Caveat Lector

I have the best friends. Sorry, y’all, but y’all just aren’t in it for friends.

The last time I got a Thing in a box, I speculated incorrectly as to the precise Thing-ishness of the Thing in question. Li seems to have taken that to heart, because I got a delayed birthday present today:

Now that is a Thing. Just ask Dream.

And while we’re on the topic of things, I got a not-very-good picture of our Mr. Batley:

As you can see, he’s waving. He’s really quite friendly, our Mr. Batley. But being a bit of an upside-down sort, he waves with his hind feet.

Walt wants to know what’s truly life-changing and what isn’t. I tell you what, graduating school, moving cross-country, and starting a new job is bloody life-changing, that’s what! I’ve had so much change happening lately it’s almost painful to think about more.

But I’m usually up for a thought-experiment, so let’s see.

Publishing a book or keynoting a conference would earn me dinner and some job publicity, I think. The book thing keeps almost happening—the part where the publisher says “Hey, wanna write a book?” anyway. Haven’t gotten beyond that part yet, but I may, someday.

I would blog with bemused snideness about nomination to Who’s Who or an honorary doctorate (which I would decline, and y’all may hold me to that on the extraordinarily remote chance it should happen), and then I would fixedly ignore it. I can’t help what other people do to publicize it, but I can certainly refuse to assist with its publicity, and I would do so as much as possible.

A big honkin’ library award would get the cash honorarium spent on a party, because why not? And of course job publicity’s a given there.

A MacArthur grant? Excuse me while I howl with laughter. Just not going to happen.

Winning the lottery would make me step back and think a bit before going public, but not so much because I’d want to change my life completely as because I’d want to figure out how not to. I like what I do. I like the people I work with. I like the problems my work poses me (yes, I do, as much as I whine about them), and I like the impact what I do has on the world. Metric tons of money would do their best to disrupt what I like about my worklife, and I don’t want that.

So I’d keep my mouth shut, if possible, until I had a plan in place.

It really should not have taken me an hour yesterday to send a simple fax to our real-estate agent.

Leaving out the long and involved troubleshooting process, the problem appears to be that whenever I plug our multifunction machine into the phone line, said line goes dead as a doornail.

I would surely love to know why.

Now all I have to do is pop the Latin-dates hack back in, and all is well with CavLec once more. (I hope nobody popped by while the template was still missing the </div> tag on the header. Dear me, how embarrassing.)

Can’t say I miss that ugly green. I like green as a general thing, but that green was just appalling.

I am living in interesting times at work, but discretion demands I hold my tongue. Possibly not forever, though; when it all blows over, there may be a conference paper lurking. It’s nothing threatening or irresolvable, I hasten to say—just rather novel.

Don’t let me forget to wear something decent tomorrow. All-staff meeting, which means the newbies have to stand up and be recognized.

I could make this a very short post and just say that I was right, but that’s no fun.

Via digitizationblog, a PDF FAQ from Michigan (really, people, couldn’t that have been HTML?) that answers quite a few of the questions I’ve had about the project since I first heard of it.

For example, file formats. I quote:

• Most pages (i.e., those that consist of print without illustrations) are delivered to Michigan as 600dpi TIFF images using ITU G4 compression.
• Occasionally, pages include significant illustrations; these are provided to Michigan as 300dpi JPEG2000 images.
• OCR (performed by Google) is provided with each page.

Call that a reading-ready digital object? I don’t. Not that it’s not useful; linguists in particular should be drooling right now. What a corpus! But no, it’s not going to magically turn into a stack of ebooks. Come on. It never was.

Question 28 (”Why does UM want its own digital copy?”) is a red herring; I doubt anyone ever asked it. Still, it’s important that UM get its licks in on that subject, because preservation is an issue that the copyright hawks should be assailed on.

All in all? I’m still waiting and seeing. Important as this project is, it’s not what either its cheerleaders or its detractors think it is.

(I think DSpace is cruising for its own category. Maybe after I fix CavLec’s styling problems.)

Set phasers on “confusticate and bebother these developers,” Mr. Spock. I just spent all day trying to figure out why the hell I couldn’t get submission buttons working in my install the way they work in a normal DSpace install.

See, in said normal DSpace install, they look like cute little ellipses chained in a line with instructions in them. Steps you’ve completed are marked with filled-in red ellipses and are buttons, so that you can click to go back; steps you haven’t finished are outlined in gray and grayed-out; the current step is outlined in red.

Except in my new one, they’re just buttons, and they look dreadful and don’t at all explain what’s going on. Can’t have that, so I started fiddling.

Firefox does a magnificent job of ignoring styling on input buttons. I messed with it for two solid hours, trying to get it to admit that color and background-color are meaningful concepts to it. No soap.

So I copied the CSS from the original DSpace stylesheet. Surely that would work?

Nope. Persistent soap absence. WTF?

Nothing I did—and I did a lot of things—fixed it. Try as I might, those cute little elliptical buttons just weren’t happening.

Finally I had to tool over to MARS and start a bogus submission (don’t worry; I’ll never finish it, so it won’t mess up our live server) to sort out what was going on.

It was all a cheat. A cheat, I tell you! The CSS in their file is meaningless! Here’s what they do. Some widget somewhere takes generic GIF ellipse backgrounds and slaps messages onto them when DSpace is built. The resulting GIFs are saved to a folder and plopped onto the page, either as a straight <img> element or as part of an <input type="image"> element. If for some reason this chain of events gets broken (and I’m still not sure how I broke it, but I clearly did break it!), there’s a plain-vanilla HTML backup, which is how I was getting my wholly-unstyleable buttons.

(If there’s a workaround to Firefox’s unstyleable buttons, I’d surely appreciate hearing about it—)

Unfortunately, understanding the problem didn’t hand me the solution this time. I busily delved into the program code, hoping to turn off the <input> elements for parts of the submission process that haven’t happened yet (because that, if you like, is confusing—input buttons that don’t do anything!).

The other possibility was replacing DSpace’s colored background GIFs with something that works better with my current design. If I could get whatever build process it is to work again, that is. I hated this idea, though, because text-as-graphics irritates the life out of me.

It gets better. Hold onto your hats, folks.

The images were a DSpace 1.2 thing. DSpace 1.3 got rid of them. I spent all damn day chasing down a code-change between versions. (And, yes, this does mean that MARS is running 1.2 while my staging server is running 1.3. Feature, not bug.)

I shouldn’t have to do this. I really, really shouldn’t. It’s maddening. Fundamental pieces of DSpace’s usability shouldn’t be this vulnerable to tweaking, nor should any designer be stuck with DSpace’s developers’ notion of color and shape choice.

I am brainstorming a paper on DSpace usability and customization issues. Anybody want to coauthor?

It’s hard for a white girl to praise diversity without sounding like Richard Florida in his Creative Class books. When I reread the first one for Info and Labor last year, I realized just how patronizing and insensitive Florida’s attitude toward (specifically) racial and ethnic diversity really was. “It’s great, as long as Those People are amusing and never actually get in the way or anything,” says Florida; “what are they for, after all, if not amusement for their betters?”

Which is a horrible, horrible message, and one I want no part of. Florida’s people want to be proud of diversity without engaging with it, want to be entertained but not enlightened by it, want it to stay confined to a downtown playground without any actual impact on their own pet neighborhoods—you know, the ones they actually live in.

(I am treading on the edge here, because Florida works at MPOW. But oh, well; he’s got nothing to fear from me, so why would he care that I despise his first book and have since I first read it? And, for the record, his work is like anybody else’s with regard to the performance of my job duties.)

So I feel I’m on thin ice saying this, but I want to say it nonetheless: I’m glad for the diversity of the place I now live in. I dig hearing Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish on the morning bus ride. The things I’ve learned about English-Spanish code switching from other people’s cell-phone conversations would make a great dissertation. (I wish I had a better time with Cuban Spanish, though. The missing esses throw me off, still.)

I love that ordinary grocery stores like the one I shop in have fresh serrano peppers and seven different kinds of queso fresco. (Actually, I wish the cheese selection here were better, but that’s what happens when you move away from Wisconsin; cheese becomes a specialty food instead of an acknowledged staple.) And, hey, I finally found the tahini, so go me.

It makes me happy that MPOW can claim to have the most diverse student body in the country. I don’t know if it’s true, even (though from the summer inhabitants, I’ve no reason to doubt it), but I love that they claim it, that they’re proud of it.

Half the people in my building don’t look a damn thing like me, and that suits me just fine. And no, that’s not just because I get tired of looking at my own homely countenance, though I do.

Not all is roses. It’s easy for me to rejoice; I just jumped a social class or two, from pink-collar all the way to professional. (I’m finding it sits awkwardly, but that’s a subject for another post.) I cringe at the racial homogeneity of, say, the librarians I work with as compared to, say, the folks working in the food court. It’s just embarrassing. And I hear “Salvadoran gangs” tossed carelessly around by white folks, and it makes me want to go eat at the hole-in-the-wall Salvadoran place down the street (if I weren’t absolutely sure there’s not a vegetarian choice anywhere on the menu), just to put my money where my annoyance isn’t.

I want to hope, though, that the price of diversity is not social injustice. I want to think that injustice that fractures along ethnic lines is only made more visible thereby. That’s dreadfully naive of me, I suppose—the usual result is the invisibility of injustice, instead. It’s not as though there’s a whole lot less injustice in the white-ville I came from, however; given the choice between a lily-white unjust society and a diverse unjust society, I prefer the latter.

And not for the serrano peppers, lovely though they are.

Last weekend, as I believe I mentioned, I got a bill from my ex-webhost, and decided that I wouldn’t be using their services any longer.

(It’s been an expensive month for computing, I fear. I had to pay the registration for yarinareth.net this month too, and I sprang for the cost-efficient seven-year deal. Then there’s the Netgear router that decided it didn’t want to work with my machines. Then hosting on top of that. Ouchies.)

I found a new host, signed up, and got the party rolling. Next day at work? I was having a really swell day browser-testing (everything except the font sizes worked in IE/Win, first go! how often does that happen?) when suddenly the browse-authors page died for no obvious reason.

Fixed that. (Part of learning a new system is learning where to look when things break. I’m definitely getting a crash course in that.) Then I hopped onto the admin pages in an idle moment, and suddenly my inbox was filling up with panic-button messages from DSpace.

It was a PostgreSQL problem. I know nothing of this PostgreSQL of which you speak. My boss good-humoredly shook a finger at me as he left and said “You better have that fixed by tomorrow morning!” I had an hour remaining in my workday. I assented, dubiously (knowing full well he didn’t mean it).

But I tell you what, I had that sucker fixed in another half-hour. Go me. Did you know that PostgreSQL commands have to be terminated in semicolons? ’Cuz I didn’t.

Got home to find a wireless cable router waiting for me. Nifty! Set it up. Connection between Macs and router kept dying. Not so much with the nifty. So I borrowed a router the next day, grinding my teeth rather, and damn if the same problem didn’t keep happening. This got me beyond tooth-grinding all the way to “the only thing keeping this machine from defenestration is the expense of replacing it.” I could jury-rig things such that David’s wireless-challenged G4 was the only machine in the house without access, and so I did.

But I am getting ahead of myself. As soon as I signed up for the new webhost, I promptly toddled over to ex-webhost’s CPanel and started downloading blog databases. Then I switched the DNS over to the new host. I got Li’s blog back up and running, for which Li was grateful, but then she asked, “So where did my August posts go, exactly?”

Er. What, now? I popped into phpMyAdmin and took a look. All the blog databases cut off cold after July 12. The blogs themselves were fine. Ergo, the blogs were not pointing to the same databases that CPanel and phpMyAdmin were. QED. No way I could check out the problem myself, much less fix it; my ex-hosts didn’t offer shell access.

I opened a support ticket. My ex-hosts took nearly three days to resolve it (though in their defense, the higher-up support guy I was eventually referred to was very polite and helpful), me chewing my fingernails to approximately my armpits the while. (Oh, hush up. Some of these DSpace posts are going to be fodder for an article soon, I think. Don’t want to lose them.)

Yes, indeed, they’d forgotten to move DNS pointers for the databases to the new machine. Here are your databases back, and thank you for your patience.

Whew.

A lot of search sweat today (mostly not through Google) found some band-aid fixes for my router problems, and so far things seem to be good. (Hold that thought, though. When the entire network stays up for 24 hours at a time? I’ll call it fixed.) Once I turn CavLec’s design into an actual WordPress theme (which I’ve been procrastinating on for months, but now I have to, because this green thing is just depressing), all should be well. Everybloggy else in the yarinareth.net universe is getting along fine (or if not, I haven’t heard about it).

Been a bad, bad week for me and computers, though. “AUGH! I HATE COMPUTERS!” I howled to Adrian in IM the other day.

“Congratulations, you have now achieved the base state of any good server administrator,” he told me. Yay. Or something.

The shock of the day (aside from getting CavLec up and running again) was learning that Jan Velterop is joining Elseviley Verlag. Springer, to be exact. As corporate open-access spokesperson.

Let me be clear. I wish only for good things to come of this. I’ve no grudge against Mr. Velterop; quite the contrary, in fact. I’ve read his stuff. It’s excellent. (Did you guys see the cogent argument for small-society publishers to go OA? Eminently readable. I’ve apparently got a small-society publisher somewhere at MPOW who is snarly about OA; should I run into him, this is my ammunition.)

But, honestly? I don’t see this lasting, for the same reasons Bruce Perens didn’t last at Hewlett-Packard. Corporations think it’s a wizard PR move to hire “the opposition” to run—well, something that the corporation has been steadily opposing. I’ve never, ever seen this end well. At some point, the new spokesmodel says something that’s just Beyond the Pale, or gets fed up with the corporation being all smiles and no action, and everyone parts brass rags.

I’d like to be wrong about this. I’d love to be wrong. I don’t think I’m wrong.

Wow. That was a longer and uglier outage than even I would have thought possible. (And a long story. I’m still fuming.)

I’ll try to get things back in gear here as quickly as I can. Until then—what can I say? Unadorned HTML is the mark of the true text artisan. Or something.