Caveat Lector

Thunderbird has lovely import mechanisms for Eudora and old Netscape stuff.

Not a damned thing for MBOX. Its own format. Because I don’t care to waste brainspace figuring out why just pointing it to the right folder didn’t work, I downloaded an extension to do the job.

Which it did.

Folder. By. Folder. I have a lot of mail folders, how about you?

Still going to use Thunderbird, because I’m familiar with it and I don’t expect to have to do this again for a while. But what an inordinate pain!

(And I wasted an afternoon on this that I meant to spend working. Now I’m even further behind. Drat it.)

Today was a Thomas “all the ways it won’t work” Edison day. I learned fifty ways to break a DSpace installation. At least. Warning: heavy tech talk coming. I’m not sure I understand half what I’m about to say.

The problem I’m trying to solve actually shouldn’t be that hard. I wanted to kill the 8080 port number out of the DSpace install’s URL, and have the server make believe that the DSpace install lives at http://stageserver.mpow.edu (no, that’s not the real URL; all y’all don’t need to be trampling around my staging server) instead of at http://stageserver.mpow.edu/dspace/ where it actually lives).

You. Would not. BELIEVE. How hard. This really is.

The basic problem is that none of the DSpace, Tomcat, or JBoss docs are written for OS X Server. Whatever little haxxie I try, I have to translate into OS X’s view of the world, which isn’t the same as Linux’s or Solaris’s or anybody else’s. I spent a lot of time today messing with files that had nothing to do with anything. Moreover, a lot of the out-of-the-box config files contain commented-out stuff that may have worked three years ago but surely doesn’t now.

First I tried a Tomcat config hack emailed me by a friend, which didn’t work (I think) because it didn’t take JBoss into account. Next I tried getting mod_jk set up, since much of the work looked to have been done already. I failed. Wow, did I fail. I failed so regularly and so often that my poor boss had to move his weblog off the machine because I was bringing the server up and down so often testing new variations. (He was a perfect gentleman about it, I must say. I felt awful.)

I tried messing with iptables briefly, only to find that OS X has very particular notions of these things, and I don’t know enough to set it up correctly. More breakage, lots more.

At some point I had it auto-redirecting to port 10680 because of a VirtualHost directive that I think managed my boss’s blog. This is probably how I fried the blog in question. (Well, one way, anyway.) Fixed that by putting another VirtualHost on port 80.

I do have half the problem solved. On a tip from the DSpace wiki, I put ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse directives into the port 80 VirtualHost that did indeed kill the port number dead. What I couldn’t make them do was cope with the /dspace/ directory; if I put /dspace/ onto the end of the rule, I got to the front page, but every other link (CSS files, image files, links to the interior of DSpace) was dead broken, I think because it was looking for things in /dspace/dspace, which obviously doesn’t fly. I tried fixing the URL in dspace.cfg to account for this, but it didn’t work.

So when I undid those “fixes,” http://stageserver.mpow.edu/dspace/ worked right beautiful, but http://stageserver.mpow.edu/ brought up the Tomcat default page. (I spent a quarter-hour figuring out where the Tomcat default page actually was on the server. I really did.)

I tried mod_rewrite, but I was getting pretty punchy by this time, and couldn’t make it work. I think the issue may be that mod_rewrite takes precedence over mod_proxy, so I can’t rewrite the /dspace/ directory without blowing the port-8080 redirection. The other possibility is that I wasn’t writing the right RewriteRule (say that three times fast).

The aforementioned wiki page has a JSP haxxie which I got to work (after much futzing), but it doesn’t do a nice silent URL rewrite, oh, no. It says “Oh, you want stageserver.mpow.edu? Well, here’s stageserver.mpow.edu/dspace/.” Which is exactly what I’ve already got and don’t want. I mean, it’ll do, because anyone who goes to http://stageserver.mpow.edu/ will get to DSpace, but there’s got to be a better way.

I’m pretty much out of ideas. Anybody else got any?

I had a good day today. I got together with one of the GMUtants (not my term, I swear!) who found me via CavLec, and we had a fine start-up discussion during which I was actually able to pass on some helpful information, never a bad way to start a relationship between colleagues. I’ve also set up a meeting with the campus copyright office (for all the obvious reasons), and plenty of other librarians have been dropping by to welcome me.

I’ve a meeting tomorrow on a possible new project, and I feel about as ready for it as I can considering that it’s the first meeting I’ve been to and I don’t know how meetings run around here. Done my homework, anyway.

And we finally got DSpace installed on the staging server! And the last bugfix in our install was actually mine! Definitely the sort of thing that makes one feel one might actually get a handle on things in the long run. (Learned a few command-line Unix tricks in the process. Eat 2>/dev/null, uninformative stderr messages! I might earn some geek cred yet.)

For my next trick, I’ll figure out how to get the install to respond to a port-number-less URL. I think I might even be able to do this one on my own. When I do, that’s the first fix I’m making to the main install.

I named my iMac Trogool, because it is a white machine with a black keyboard and I’ve always wanted to name a machine Trogool.

I still have a mess of administrative stuff to figure out—timesheets, campus mail, relocation reimbursement, and such—but it was a good work day.

Icing on the cake: got a new power cord for my new pet Powerbook (which still languishes nameless, although I’m considering Galactus), and the humidity backed off a bit today such that I didn’t feel I was walking through a swamp.

Natural Born Cyborgs, which is one of my favorite nonfiction books from the last couple-three years, talks extensively about how much of our memory and cognitive skill we “store” in our physical environment.

Nothing proves the man’s point like moving. Nothing in this world. Seriously.

Just the numbers are enough to drive one bats. My place of work (hereinafter abbreviated MPOW) has a “G-number” that is the key to practically everything. Except the code-lock on my office door; I live in a communal office that doubles as a server closet. (Really. I do.) And then there’s my mail-stop number, my home and work phone numbers, my new library card number…

Oh, and speaking of my new library card number, I do wish the public library would pull its OPAC out from behind a card-number-enforced firewall. That’s just goofy, not to mention offputting for no good reason.

Anyway, bus numbers, bus-stop numbers, street addresses of important places, and all that jazz. My brain, she is breaking.

And then there’s the problem-solving, just one damned thing after another. I’d forgotten how much change (in the coinage sense) apartment living eats up. No problem, I said at first; our credit union is right across the street, so we’ll just go there and get quarter-rolls.

Except that the branch across the street doesn’t do cash withdrawals except via ATM. Let me say that louder: they don’t handle cash. What the heck kind of a financial institution doesn’t handle cash? Grrr.

There’s an arcade on campus that has a change machine. Said arcade is closed for renovation.

For now, I have been rescued by a coworker, whose roommate is apparently a bit compulsive about saving quarters and who was quite willing to exchange a ten-dollar bill for an envelope of jingle. Seeking a more permanent solution, before my brain overheats and melts.

I have an ID! And email! And access to employment records! And email! Lo, I exist!

My first trick is going to be doing a DSpace install on the staging server. And lo it is wholly beyond my capacity… but my boss is good-naturedly going to walk me through it the next time our schedules coincide (which could be a few days, as I have to meet with HR tomorrow morning and he has to do something else tomorrow afternoon).

I tried. I really did. I followed instructions, and got completely stuck when “adduser” inexplicably failed to work.

“By the way,” said my boss a few hours later (hours during which I occupied myself with other things), “you have to ignore the adduser stuff; in OS X a user called “appserver” owns everything. So you have to make sure that the folder you install into has appserver as its owner.”

Oh. Righty-ho, then. That’s more or less when I decided I needed help. I mean, I know from chown, but I’m sure there are other little nasties waiting for me.

In the meantime, I’ve been taking the nickel tour of Java Server Pages, just enough to be dangerous. (Because the default DSpace HTML is yucko, emphasis on the yuck, and the information architecture is even worse, for reasons I intend to bloviate upon at some length when I have time. This will change.) The wall is being scrawled upon, however; I need to learn me some Java. Fortunately, the local community college teaches it online.

Need to learn me some PostgreSQL, too. That’s a mite scary. I wonder if the community college teaches that too, or if they just stick to Access and generic db-design courses?

Eh, well; I’ll find out. Matters are progressing on the human side of the job, so I’m not unhappy with what I did today.

Move over, Michael Moore. There’s a more subversive director in town, and his name is…

Tim Burton.

I don’t care what anybody else says. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory isn’t about candy. Nor about cute woobies who look like pirates. Nor, ultimately, about children (though, hey, I appreciate Dahl’s unvarnished take on childhood as much as anyone, and I dearly loved the Beauregarde-Salt moment and wish it had been followed up on).

Er, if you don’t want to know what this movie is about, you probably want to stop reading this post now.

Right. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? The Tim Burton movie? Is about labor, abuse thereof.

I don’t need to do a close-reading on the Bucket establishment and how labor exploitation made it the way it is; that’s clear enough. (I’m definitely amused by the toothpaste factory hiring Mr. Bucket back at an advanced salary to fix a machine that did the work Mr. Bucket used to do at a crap salary. Heh. Nice hit at automation and computers. Perhaps straight from the book, too; I honestly don’t recall.)

Nor I don’t need to comment on Mr. Salt’s legions of low-paid pink-clad panopticonned women, neither.

Of course the Oompa-Loompas don’t exist; Mr. Teavee is quite right about that. They can’t exist. They’re the perfect worker. They’re all identical, so none of the friction caused by clashing egos and ladder-climbing and all that jazz. They live on a byproduct of the factory, so they’re cheap. They’ve been rescued from (what they considered to be) squalor, so they’re infinitely loyal. They’ll do whatever Wonka wants, from rowing galleys (wow, that was just… blatant) to arranging to have his guests offed in sundry unpleasant ways while singing and dancing to spare him the blame. And they don’t have to sign consent forms to be used as experimental subjects.

Not to mention that they’re foreign. Outsourcing, anyone? Mm-hm.

And then there’s the squirrels. Highly-trained, my fanny—what squirrel needs to be trained to open nuts? Wonka is simply taking advantage, binding the mouths of the kine and so forth. Where else is a squirrel going to work?

As for young Charlie (spoilers ho!), he is faced with the same choice tons of American workers face: your job, or your family?

You can watch the whole movie this way, and in fact I recommend it.

I knew this reading was something the crew intended when the camera got close on a pair of scrapbook pages near the end of the movie. You’ll know ’em when you see ’em, yep yep.

The odd thing is, I think Dahl would have loathed this reading, and loathed the movie because of it. But it works beautifully. I tip my hat to Burton and August. Love a good bit of subversion, I do.

Well, my first day at work was a bit anticlimactic; I don’t actually exist yet because my paperwork hasn’t yet been folded, spindled, mutilated, et cetera. No email account, no employee record, no nothing. I do, however, have a desk, a gorgeous new iMac, my pet Kinesis keyboard, and my pet chair, adjusted to my liking. (All of this, including me, may be up for a move later on. I haven’t heard the latest on this, though.)

So I spent the day getting friendly with OS X (I’m not completely happy with my setup yet, but I’m happier than I was), making appointments to become de-unpersoned, filling out de-unpersoning forms (lots of these), and poking around in DSpace space to pick up ideas for our install.

(Right now I have more ideas than I can possibly implement. Must slow down a wee bit, at least until I can implement stuff unassisted. Also mustn’t neglect human side of job, though working on that is impossible without email!)

The pod will arrive on the 28th, so the big de-podding party will be the 30th, and folks are welcome to drop by and help out any time between the 28th and the 1st. (The pod goes away again on the 2nd.) If you’re local and still willing to help out, drop me a line and I’ll give you my phone number. There will be lots of friends-I-haven’t-met-yet helping out, but if someone would prefer to meet me and/or David in a public place first, we can set that up. (There’s this cute hole-in-the-wall Thai place down the street…)

What I think I’ll do, if we get enough people on the day, is a sort of bucket-brigade setup. It makes more sense to pass things down the line and up the stairs than have people trotting back and forth the entire distance and getting in each others’ way. And that way the utility cart can be used in the parking lot, and the dolly can get stuff up the stairs, so less actual lifting and hauling. (Yes, we have both a utility cart and a heavy-duty dolly. Buying was cheaper than renting, go figure.)

The weather has been unbelievably horrid. Not especially hot, just tropical-humid, dewpoints in the mid-70s. We’ve had to use the apartment air-conditioner not so much for cooling as for de-humidification. I know I grew up in this yuck and therefore ought to be able to handle it, but childhood wisdom is proving surprisingly elusive.

Oh, and does purchasing tahini get one onto terrorist lists or something? Because I’ve been to four different stores and have yet to find any. Hummus, yes, but not this essential building block thereof. What gives?

I’m going to wander downtown today and pick up a library card, now that I have a set of keys to the apartment. (Only one resident previously, so only one set of keys. Not a tenable situation, long-term.) David has been making going-shopping noises, which is fine with me.

Until I become a person (middle of next week, latest), I’m going to mess about with the backup DSpace install, and look over some actual installations (as opposed to secondhand chatter about same) so that I can get my head on straight about the bigger picture. (The University of Rochester is supposed to have an intriguing one.) That plus tweaking OS X (gah! forgot to install nsgmls! what’s wrong with me?) should keep me plenty busy.

We made it. The expected DSL was not available owing to a phone-number snafu with Verizon. (Which I thought I’d resolved this morning, but David’s parents say they still can’t get through. Sigh.) Using wireless now.

The Goths survived the ordeal, though they predictably weren’t happy about it. Didi hunkered in her carrier and emitted “I’M MISERABLE!” waves in all directions, while Dream yowled a lot and burrowed busily into our sides when we let him out of the carrier (leashed, of course) in O’Hare and Dulles.

I hate, loathe, abominate, and abhor O’Hare as an airport, by the way. (The Bus/Shuttle Center is actually an amazingly convenient regional transportation hub.) I trucked from one concourse to another on information from the first flight, sat two hours, and then had to retrace my steps entirely owing to a gate change. Not to mention that debarking onto the tarmac meant hideous construction noise, completely ruining any chance poor Dream had at composure. He just howled, poor beastie, and there wasn’t anything I could do for him.

Our pilot out of Chicago did a nice bit of flying, getting us into Dulles in the nick of time before a thunderstorm that shut down baggage handling. Of course, this meant waiting an hour for our luggage. Yay Dulles, Home of the Gray Walls, Gray Floor, and Heck, Gray Everything. Dreariest damn airport anywhere.

The Goths did not much approve of their new home. Didi sniffed about a bit and then hopped back into her carrier and looked up at us beseechingly. “Okay, housemonkeys, this has been a fine joke—take me home now.” They’re better today (though we had to reorient the fridge because Didi managed to get herself lost behind it), though still a bit clingy.

We’re roughing it for a week or so until the pod gets here. (Something’s up with their phones; endless ringing this morning. I assume they’ve got Dennis overwork problems, because I’m still getting automated email from them.) In the meantime, we’ve bought a few groceries and miscellaneous oddments like bath mats, scoped out the local shopping, opened a credit-union account, failed to find someplace to duplicate our single set of apartment keys, failed to find a vet who can provide the Goths’ prescription food, walked down to campus, and watched the penguin movie (which is pretty amazing).

Tomorrow I hit work; let us hope work doesn’t hit back too hard, because I’m still tired. If you sent me email and I haven’t answered, give me another day or two, please. Thanks.

Eleven years ago, I was in the process of catching hell from my parents for moving in with a guy. It was fine that I was moving; I was going to grad school, which as Everyone and Ivan Tribble Knows is the proper destination for bright young things just out of college. But moving in with a guy? Ever so very Not Done.

They took me out to dinner shortly before I left. It was either a sendoff or a belated birthday dinner; I don’t recall which. I do, however, remember getting out of the car in the ugly strip-mall parking lot and looking up at an ugly variegated dirty-grey sky, around sunset. A patch of dark grey gave way, and behind it I saw a patch of rainbow.

Nobody saw it but me. It was my patch of rainbow, nobody else’s. Laugh at me if you like, but I immediately felt better about my journey.

Tonight we ordered in from our favorite Thai place and ate standing up in the kitchen. I got a call from my mom, which saved me having to call her, and just as I hung up, an inconsequential rain-shower started. The sun poked through some cloud-scraps in the west, and I said to myself, “Hmmm… I wonder if…”

And indeed, the guy I moved in with eleven years ago and I hastened out to the front porch and thence to the driveway to watch a big, bright rainbow, one of the extra-vivid ones that has a dimmer echo a little way further up, outlining the southeastern sky.

Cars passed by, and a few drivers turned their heads, wondering what two idiots (one of them barefoot) were doing standing out in their driveway in the rain. They didn’t see our rainbow. It was ours.

I do have a superstitious streak, I’ll admit. If the omens for Madison were good eleven years ago, the omens for graduate school weren’t. What with my fortuitous fortune cookie and now our rainbow, though, I am clearly being told to relax, and I intend to follow that advice.

David and I went up to the library so we’d have somewhere to sit that wasn’t the floor. I picked up a book from the new-book shelves that I didn’t quite get to finish and am going to pick up again at my earliest opportunity.

I also recommend that all of you do the same. All of you. And if you do, and you have a blog, please post your reactions to it therein. This book sheds enough light on some of our more tendentious blogsphere debates that I think it needs to be widely read.

The book is by Anna Fels, and is called Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives. (Random WorldCat question: why don’t new books seem to be fast-tracked onto Open WorldCat? We’re missing a trick here, librarians. I shouldn’t have had to use a Powell’s link.)

If you’re female and went “eewwww” when you saw the word “ambition,” join the club. I resisted this book something awful. It just kept right on jabbing me in tender spots with behaviors and phenomena I recognized—female distaste for the word “ambition” being a case in point, of course.

Thesis, in brief and probably misstated: Ambition consists of desired mastery of a domain plus recognition of that mastery. While women have made great strides in actually mastering domains, we’re still frozen out of the recognition business for many and varied reasons, and it hurts us.

Oh, did I resist that thesis. Bitterly and hard. Mastery is supposed to be enough, don’t you know (and that’s another one Fels takes apart at the seams). But doesn’t this begin to explain why the women-blog-too arguments get so acrimonious? Why the Ivan Tribbles and Michael Gormans and Blaise Cronins of this world single out blogs for derision? (My read on Fels’s read: because blogging offers a decentralized recognition and validation system that the Ivan Tribbles et cetera of this world don’t control.)

That said, I skipped ahead to Fels’s conclusions, and thought they were weak. If there’s another edition of this book (and I want there to be!), I hope she rewrites the final chapter. For one thing, Fels joins the chorus of people pointing out that women’s unequal share of the unrecognized work of childrearing is a serious psychological and economic burden. Her fix, however, lies purely in making sure mothers get their fair share and fathers do their fair share. This is fine, as far as it goes, but I do wish we could expand the concept to “reducing the burden of childrearing on women,” which most definitely includes “eliminating the tremendous social pressure on women to have children in the first place.” Hello? Dr. Fels? We’re here, we’re childfree, and we’re not going away!

In that same concluding chapter, Fels claims to have no advice for women navigating the uncertain shoals of ambition. She missed the cryingly obvious: if recognition is so important, offer it to women, don’t just seek it! We can all do that. We should. (If you think this post is partly motivated by getting Fels some of her due, gold star for you. It is.) I’m convinced enough by Fels’s argument and the evidence she marshals for it (some of which I do think is weak, but much of which is quite strong) to start making extra effort to get women some recognition.

I hope others will do likewise.