.)

So can a single process make both of us happy?

Well, sine qua non: there’d be an upfront development cost. We’d have to build a CSS stylesheet that made both Walt and me happy, and we’d have to turn me loose for a while until whatever I hack actually works, including handling grotty edge cases. (If I were hacking for myself, I wouldn’t be as picky; a few hand tweaks are no big deal for me. Walt, however, shouldn’t have to mess with that.) The question is whether we’d save time in the long run.

If I had access to Walt’s desktop and could install a scripting language, sure. Then it’d be easy. I could knock something out in Python to beat Word’s horrible HTML to a pulp in a day or three—and it’d handle a whole issue at a time, too, no cut-and-pasting individual articles. (Because, yuck. Who wants to do that all day?) Would I? Oh, sure. Here’s my thought process:

1. Is this problem patterned enough to be hackable? Yes, certainly. Process links and paragraph-internal spans of boldface or italics, chop up an issue into individual articles (found by their headings), dump each article into a canned HTML template containing links to CSS files and the basic navigation structure, write to disk, end of problem. (For extra points, take care of the FTP.) Same process for each zine issue, so no hand-tweak problems once the bugs are worked out.

   Lesson: Problems without patterns aren’t hackable. If you give me a random collection of Word documents from a random collection of people, I can’t swing a one-shot, no-tweaks conversion, because each document will be different from all other documents. Hacks need patterns to grab onto, because computers need patterns in order to work; it’s only human beings who are wired to impose patterns on what they see.

   Authors? When editors ask you to be consistent about your use of styles? THIS IS WHY. It isn’t petty authoritarianism, honest. Cataloguers? When programmers complain about MARC-tagging errors that don’t affect access? THIS IS WHY. You’ve obliterated a pattern; a human may be able to see past it, but the computer can’t.

2. Is this problem ongoing or repetitive? Yes. Walt wants to do essentially the same thing many times.

   I don’t bother hacking something for a one-time project if hacking will take me more time than fixing the problem by hand. Just common sense.

   The book I’m currently working on for the Digital Content Group has a few nasty pieces of two-column print. The OCR engine blithely captured a line at a time ignoring the columning entirely, which of course scrambled the text like eggs. I might be able to script part of a fix—but it’s not worth my time; there isn’t enough two-column text and it’s a rather hard problem owing to scannos and a basic lack of patterning. So I’m fixing it by hand.

   Lesson: Ongoing or repetitive tasks are top hack candidates. If you’re doing something by hand over and over, don’t; figure out how to hack it. But don’t spend an hour hacking something that’s a one-time two-minute hand-fix. Over time, one develops a sense of how long it’ll take to hack something versus hand-fixing it.

3. Is this problem so difficult (for the hacker in question, not for, say, Donald Knuth) that hacking it given the time constraints isn’t practical? Nah. I think I could swing this even in (ugh) VB, though I’d have to steal code from a friend of mine. (He won’t mind. He gave it to me.)

   This shouldn’t be a deal-breaker, though, or you’ll never hack anything. If it is a tough-but-solvable problem, ask yourself if what you’ll learn from it justifies the extra time it’ll take to hack it vis-a-vis hand-tweaking it. This, I think, is where a lot of librarians miss a lot of boats. You learn to hack by hacking; it’s not magic. I’m terribly rusty at the moment, in fact (not that I’ve ever exactly been expert), simply because I haven’t been doing much hacking lately. With any luck, whatever job I land will get me back into the swing of things.

   Lesson: Hack anything that’ll teach you how the system works. The knowledge will pay off down the road.

4. If I hack it, am I likely to create more problems than I solve? In this case, no; the alternative is that Walt either goes back to his old method or quits putting out HTML altogether, which wouldn’t bother him.

   But this is a serious consideration. Hacking your .htaccess file to keep out referrer spammers can bork your site. Loosing a regular expression on your file can change things you didn’t mean to change. Until a hack is pretty thoroughly tested, make sure it doesn’t overwrite any files or make any other irrevocable changes. (My personal regex search-and-replace engine simply can’t overwrite original input files, I’m so paranoid about this.)

   Lesson: Hacking can be dangerous. Practice safe computing.

I don’t have access to Walt’s desktop to install Python, though, so his problem gets a little harder. Either I have to use (ugh) VB to bend Word to my bidding, or I have to find tools that do what I need them to do without tripping Walt’s annoyance meter.

I still think I could do it without resorting to (ugh) VB. Almost. The sticky point is chopping up the issue into articles. If Walt’s willing to do that much by hand (and he is doing so now, as I understand it), the rest is feasible. All it takes is a search-and-replace engine capable of running a number of regular-expression search-and-replaces on a number of files at once. Given that, Walt saves out an issue, hand-cuts it up into articles, batch-runs the resulting files through the engine with a list of searches I would hack together, and that’s that.

Are there such engines? Yes. Ye UNIX types can button it, because I know about sed, thank you. Such engines exist for Windows with pretty GUI front-ends, is what I’m saying. For free, yet. (ReplaceEm is the slickest one I know about, but there are others.)

All in all, though, the safest route would probably be (ugh) VB, since Walt works in Word anyway. But that’s not the point. The point is: Some jobs are more hackable than others. Hacking a hackable job costs time in the short run but saves it in the long run. Hack safely, and you’ll be happy.

I see from my referrer logs that Ruritania U.’s librarians have dropped by. Hello, there. I’ve been wondering what took you so long to get here.

See you next week.

Seems I’ll be trying out this shoe-wearing business a bit sooner than I thought, seeing as how I have been invited to a pre-Valentine’s Day (escape the rush!) dinner at Porta Bella tonight. Seems to be going all right so far; I can definitely feel twinges, but I can walk like a normal human being despite them.

I won’t say the dinner had anything to do with this, but I won’t say it didn’t, either. Because I’m just evil that way.