Category Archives: Tech

Brief Note

I’ve not been around much and will continue not to be.

But… I just had to point to this article that AKMA has brought to our attention on “Adventure: Search for the Colossal Cave.” Those who recognize the name will need no reminding; for those who don’t, an introduction really won’t suffice–because one can never capture what it all means to those of us who played it back then.

The article is fascinating, but doesn’t answer a question that I’ve wondered about for quite a while. At what point in the game’s history did the den of the software wizard disappear? I have vivid memories of the room littered with Dr. Pepper cans sporting a pin-up of a nude Cray-1 supercomputer that somehow was missing from later versions I’ve played… Anybody know?

Busy Night: Normal Life

We’re doing some short-term elder-care right now for a colleague’s aunt who has mild Alzheimer’s. M and the girls have been there all day for the past week plus. It’s a rough schedule and fairly exhausting. I help out when I can in evenings and weekends–so I was there all day today. (It’s like dealing with three toddlers instead of two–one of whom has the same conversation with you every fifteen minutes or so.)

Now, M is at the desk behind me finishing up a sermon for tomorrow’s supply gig; I’m trying to figure out how to install Oracle on my test server since it turns out that my side-job’s web host is discontinuing MySQL support. What fun…

Third Time’s a Charm?

*Sigh* I was planning to get a lot done tonight. Didn’t happen. I made a silly error on protocols for handling file extensions and ended up reinstalling the OS from scratch… On the upside–I’m trying a new OS. :-D

I started out with this box on Ubuntu. That was working okay. Then, I needed to install some stuff but cleverly forgot/couldn’t locate the root password. At that point I said–hey, I’m a Windows guy from before Windows existed–why use Ubuntu which uses Gnome as a graphical interface (a Mac clone)? Why not try Kubuntu which uses KDE–a Windows emulator? (Especially since the price is the same…) It was okay–I had no major problems but I did notice a performance difference. It was slower…

This is an *old* box I’m working off of.

When I made my goof tonight I said, well, why not round it out with Xubuntu which is designed for more basic systems. So, I spent what was supposed to be productive coding time reinstalling the operating system, retweaking Firefox, and setting up my lampp stack. And in case any one else is trying this, I *heartily* recommend this site and its download. After several days trying to manual compile a stack on my Windows unit I discovered their Windows version and was good to go in under an hour. This is the second time I’ve used it on this box (once with Kubuntu, now once with Xubuntu) and haven’t had a bit of trouble.

In the meantime, however while waiting on downloads/installs/and such I’ve been glancing through Oscar Cullman’s Essays on the Lord’s Supper, John Koenig’s New Testament Hospitality, and Luke Johnson’s Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity.

Much more important than these, though, I got to spend some quality time with M which I’ve been missing a lot recently because of my crazy schedule…

Chant Posts from Comrades

bls has linked to the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society. For those unfamiliar with the group, you may recognize the name of Walter Frere, Anglican priest (was he a bishop too? I forget…) and liturgist. He’s one of the biggest names associated with the group and is due a great debt of gratitude for his work on Medieval English Music. Anyway, great stuff including a nice catalog of current stuff in print (in pounds, though…)

Chris has given us some goodies of his own: music for the Compline hymns according to the texts of the Anglican Breviary and the Antiphonale from NLM.He’s using TeX for it–a system that I’ve heard about peripherally but am basically unfamiliar with. After seeing these pdfs I may need to give it a serious look…

Welcome to the New Digs

This is the new web home of haligweorc.

There will be a few more changes coming in the near future. All good as far as I know…

We did loose a post or two and a few comments but other than that, everything else seems to have made the change fairly well.

I’m hoping to have left some baggage behind at the old site. Much less will be written about the Great Unpleasantness; much more will be written about things spiritual and medieval. Hopefully much more will be written of and therefore on the Damn Dissertation. Time will tell…

Medieval Databases

No, silly, databases about medieval things…

There’s been some discussion about medievalist folks thinking about manuscript databases. I have a great deal of interest in the subject–but absolutely no time to do anything about it. If I may offer a few points of professional advice–since I am a database programmer in my day job:

  • Don’t choose a database because it happens to be the one on your computer. I.e., yes, you may well have MS Access on your computer if you’ve got the full Office Suite. No, don’t use it just because it’s there. Consider how you will use the database. Is it for merely personal use? Maybe Access will work for you. Do you want to put it on the web? Think about using MySQL instead. It integrates really well with a dynamic programming language called PHP. In fact, a whole lot of commercial websites are MySQL/PHP integrations. Limited project budget? You’re in luck–MySQL is free… (And so’s a good front-end for Windows here.)
  • Plan your database in advance. The biggest failing of most amateur databases is a lack of planning in the beginning stages. Think about you want to capture. Then, consider what fields make sense together in terms of tables, and what will tie those tables to one another.
  • A major issue that often comes back to haunt beginners is field normalization. In plain English, it means making sure that your data is in small enough bits. Thus, a shelfmark field shouldn’t contain “London, BL, Cotton Nero D IV” Rather, three different fields should have “London”, “British Library” and then “Cotton Nero D IV”. When in doubt, use multiple fields.
  • In terms of front-ends (that is, what a user will see as opposed to the back-end which is what the programmer interacts with) flashy is cool–but achieve stability first. Then go for cool. All the napkin drawing will be pointless if you can’t get your data out the way you want it…
  • Academics spend years learning dead languages and grappling with French poststructuralists, et al.; not all have invested the time in learning the technologies to disseminate what fruits they’ve gathered. When in doubt, talk with your IT department and their techies. Consider taking the money saved from buying a database and get a research assistant fluent in computer…

No, I haven’t been putting any thought into this recently. Why do you ask? Of course it had completely slipped my mind that Mediawiki works off a MySQL back-end… As does WordPress…

I’m going to stop talking now…