Rhaptos Software Development - Developer Blog

CNXML 0.6 anticipates HTML 5.0 elements

jccooper — 2009-06-16T13:58+00:00

HTML5 has some audio/video elements, only now supported in a Mozilla 3.5 beta, that will map well to the new CNXML 0.6 elements.

Spam Fighting Again

jccooper — 2009-05-29T11:13+00:00

A new Report-A-Bug spam pattern has arisen, and I've closed it off.

Proposed Continuous Build Setup

ew2 — 2009-05-28T09:22+00:00

A diagram and a short description of all parts of a continuous build system for Connexions

Module Web Rendering Pipeline

bnwest — 2009-05-27T14:51+00:00

Discussion of how CNX module get rendered for browsers.

Collection XML First Draft

cbearden — 2009-05-11T13:26+00:00

We're big

jccooper — 2009-04-30T10:17+00:00

Among a listing of the web's top Plone sites, we're there.

Module Edit Workflow Unplanned Work

ew2 — 2009-04-27T09:08+00:00

In an effort to track unplanned work in Sprints, I am documenting unplanned work from the Module Edit Workflow Sprints.

Roles and Attribution in Collections

cbearden — 2009-04-15T17:32+00:00

Authors, editors, compilers, publishing organizations? (Added an update 2009-04-16 9:27)

Updated the feeds page on Trac

kef — 2009-04-10T10:32+00:00

On rhaptos under "Documentation" and "API's", http://rhaptos.org/docs/apis/, we point to a trac page with all our feeds, https://trac.rhaptos.org/trac/rhaptos/wiki/RSSFeeds. I updated that with the lens feeds. (A while back, but forgot to publish)

CNX UI Design Considerations

kef — 2009-04-10T10:31+00:00

I would like to start of a design guide for new Connexions features with a list of design considerations that are important and tend to trip up good design if they don't get thought through early. The guide should cover both logic design and UI design. This posting suggests some initial ideas.

More on correctness testing of l10n performance changes

cbearden — 2009-04-09T15:31+00:00

Notes on correctness testing of the l10n performance changes

cbearden — 2009-04-06T15:44+00:00

We've removed gentext template calls from content_render.xsl, and we've restructured the l10n apparatus considerably; now, let's make sure we aren't mangling everything.

Module Edit Workflow Phase 1 Sprint 2 Review

ew2 — 2009-04-06T15:23+00:00

Connexions team completed and reviewed Module Edit Workflow Phase 1 Sprint 2 as part of their process improvement.

Module Edit Workflow Phase 1 Sprint 1 Review

ew2 — 2009-04-06T11:08+00:00

Connexions team completed and reviewed Module Edit Workflow Phase 1 Sprint 1 as part of their process improvement

CVS is Gone!

jccooper — 2009-03-30T10:24+00:00

We've removed CVS from Rhaptos, now we need to remove CVS from rhaptos.org.

Mass Roles Setting

jccooper — 2009-03-26T17:17+00:00

We needed a whole workgroup worth of modules roles corrected; here's what I did.

Types for Collection Components

cbearden — 2009-03-26T14:33+00:00

Collections have types like "Course", "Textbook", and "Manual"; the components of a collection (subcollections and modules) should also have appropriate types, like "Introduction" and "Chapter".

Re-using Collections and Subcollections

cbearden — 2009-03-25T12:09+00:00

How would it work to enable some kind of re-use of collections as subcollections, and subcollections as collections? Here is my initial analysis.

Properties of Collections

cbearden — 2009-03-19T16:11+00:00

A list of collection properties settable through the present UI; how these are treated when collections are treated as subcollections and vice versa should be considered.

Nested list comprehensions: easier than I thought

reedstrm — 2009-03-19T12:23+00:00

Seems nesting is part of the spec for Python list comprehensions.

Collections as Subcollections: Two Scenarios

cbearden — 2009-03-13T17:11+00:00

Is it reasonable to want to use subcollections as collections, and collections as subcollections? Here are two scenarios where it makes sense to do so.

File types for photos and figures

kylejb — 2009-03-12T15:10+00:00

Collection Versioning

cbearden — 2009-03-11T14:37+00:00

We are in the process of redesigning our XML structure for representing collections of modules. One requirement is a version number that expresses changes in the content of the collection, as well as changes in the structure of the collection.

Collection Structure Redesign

cbearden — 2009-03-11T14:37+00:00

The next big thing, for me at least.

MathML Message Behavior

ew2 — 2009-03-11T13:17+00:00

Outlines the behavior of the MathML Message in different browsers and the location of the code for the MathML Message.

Python list deltas

reedstrm — 2009-02-27T17:45+00:00

I've got a list of numeric items, and want the corresponding set of deltas.

More Spam Fighting

jccooper — 2009-02-26T10:34+00:00

We've started to get a new class of Trac bugs, and I've put in a fix to stop them.

Devset Management

jccooper — 2009-02-26T10:15+00:00

I usually keep a devset checkout somewhere and link the Products there into my instance (and you should too, if you do that sort of thing.) That's an annoying manual task, and now we have a script that can help.

Scripts docs

jccooper — 2009-02-25T11:55+00:00

We need doc strings for most of our scripts.

Needs docs? Throw in a keyword.

kylejb — 2009-02-24T08:59+00:00

A way to get things documented without inundating Trac with loads of duplicate tickets. Simply add the "needsdocs" keyword to your ticket and I'll get around to updating the documentation appropriately.

Unicode and Python

jccooper — 2009-02-20T00:00+00:00

If you're like me, Unicode and its handling in Python is a bit of a black art. But I have found a grimoire that might make some sense of it.

Determining the cause of a live slowdown

reedstrm — 2009-02-19T13:21+00:00

Sometimes cnx.org gets slow. Here's how I determine why

For the Benefit of Mr Kite, I Shall Do a Show Tonight on Merging

jccooper — 2009-02-19T12:33+00:00

I'm doing some downstream merging now with svnmerge. It's not so hard, generally, so I'll describe it for the benefit of everyone who is not me and who might want to do the same.

Keywords in Trac

jenn — 2009-02-11T13:33+00:00

I not only agreed to the creation of a new keyword today, but suggested one. This reminded me that, if I'm going to be a curmudgeon about how we use keywords, I should set out my thoughts on the subject.

MyCNX Phase 2 Milestone Review

ew2 — 2009-02-11T09:20+00:00

Results of Connexions team review of the My CNX Phase 2 Milestone

MyCNX Milestone Review

ew2 — 2009-02-11T09:13+00:00

Results of Connexions team review of My CNX Milestone

Access to CNXML 0.5 eip-help

jenn — 2009-02-10T16:41+00:00

I'm still having to generate CNXML 0.5 to test tweaks to upconversion, and I was never that good at it to begin with; so it's useful to be able to access the previous version of the help.

Search CNX Directly From Your Brower

jccooper — 2009-02-10T13:04+00:00

Modern web browsers have a search bar that lets you search sites directly. You may have seen this with Amazon and Wikipedia. You can do it with Connexions, too.

CNXML 0.6 Project Review

ew2 — 2009-02-09T16:11+00:00

Results from Connexions team review of CNXML 0.6 milestone

Google Chrome Comic

jccooper — 2009-02-04T16:25+00:00

Want to know the deal with Chrome? See the comic they produced. It's fun.

Added Scott's metadata analysis document link to new folder in Documentation

kef — 2009-01-26T15:47+00:00

The Google document spreadsheet with Scott's metadata analysis is now linked under Documentation/Metadata. http://rhaptos.org/docs/metadata/analysis-link

Closing tickets when milestones go into QA

kef — 2009-01-14T14:53+00:00

From the meeting, these are the general rules for putting tickets in testing and closing tickets.

1. Don't close "Live" tickets -- put them in "testing". Those should always go through QA.
2. For other tickets (requirements and development entered tickets) should be closed, unless developers need them for their development process.
3. When a milestone goes into QA testing, a notice will be sent out to developers. If developers have put any tickets in to testing, they should close them at this time, unless they are specifically requesting that they be QA tested.
4. Developers should not close tickets that were opened (or reopened) by the testing team. Put them in testing instead.

Author Link Analysis

jccooper — 2009-01-05T15:55+00:00

Author link usage statistics, with an eye towards changing the scale.

Suggestion for live site slowness reports

jenn — 2008-11-10T13:39+00:00

After I grumbled at Jonathan yesterday during the read-timeout episode, we talked a bit about how we could keep track of performance issues without the admins feeling harrassed or the reporters fearing for their lives.

CXNML 0.6 Changes for LaTeX importer

bnwest — 2008-10-15T14:28+00:00

Discussion of changes required to CNX LaTeX importer for the CNXML 0.6 language change.

SVN 1.5 means svnmerge -> svn merge

jccooper — 2008-09-10T17:23+00:00

The new version of SVN is out, and it has (finally) built-in merge tracking. And it's better than svnmerge.

Signing on to Jabber from multiple locations

reedstrm — 2008-08-14T15:42+00:00

Turns out it is possible to sign on to jabber from more than one client, simultaneously. (This is the root cause of the 'jabber keeps disconnecting me' problem)

Search results tips from Jarod Spool -- (more scent, most relevant first, no pogosticking, no wacko results, more result per page)

kef — 2008-07-15T13:09+00:00

Jared Spool's article, http://www.uie.com/articles/search_results_part2/, has some interesting results from researching various companies' search results pages.

Provide a lot of info in the results to support user tasks. He gives the example of price, distance, and room amenities for hotel searches, to support various types of customers. For us, I think that means providing axes of information about the content in the initial results page, which we do fairly well. At some point, including lens information, ratings and reviews will probably be important.
No one ever complains that the page has too many results -- 10 per page can be limiting, but I think right now performance issues force us to limit the UI.
Most relevant results should be first. Well that is obvious. But the interesting result is that people stop searching down if irrelevant results appear (relevancy threshhold). As we get textbook searchers, we really need to reconsider how often modules are obscuring collection results that may be more relevant to the searcher.
Eliminate wacko results. Just thought the psychology here was interesting. Programmers see wacko results as a weird corner case of an algorithm, but searchers see them like Tourette's syndrom (Spool's term) -- random results inserted into an otherwise sane response -- and it makes them not trust the other results.
Prevent pogosticking -- The more times someone goes to look at content and comes back to the search results (which Spool calls pogosticking), the less likely they are to ultimately find what they want. (I think that this would be a good stats problem for our new book -- probability of success given Y pogos) Preventing this is related to the "Provide a good scent in the initial display).

Building a Word Importer Test Bed

bnwest — 2008-07-14T16:46+00:00

We need a Word Importer test bed so that we have a set of word documents which represent the word documents that we are receiving from the wild and which we can be examined in great detail. A goal is to do a better job importing word docs from authors who import the most content into cnx.org.

Upgrading Trac

jenn — 2008-07-11T11:40+00:00

Some notes on where our patches for Trac live and how I use them

Performance tests of module PDF generation

reedstrm — 2008-07-02T12:53+00:00

Chuck and I ran a few 'quick' tests of module PDF performance, using an amazon EC2 instance. Here's what we determined.

Unit Testing Proposal

ew2 — 2008-06-26T11:18+00:00

As we move toward having more outside development, automated unit tests could help keep our code in top shape.

CNX/Rhaptos Coding Standards

ew2 — 2008-06-26T11:17+00:00

Bash script coding standard

reedstrm — 2008-06-13T16:35+00:00

Aren't standards great?

The problem solving chat

reedstrm — 2008-06-09T16:28+00:00

Here be the logs for the collaborative problem debugging from June 5th

Trac Usage Changes

ew2 — 2008-06-03T14:15+00:00

Trac Usage Changes for Milestones

LaTeX Importer Limitations

bnwest — 2008-01-16T10:18+00:00

LaTeX Importer Limitations

Making Your Instance Yours

jccooper — 2008-01-03T16:04+00:00

Copies instances will in some places still refer to cnx.org, making them hard to use. I usually just ignore it, but if it becomes cumbersome, you can fix it.

Rice IT SVN

jccooper — 2008-01-02T12:19+00:00

Rice IT also runs a general-purpose SVN service.

Personal Backups

jccooper — 2008-01-02T12:08+00:00

Rice provides a backup space for everybody, and we should probably use it. It's not too hard...

To use Tralics' bib entries or not?

rwagner — 2007-12-19T16:49+00:00

A Tough Case for Content MathML

rwagner — 2007-12-10T17:46+00:00

GROUP 07 - Conference notes - Part 1

manpreet — 2007-11-28T18:28+00:00

Servant of the gods - memory!

reedstrm — 2007-11-16T16:54+00:00

If knowledge is power, memory is the vessel of that power

Consistency without becoming a hobgoblin

kef — 2007-11-06T22:40+00:00

Rob Rhyne (UPA-DC 2007)

Rhyne’s talk was about using common design patterns and everyday metaphors to achieve consistent and usable interfaces without demanding strict uniformity. He says uniformity is problematic if it is being invoked to justify a design that is one of the following:

easier to build but is actually less useful,
a substitute for a more useful creative solution, or
when it simply results in something that is boring and undistinguished.

He showed Google search results, Yahoo search results, and Microsoft Live search results and without the header these look nearly identical, but the two catch up searches really need to distinguish themselves visually without breaking the understandability. Conventions can be broken when they are immediately obvious. He cited successful examples that broke away from conventions: the iPhone interface and a CD burner called disco that uses drifting smoke on the desktop to indicate that it is still working while allowing the user to do other stuff.

An audience member working for a medical site told a story about trying to develop websites of information for diabetics and for breast cancer survivors. The pointy haired bosses (ooh that’s me) wanted uniformity, but these two communities are actually very different in how they approach finding information (no details given unfortunately). I retell that story, because I think it has some parallels with our communities of authors and readers. The Connexions stylesheets were the first design for allowing communities to relate to content as communities. The stylesheets controlled the entire look and feel of the navigation, content, CNX and branding which turned out to be very hard to understand for readers, and difficult to maintain for development. We are now moving toward supporting styling in the content area, but preserving CNX navigation. We plan to provide style parameters that can be applied by module authors, collection authors, lens makers, and readers (in that order). Will that be enough? And will it really be easier to maintain?

Rhyne gave a couple of suggested references:

Yahoo! Pattern Library
http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns
“Web Patterns”, John Allsopp
http://westciv.typepad.com/dog_or_higher/2005/11/webpattenrs_and.html
Flickr Design Pattern Photo pool

Breadcrumbs : Finding related information

kef — 2007-11-05T10:36+00:00

I heard a brief talk by Angela Colter (UPA-DC 2007) on a study of breadcrumb usage. The researchers wanted to know how people think of them, and how they use them.

Three types of breadcrumbs:

Location model – single breadcrumb path to any resource
Path model – shows exactly how this user got to the page
Attribute model -- gives metadata information (categories, subcategories) – this model is used by Amazon and results in multiple breadcrumbs paths showing on a single page.

Results:

Users describe breadcrumbs as paths, but think of them as locations.
Novice users are very likely to use them, and understand they are links.
Most commonly used to find something related. While heading back to the search box the user trips over the breadcrumbs and see that something in the breadcrumb trail might be useful.

Breadcrumb problems:

If the breadcrumb link label is named something different than the page you get to that is a problem and users never use the crumbs again if that happens to them. (In this study)

LaTeX Importer - Bibliographies

bnwest — 2007-11-02T11:29+00:00

Shows how the forms of LaTeX bibs get translated by tralics and then by us into CNXML.

Web 2.0 usability issues and open questions

kef — 2007-10-24T20:49+00:00

From Jared Spool at UPA-DC-2007 again: These are the things that his company is actively researching – the unsolved problems of Web 2.0 usability.

What does it mean to produce a usable API?
RSS – When chronologically isn’t the right organization, what then?
Tagging – How do you unify things that are intended to be the same, but aren’t such as misspellings and alternates (NY, NYC, New York etc.)? The big search engines have made headway in this area somewhat.
Quality: What is the role for the editorial with regard to user-generated content and how to support that role?

This quality question is exactly the same question that Connexions is asking and trying to answer with lenses. The corresponding business question is how do we support an economy of editors while preserving open content? Related to the quality of content is the quality of tagging. Audience members brought up the need for expert generated ontologies and subject vocabularies in addition to completely user generated tags.
Social networking -- How to avoid mobs?

rhaptos.org Workflow Change

jccooper — 2007-10-18T15:46+00:00

The default state for content on rhaptos.org is now 'published'.

Web 2.0 is ...

kef — 2007-10-17T21:05+00:00

Jared Spool gave the following definition of Web 2.0:
1. API's -- the ability to get the data without going through the UI
2. RSS
3. Folksonomies and tagging
4. Social networking
or is it just "marketing hype"?

Jared Spool on Good Organizations

kef — 2007-10-17T07:48+00:00

Jared Spool gave a very quick rundown of things he thought were required of good organizations. By implication such organizations are more likely to get the user experience done well also.

Good user design is like chicken sexing and sushi making

kef — 2007-10-15T19:36+00:00

Jared Spool talks about design, the Wall Street Journal, chicken sexing, and sushi-making.

Design well, design small, and keep the business needs in mind.

kef — 2007-10-15T09:01+00:00

Jared Spool on design at UPA-DC 2007

LaTeX-generation stage in our pipeline

cbearden — 2007-09-28T14:17+00:00

This stage needs refactoring to support future development.

Footnotes from floats in LaTeX

cbearden — 2007-09-28T13:40+00:00

LaTeX has floating environments, of which tables and figures are the most important. Footnotes from within those environments are problematic.

Math line-breaking in MathML and LaTeX

cbearden — 2007-09-25T15:10+00:00

A thread from the W3C www-math mail list mentions a possibly useful LaTeX package.

LaTeX Importer Workflow

bnwest — 2007-09-24T15:36+00:00

LaTeX Importer Workflow

CNXML Short Comings As Seen During The Import Process

bnwest — 2007-09-24T12:39+00:00

CNXML Short Comings As Seen During The Import Process

TeX Reading

cbearden — 2007-09-21T10:38+00:00

Recommended reading for learning more about TeX from John Culleton in comp.text.tex.

The future of LaTeX Unicode support

cbearden — 2007-09-20T13:24+00:00

The maintainer of ucs.sty is no longer working on the package.

Fun LaTeX Facts

cbearden — 2007-09-13T18:55+00:00

Some notes as I work through the University of Cambridge Engineering Dept.'s LaTeX tutorial

Tralics notes

bnwest — 2007-08-27T11:03+00:00

Tralics notes

Converting LaTeX .eps files to .png files

bnwest — 2007-08-23T16:16+00:00

Converting LaTeX .eps files to .png files.

Hermes notes

bnwest — 2007-08-20T10:47+00:00

Hermes notes

Common Plone programming recipes

jccooper — 2007-08-17T18:11+00:00

Nice plone.org howto regarding common Plone programming idioms.

TtM notes

bnwest — 2007-08-16T14:23+00:00

TtM notes

LaTeXML notes

bnwest — 2007-08-16T14:08+00:00

LaTeXML notes

Browse System Alpha-chunking

jccooper — 2007-08-15T17:10+00:00

The browse system's alphabetical selection for authors, etc, works okay for us, since we have enough data, but it works poorly for bare Rhaptos installs, and is already starting to be a problem for some of the more popular letters.

LaTeXML

easgarov — 2007-08-14T12:50+00:00

LaTeXML is the tool that converts from latex to xhtml.

Branch Management with svnmerge (original blog post)

jccooper — 2007-08-07T17:15+00:00

The SVN merge facilities are pretty dumb, and doing merges, especially to long-lived branches, is annoying. I came across an SVN helper tool called (a bit unhelpfully) 'svnmerge', and am trying it out on the Plone 2.5 branches. So far I like it.

Daily report

jenn — 2007-08-06T16:29+00:00

I know I'll lose track of what I did this week if I don't blog it, so for the benefit of our absent manager I'm going to try to do daily progress reports this week.

Product Upgrades

jccooper — 2007-07-17T15:20+00:00

An example of explicit upgrades in an install script.

tex4ht unix installation and running

easgarov — 2007-07-12T11:38+00:00

tex4ht linux installation worked!
well, almost...

tex4ht notes

bnwest — 2007-07-09T13:09+00:00

tex4ht notes ... the horror

More CNX in Plone core

jccooper — 2007-07-09T11:08+00:00

Connexions has slipped a fair bit into the Plone core. Now we have more!

Firefox funkiness with attributes: offsetTop and offsetLeft

bnwest — 2007-07-06T17:20+00:00

Firefox funkiness with attributes: offsetTop and offsetLeft.

Trac field: branches

jccooper — 2007-07-05T13:01+00:00

As if we don't have enough, I think maybe we need one more field in the bug system: branches.

tex4ht installation

easgarov — 2007-07-03T11:24+00:00

tex4ht is a collection of utilities to convert latex to various xml formats. One of the utilities is oolatex, which converts from latex format to openoffice document.

OpenOffice Connexions template

easgarov — 2007-06-26T12:13+00:00

Collection Types to Support

kef — 2007-06-21T13:40+00:00

We are now supporting course and report as collection types. Kyle is building an interface to enter them when creating collections and so we need to decide what collection types to support. The blog entry discusses bibtex types and others that have occurred in our practice.

Publishing Connexions Collections in CiteULike.

kef — 2007-06-21T13:33+00:00

CiteULike is publishing Journal TOC's and then letting people link to the articles. Should Connexions do that with collections?

Word Importer Best Practices

bnwest — 2007-06-20T17:30+00:00

Word Importer Best Practices

DOs and DONTs for Word Import

easgarov — 2007-06-20T16:41+00:00

Short help for authors who import word documents

Importing .doc files

easgarov — 2007-06-19T17:46+00:00

My experiences in playing around with Word Importer

Formulator Usage Notes

bnwest — 2007-06-19T10:37+00:00

Formulator Usage Notes

Edit In Place Improvements

bnwest — 2007-06-13T16:09+00:00

Edit In Place Improvements

Author Round table top 10 list

2007-06-12T10:16+00:00

10 main points from the Author round table

What URLs for trac projects?

reedstrm — 2007-06-11T16:00+00:00

Trac instances almost ready. Where should they live?

Author Roundtable June 07

kef — 2007-06-07T23:18+00:00

I uploaded Sebastian's notes on the author round table from Tuesday, June 05. They are under User Interface/User Testing. http://rhaptos.org/ui/ut/roundtablejune07

Lens Functional Design Draft

kef — 2007-06-05T22:41+00:00

I have uploaded the lens functional design draft and a proposed version 1 implementation for July. Cameron Cooper will be producing an architectural design for the implmentation shortly. Comments are welcome. All the documents are available in http://rhaptos.org/architecture/lenses/.

Future Plone Tech

jccooper — 2007-06-04T13:41+00:00

Some links to demonstrate and learn about some of the new technologies we'll be able to use when we're running Plone 2.5.

Trac migration discussion area

jenn — 2007-06-01T00:00+00:00

I've started a development folder for the Trac migration.

rhaptos.org workflow

jccooper — 2007-05-30T16:48+00:00

Not my idea, but I thought I'd note this so it doesn't get lost.

Proposal: publish log

jccooper — 2007-05-29T09:34+00:00

One way we might improve intra-day recovery would be keeping an independent log of published content.

Upgrading Strategy

jccooper — 2007-05-24T20:08+00:00

The future of product upgrades in Rhaptos.

Roles and their impact on author browse & search

manpreet — 2007-05-14T17:20+00:00

Form Audit

2007-04-24T12:35+00:00

With Plone2.5, we can now get add unload protection (warnings that you are about to lose information that you entered in a form) fairly easily on our forms. Here is a list of all the forms on the site that could possibly have such protection enabled.

Author Display Templates

2007-04-20T10:35+00:00

A List of all the templates that display role information and author info

Importing math into CNX author story

bnwest — 2007-04-06T14:20+00:00

Our importing math into CNX author story.

Plone 2.5 Upgrade: It's Alive!

jccooper — 2007-03-29T11:52+00:00

Plone 2.5 upgrade script runs all the way through now.

Plone Upgrade Progress

jccooper — 2007-03-23T17:15+00:00

So I can start an instance on Python 2.4/Zope 2.9/Plone 2.5.2. I can also run *most* of the upgrade script! Bad news is the timing.

Potential Migration Problem

jccooper — 2007-03-21T14:08+00:00

One problem with the Plone migration that has already become clear to me is that it'll take a long time to run.

Lens Brainstorming

jccooper — 2007-03-19T15:32+00:00

Possible different types of lensing...

Meeting to discuss (La)TeX and Connexions Printing

cbearden — 2007-03-15T18:00+00:00

Notes on a meeting RichB organized to discuss Connexions printing.

Subject Field Inconsistencies

2007-03-13T17:11+00:00

Some suggestions I have for cleaning up our subject data

Handling the translator role in IMS Metadata and Dublin Core

cbearden — 2007-03-12T17:27+00:00

Some notes on our new roles in metadata, for discussion and future reference, from a conversation with Ross.

XSLT UI Lunch

jccooper — 2007-02-15T17:50+00:00

Alan Runyan is interested in an XSLT future for the UI of Plone. I had lunch with him today to discuss this, and our situation.

Adding Subjects to Modules

2007-02-07T11:02+00:00

The guidelines I'm using when I mark subjects on modules.

I18n Hits Trunk... hard

2007-02-05T17:46+00:00

I rolled i18n to trunk today. I couple things that people should be aware of.

Testing i18n, Yummy

jenn — 2007-02-05T09:30+00:00

Well, I normally just report status on my testing page, but it's complex enough these days that I think I'll elaborate in a blog post.

Primitive Endorsements!

jccooper — 2007-01-25T17:53+00:00

I've got a del.icio.us-based endorsement system running. It's a bit rough, but that can be fixed.

Testing the new home page mockups

kef — 2007-01-23T10:20+00:00

Kathi had family test three mockups for the new homepage using questions that Manpreet devised. I transcribed what they said and did. When the first person is used, I am quoting them.

Content Deletion

jccooper — 2007-01-18T17:46+00:00

Normally we don't delete content, but sometimes we are obliged to. Here's how... This blog has been superseded by http://rhaptos.org/docs/sysadmindocs/sa-deletecontent

DifferenceEngine running!

jccooper — 2007-01-10T18:10+00:00

My skin-components-by-patch idea has been realized (in a somewhat rough form) in DifferenceEngine. We'll probably be using it going forward, so get a-learnin'.

Notes on reuse

reedstrm — 2007-01-04T14:48+00:00

a look at linking in Connexions collections/courses and modules there in.

Full Name Behavior

kef — 2006-12-22T13:31+00:00

Instance Creation

jccooper — 2006-12-21T12:48+00:00

A script to automate devinstance creation.

Translation issues

maxwell — 2006-12-12T17:18+00:00

When Branching

jccooper — 2006-12-07T16:07+00:00

Subsequent merging of a branch can be made a bit easier if we add a simple step.

Making a Better Word Importer ...

bnwest — 2006-12-06T10:00+00:00

Making a Better Word Importer ...

Celebrating Firefox 2.0 with Search Plugin Autodiscovery

jccooper — 2006-11-17T20:58+00:00

Firefox 2.0 is out, and one of the spiffy new features is auto-discovery and installation of search plugins. I set us up for this on a new devset.

Harvesting Imported Word Files

bnwest — 2006-11-15T14:15+00:00

Mission - Harvest imported Word doc files in order to be able to profile the imported Word usage. Track both the successes and the failures of the Word importer. Harvesting can be turned on/off on the server dynamically, starting out (default) as off. Build a test bed of real world import Word docs, for regression testing.

QML JavaScript

bnwest — 2006-11-14T18:05+00:00

Keeping Tony Brandt happy.

Image Editting / Connexions Idea Board

2006-11-08T12:07+00:00

An idea about ways to edit images in an educational sort of way!

Plone Conference 2006 Seattle Report

jccooper — 2006-10-30T13:23+00:00

What I learned at the Plone conference that may be useful to other folks.

cals2html evaluation

jenn — 2006-10-26T16:34+00:00

Max has made extensive changes to our table rendering code so that it supports much more of the CALS table model. Unfortunately, turning on new features has consequences for some tables in our existing content. I've gone through to see how extensive the damage may be, and how much work we might have to do to bring existing tables "up to code".

Thoughts on a Rainy Day

2006-10-10T15:18+00:00

A few thoughts that came up while helping with the Mellon Report. They might not even make it to the Feature Request state, but I thought I'd share them anyway.

Mmm... that's good soup!

jccooper — 2006-10-06T17:32+00:00

Delicious, in fact. I've implemented some basic lensing using del.icio.us as the selector.

Check out Express Checkout

jccooper — 2006-09-19T18:22+00:00

This feature, packaged with recent changes to edit in place, allows quick checkout of modules from published page. Now functionally ready, needs UI review.

Kyle needs your help!

2006-09-14T13:06+00:00

I need advice for the text of the email notifications that RhaptosSubscriptionTool will send out

Planned Projects Updated

jccooper — 2006-09-13T19:04+00:00

Now with categories!

Web Services API Guide Published

jccooper — 2006-09-13T18:09+00:00

Lots of people are interested in integrating their stuff with CNX. Luckily, most of the tools to let them do it themselves already exist.

An Experiment in Wikiness

reedstrm — 2006-09-06T23:48+00:00

Thoughts on tags

reedstrm — 2006-08-31T16:12+00:00

Development Documentation Outline

2006-08-25T12:51+00:00

Well, I was about to change it around again when I realized that I had just finished the third final draft of the outline.

A Poor Man Coding Style Guide for Rhaptos

nmueller — 2006-08-21T16:27+00:00

Here I want to provoke a discussion regarding coding styles in Rhaptos. E.g. (1) Shall we use TABs rather than Spaces for indentation (2) How should a proper function/method should look like regarding documentation (3) What about error handling? Should any if-statement be complete, i.e., should any if-statement comprise an else-statement (4) What about code line wrapping for a convenient reading etc... Just feel free to leave any comment here regarding my upcoming poor man's coding style guide for Rahptos.

Experiences Installing a Rhaptos Instance from Scratch

nmueller — 2006-08-20T12:00+00:00

Experiences in installing a Rhaptos instance at IUB from scratch.

Pipeline for Importing LaTeX into CNX via Scientific Workplace

kochelek — 2006-08-17T17:15+00:00

A pipeline for importing LaTeX content into CNX has been developed using Scientific Workplace. The requirements, procedure, errors, and expected outputs are explained herein.

LabVIEW Wrap-up

mhutch — 2006-08-11T11:54+00:00

Some parting words of wisdom.

Firefox Session Manager

jccooper — 2006-08-03T16:49+00:00

Session Manager is awesome. Install it now! For great justice!

Name Needed for Subscription Tool

jccooper — 2006-07-31T15:09+00:00

We need a snappy name for the new subscription tool.

Rhaptos RSS Rhapsody

jccooper — 2006-07-31T11:59+00:00

I've enabled syndication on a trail basis. It's cool.

Stefan Update 07.25.2006

sanca — 2006-07-25T18:08+00:00

Getting close to a fully functional MathSearch with highlighting...

"Download this [XML] source (ZIP)" link

maxwell — 2006-07-21T17:35+00:00

Mock-ups for the new link

Talk #2 with NI

mhutch — 2006-07-19T11:50+00:00

Touched base with Erik & Jim.

Stefan Update 07.18.2006

sanca — 2006-07-18T16:01+00:00

Latest development of the MathML search engine

Import pipeline for CSB content via Scientific Workplace

kochelek — 2006-07-18T15:31+00:00

There now exists a (mildly cumbersome) pipeline for importing CSB's data into CNX with only minimal cleanup required. These are the details.

Talk with NI

mhutch — 2006-07-12T11:16+00:00

Some pearls of wisdom and direction from Jim Cahow and Erik Luther.

Documentation from Rome! (Edited in Houston)

2006-07-12T08:44+00:00

A quick attempt at instructions for how to do a "Rhaptos Site" install, so that Chuck has something to work from in Vietnam. Jenn added 4.5. Ross edited with abandon, since the original is archived in email.

Stefan Update 07.11.2006

sanca — 2006-07-11T17:53+00:00

The fourth update on the status of the integration of MathSearch into Connexions

LabView Files on the CNX Servers

mhutch — 2006-07-11T10:54+00:00

A catalog of the LabView files contained on the CNX servers.

LabView Project Definition

mhutch — 2006-07-06T16:58+00:00

Goals for the LabView project for the summer, including some direction from Rich.

Storage Dispatch branch is entering testing

2006-07-06T13:17+00:00

Browse Recent Page Rolled out

2006-07-05T18:05+00:00

The browse recent page is now live!

Stefan Update 07.05.2006

sanca — 2006-07-05T17:34+00:00

Third update on the status of MathWeb Search

Importing LaTeX to CNX using Scientific Workplace

kochelek — 2006-07-05T15:58+00:00

Rough directions for importing LaTeX into CNX using Scientific Workplace, including predictable errors and workarounds/resolutions.

LyX & Tralics

mhutch — 2006-06-30T09:37+00:00

Issues that arise when converting .lyx files to CNXML through Tralics. May be helpful when writing a creating a .tex -> Tralics -> Conversion Script (w/ XSLT) -> CNXML pipeline.

Stefan's Progress up to 06.28.2006

sanca — 2006-06-28T10:04+00:00

The second of the weekly progress updates...

Fixes to course printing system

cbearden — 2006-06-26T09:22+00:00

This weekend I finished up several changes to the course printing system that considerably reduce the pain of creating course PDFs.

What's Darko doing: 06/20-23 (bonus: Galveston story)

dpesikan — 2006-06-25T18:25+00:00

Fixed Python checker to output XPOINTERs, Type Checker for MathML modified to pipe, and changed the format of output (XPATHs).

Installing Math WebSearch on Wakizashi

sanca — 2006-06-23T20:03+00:00

A list of things that need to be done to install the inherited Search Engine on our local machine.

What to do with eip-figure branch? PART 2

maxwell — 2006-06-22T13:59+00:00

Some mock-ups of ideas discussed in an early blog post

Browse Recent page ready for testing

2006-06-21T15:59+00:00

I'm declaring the Recently revised page ready to be tested

Scientific Workplace

kochelek — 2006-06-21T14:27+00:00

Pfeiffer Content Issues

kochelek — 2006-06-21T14:27+00:00

Issues seen in converting Pfeiffer content with LyX

reLyX and LyX1.3.X

kochelek — 2006-06-21T14:27+00:00

lyx2cnx test

kochelek — 2006-06-21T14:27+00:00

What's Darko doing: 06/15,16,19

dpesikan — 2006-06-20T10:32+00:00

Spell checker coding started!!

What's Darko doing: 06/13-14

dpesikan — 2006-06-20T09:55+00:00

Chat with Ross and Cameron, overall plan, Java code

Stefan's Progress up to 06.19.2006

sanca — 2006-06-19T11:05+00:00

The first update of a series of weekly reports which will help me (and others) keep track of my work progress.

What's Darko doing: 06/12

dpesikan — 2006-06-14T11:41+00:00

Rares's bachelor thesis reread

Plone Training Checklist

jccooper — 2006-06-13T17:32+00:00

Now that I'm around full time, I'll have the chance to do some Plone training. But first, I need to figure out what exactly to present. Follows are some topics; please let me know what you're interested in. Also, anything that's not there. Some entries are separable, some are not. They are grouped vaguely by subject.

New Development Process, Trial Run

jccooper — 2006-06-13T17:11+00:00

Our solutions to the EIP situation will require the addition of a checkout-from-published feature (which has been requested anyway). I'm going to use that to test a new development process.

What to do with eip-figure branch?

bnwest — 2006-06-13T17:06+00:00

What to do with eip-figure branch?

We need per-instance XML setups

cbearden — 2006-06-12T17:11+00:00

Having a single, global XML installation (including XSLT and CSS) per host is too limiting.

New Version of Browse Recent Page

2006-06-08T16:50+00:00

After a couple iterations of feedback, I have a new version of the browse recent page that is ready for review.

READ ME! Rhaptos workflow rework

jccooper — 2006-06-08T15:43+00:00

We've redone the rhaptos.org workflow to fit our model better. The visible state now means "internally visible", like many thought it already did; also, the review step has been removed, and you can edit published content.

Rice Email Go!

jccooper — 2006-06-08T12:25+00:00

You may now email me at jccooper@rice.edu.

Browse Recent Page ready for review

2006-05-25T14:54+00:00

I've finished up a first draft of a page to browse recently published content. I would appreciate any feedback.

Bitflux Editor

2006-05-09T13:19+00:00

After cruising through the Bitflux Editor demo and doing a bit of reading, here are my thoughts on Bitflux as it could apply to Connexions.

AJAX DHTML JavaScript Toolkits

bnwest — 2006-05-08T15:05+00:00

AJAX/DHTML JavaScript Toolkits investigated!!!

Supporting Multiple Languages

reedstrm — 2006-04-20T12:00+00:00

What do we need to do to support multiple languages more completely in Connexions? (I promised this entry to the team some time ago. Here it is for the record.)

Preferences of MathML parallel markup

nmueller — 2006-04-18T05:09+00:00

In this blog we will explain the preferences of MathML's parallel markup.

Browse by Language

maxwell — 2006-04-13T19:37+00:00

Mock-ups for browsing content by language

devsets: cross-product development

jccooper — 2006-04-10T14:45+00:00

Our development model (as it currently stands) puts development on branches. Branches exist only per-product, due to our SVN structure. This is fine if you only work on one product, but what if you need to make changes to two or four or more products? We now have a less-ad hoc way to capture this information than just telling Jenn.

Latest Content Display 2

maxwell — 2006-04-04T20:09+00:00

Browse by latest, again. (This time with tooltips.)

My talk at the Rice HCI group

manpreet — 2006-03-24T16:37+00:00

I presented Cnx.org and my plans for usability going forward to the Human Factors/Human Computer Interaction (HCI) group at Rice. This is their feedback.

Rhaptos Internationalization

cbearden — 2006-03-15T15:13+00:00

A few notes on starting to create translations of Rhaptos/Connexions site text.

Roles Reordering pushed to functional testing

2006-03-07T15:51+00:00

I created a new Plone instance on my development machine to do functional testing of the role reordering

What does Plone need to support communities

reedstrm — 2006-02-28T14:20+00:00

Modified Content Roles Page

2006-02-27T13:12+00:00

I have "finished" a new version of the Roles tab for content objects that will let you specify order of members.

Blogs about Cnx@TED

cbearden — 2006-02-24T13:36+00:00

A quick round-up of blog entries about TED that mention Rich B and Connexions.

Design Doc Discussion

2006-02-20T15:23+00:00

Discussion on what new design documents should contain.

New logo incorporation

maxwell — 2006-02-16T04:27+00:00

Preview the new logo in use on the site

Latest Content Display

maxwell — 2006-02-14T20:53+00:00

Figures and Media in EiP

bnwest — 2006-02-13T14:38+00:00

Figures and Media in EiP

ECAssignmentBox: New Open Source Assignnment Product

jccooper — 2006-02-13T14:36+00:00

Just released for Plone: ECAssignmentBox

Transform Work in Testing

jccooper — 2006-02-13T14:23+00:00

My transform work, which is mostly involved with Zip file import and export, is largely done and in the testing court now.

Transforms, get your transforms!

jccooper — 2006-01-23T21:04+00:00

See new module transforms on sullivan.

Customizing a Rhaptos Site

2006-01-23T13:13+00:00

A discussion of several different way to customize the look and feel of a Rhaptos/Plone Site.

QML Brainstorming

2006-01-23T12:23+00:00

What types of questions do remember from tests you've taken and homework you've done?

Community Features go Live!

2006-01-20T12:16+00:00

Yesterday, the RhaptosCommunity Product and the member profiles went out on beta.cnx.rice.edu.

A Conversation with Guido van Rossum

jccooper — 2006-01-09T15:00+00:00

In this series of interviews, Guido (creator of Python) talks about its origins, design decisions, and other things.

Documentation on RelaxNG extensions of Etna

ljouanneau — 2005-12-19T10:52+00:00

I have published a reference documentation on the RelaxNG extensions that you can use into your RelaxNG schema, for Etna.

Release of Etna 0.2.5

ljouanneau — 2005-12-19T08:07+00:00

Etna 0.2.5 is released.

Stylesheet for ETNA XML editor

maxwell — 2005-12-12T15:39+00:00

How CNXML documents will look in ETNA.

Sakai Conference in Austin

2005-12-12T13:36+00:00

My experiences at the "Deep in the Heart of Sakai" Conference in Austin last week.

LaTeXML install notes

reedstrm — 2005-12-08T14:47+00:00

In which we attempt to document installation of LaTeXML onto a Debian system, with the assistance of Michael Kohlhase

My Visit to UC Merced

cbearden — 2005-12-07T15:46+00:00

A report on my visit to the Center for Computational Biology at UC Merced.

Release of Etna 0.2

ljouanneau — 2005-12-05T11:19+00:00

I released a version of Etna, a new wysiwyg Xml Editor.

Generating EIP help from the Spec

cbearden — 2005-11-15T15:11+00:00

Max reminded me that we also need to generate the text of the element help for Edit-in-Place. A good idea, but it does further complicate the spec integration and generation process.

CNXML Flavors and the Spec

cbearden — 2005-11-15T15:11+00:00

CNMXL 0.6 (like 0.5) will have four variants, depending on whether or not MathML and QML are used. How to reflect this in the specification?

The CNXML Spec and the Design of CNXML RNG Schemas

cbearden — 2005-11-15T15:10+00:00

In which I outline the design of the CNXML 0.6 schema and point out some implications for integrating the specification with it.

Producing the CNXML Specification from the Schema

cbearden — 2005-11-10T15:47+00:00

An overview of the process I propose for generating the next CNXML specification from the Relax NG schema.

NCPEA User Guides

mhusband — 2005-11-04T11:40+00:00

Created three new courses for use by the NCPEA group.

Bookmarking Connexions content in del.icio.us

cbearden — 2005-10-31T15:00+00:00

Last night, cuz I wanted to, I loaded links to the 100 most popular modules of all time (as of last night) into a dedicated del.icio.us account.

Maintaining Simplicity

brentmh — 2005-10-21T15:59+00:00

I started this blog entry to talk about a couple of the recent performance improvements on Connexions . But it's taken an unexpected turn to include some thoughts on coding practice and the goal of simplicity.

CNXML Imports Refactored

jccooper — 2005-10-17T19:08+00:00

We've grown imports for CNXML in an ad hoc fashion. For the last few days, I've been refactoring these into the CMF standard for data transforms.

Python Idioms

jccooper — 2005-10-17T18:42+00:00

This page on Python idioms should make you say "oh, neat!" at least once.

Selenium Day a success

jenn — 2005-10-14T10:30+00:00

Bottom line: about 15% of the total body of the test plans has been converted to Selenium. Woo hoo!

xpathgrep

brentmh — 2005-10-12T16:21+00:00

I just checked in a useful script for searching through CNXML files via XPath patterns

Cleaned up RhaptosCommunity

2005-10-06T14:45+00:00

This week and last week, I worked on cleaning up my RhaptosCommunity product. I fixed several bugs and made the edit pages more intuitive.

Migrating to Rhaptos

brentmh — 2005-09-28T10:54+00:00

Instructions for migrating your development instance to the newly renamed rhaptos code

New Installation Instructions for RhaptosCommunity

2005-09-27T14:44+00:00

I have updated the installation instructions for the RhaptosCommunity product.

I18n for RhaptosCommunity

2005-09-26T13:33+00:00

I added internationalization (i18n) support for the Rhaptos Community skins and cleaned up some bugs

Plone Training This Week

jccooper — 2005-09-14T12:47+00:00

I'm off doing a Plone class the latter half of this week.

CMFBoardTab Now Quite Flexible

jccooper — 2005-09-13T16:34+00:00

CMFBoardTab, which puts CMFBoard forums as a tab, now acquires its actions from the object it is placed on.

New Spotlight on Anders Gjendemsjø

mhusband — 2005-09-13T15:11+00:00

A new Spotlight article and photo were posted for Norwegian author Anders Gjendemsjø.

Jeff Does CNX Demo at Berkeley

mhusband — 2005-09-13T14:51+00:00

Jeff Silverman, a former student employee of Connexions, demonstrated Connexions to his TA Teaching Pedagogy course at UC Berkeley on September 12, 2005.

RhaptosCommunity ready for testing

2005-09-09T14:16+00:00

I have pretty much finished my latest round of development on the community product. It is ready for testing.

Skeleton of proposed spec organization

cbearden — 2005-09-08T11:48+00:00

I've attached a markup of the skeleton of my proposed organization of the CNXML 0.6 specification. What do you think?

Content model of cnxn and name

cbearden — 2005-09-07T15:12+00:00

Both cnxn and name accept only text (#PCDATA in DTD terms) as content. Is that what we want?

Documentation in RelaxNG

2005-09-07T11:08+00:00

As a part of the CNXML 0.6 spec effort, I have been researching how documentation can live in the actual schema. It's easy, I promise!

Notes on second meeting of the CNXML 0.6 Specification Team

cbearden — 2005-09-06T17:18+00:00

A brief meeting after today's (2005/09/06) staff meeting.

New Figure EIP

maxwell — 2005-09-06T13:47+00:00

An alternative presentation for figure editing in Edit-In-Place

Notes on first meeting of the CNXML 0.6 Specification Team

cbearden — 2005-09-02T15:08+00:00

In this meeting, we began setting the parameters for producing the spec and detailing responsibilities.

The second half of my internship

2005-08-26T17:07+00:00

These are my last hours as an intern at Rice University, working for the Connexions project. Hence, it is time to sum up the last two months with a few sentences.

EiP is now integerated with Sarissa.

bnwest — 2005-08-22T11:36+00:00

EiP is now integerated with Sarissa.

First Rhaptos Product in CVS

2005-08-17T14:12+00:00

Yesterday I added my community product to CVS, making it the first "Rhaptos" product

So, you want branches?

reedstrm — 2005-08-15T17:26+00:00

A brief "how to make branches in CVS"

Printers, servers, packaging

reedstrm — 2005-08-15T09:46+00:00

Mostly admin - hot potato!

TI Professor Translating Cnx Content into Japanese

cbearden — 2005-08-11T14:59+00:00

Yoji Yamada, Texas Instruments Visiting Professor to Rice for August & September, and his student Hironori Takaryo, are translating Connexions content into Japanese.

STeX

2005-08-03T16:54+00:00

My work on the Semantic TeX project is aproaching its end. We have reached our goals (more or less), which makes the package ready for its first release.

XmlDiff is flawed

2005-08-01T17:23+00:00

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, I noticed some weird behaviors of the XmlDiff algorithm. However, at that time I didn't know about the severity...

Security, Obscurity, and Vacation

reedstrm — 2005-08-01T16:47+00:00

In which the admin goes on vacation, and has a preceding experience that cause him to sorely need such

Tables (CALS to XHTML fixes)

maxwell — 2005-08-01T15:26+00:00

I've been working on new and improved XSL for CALS table -> XHTML table transformations.

Tab Forums Go! (maybe)

jccooper — 2005-08-01T14:11+00:00

The forum-under-tab functionality I've been working on is done-ish.

How Music Makes Sense

2005-08-01T13:53+00:00

Anthony Brandt's new module plus listening gallery have been published.

Gallery JavaScript can work in multiple style sheets now

maxwell — 2005-08-01T12:30+00:00

Last week I worked on improving the JavaScript that makes the Music Galleries (as in Tony Brandt's course) look and work right.

NCPEA Conference

2005-08-01T09:35+00:00

After a month or so of preparation, the NCPEA workshop went smoothly, with only a few hitches.

The best laid plans...

brentmh — 2005-08-01T09:31+00:00

Despite being ready to do a final RISA 1.2 release and roll the code out to our production servers on Friday we chose to postpone both of those events.

This is the End, My Only Friend

2005-07-29T14:23+00:00

The new Roadmap is finished, as is my career as a Connexions employee.

Community Pages

2005-07-26T16:47+00:00

Feel left out and all alone? Need a friend? Have too many friends that you need to break them down into smaller chunks to communicate with them? Want to share your expertise on a subject in Connexions? Just want to talk to people and have a good time? Want to feel better about yourself by calling me a loser? If you said "Yes" to any of these questions, I have the solution for you... New Connexions Subject Communities pages!

Please Stand Behind the Yellow Line, the Roadmap Will Open Automatically

2005-07-26T00:43+00:00

Most of the Roadmap's functionality is done!

IEAnnotea is now faster

bnwest — 2005-07-25T14:33+00:00

Lauching the create annotation dialog was slow on some machines.

Plone Conference Update

2005-07-25T10:26+00:00

The things I learned from the Plone Conference in New Orleans

UC--Merced Connexions author to visit next week

cbearden — 2005-07-21T14:57+00:00

Masa Watanabe, Academic Coordinator Center for Computational Biology at University of California--Merced is visiting Connexions this coming Monday & Tuesday (7/25-7/26) for training in Connexions authoring.

NI and Music

2005-07-20T13:39+00:00

Know any good, repetitive pop songs licensed under Creative Commons?

Functional Communities

2005-07-18T17:26+00:00

I finally finished most of the basic functionality for the Subject Communities

NCPEA publishes a book in Connexions

cbearden — 2005-07-18T15:06+00:00

The National Council of Professors of Educational Administration (NCPEA) is republishing their print book _Crediting the Past, Challenging the Present, Creating the Future_ in Connexions.

CNXML 0.6 Relax NG

cbearden — 2005-07-18T12:22+00:00

The Relax NG schema for CNXML 0.6 is almost done. I need to add context-based constraints on the value of the 'type' attribute of the 'code' element, then we can tag-n-branch.

The Long and Winding Road(map)

2005-07-18T10:32+00:00

My current progress on the new Roadmap for Firefox.

Progress with STeX

2005-07-18T10:16+00:00

This past week I've been working on implementing a few features on Prof. Kohlhase's functions for importing function inside modules and afterwards importing the modules themselves.

RISA 1.2 Beta!

brentmh — 2005-07-18T09:50+00:00

Consider this the official release announcement for RISA 1.2 beta1

pyDiffHighlighter comes alive

2005-07-17T19:18+00:00

I've been working on the pyDiffHighlighter for almost two weeks (with many interrupts caused by paper works for a proper registration as an international Rice intern), therefore it's time to mention about my progress and difficulties.

Plone stylesheets, mostly

maxwell — 2005-07-15T19:12+00:00

Updates on what I've been doing, mostly regarding the new Plonish stylesheet

License Updating, Reading, etc.

2005-07-15T17:20+00:00

Today I updated the license information on Risa Products. I also finished reading "Design for Community" yesterday

Keymaster, Gatekeeper, There Is Only Xul

2005-07-11T11:41+00:00

My first work on the new Roadmap.

Discrepancies in public & system IDs

cbearden — 2005-07-11T10:43+00:00

I have found the chief cause of the discrepancy between public and system IDs in 105 of our CNXML 0.5 docs.

Web Page Updates

mhusband — 2005-07-11T09:58+00:00

Updated the Connexions home page and the About-People page with current information.

Welcome Joey King!

brentmh — 2005-07-11T09:19+00:00

Progress towards release

brentmh — 2005-07-11T09:05+00:00

Almost there....so close!

Music and Testing Update

2005-07-07T15:09+00:00

Tony Brandt's new module "How Music Makes Sense" and the accompanying listening gallery is almost ready to be published! And I've been breaking things for Jenn.

Two new style sheets

maxwell — 2005-07-06T18:21+00:00

Recently I made two new style sheets: one that mimics Plone's look and feel, and another that mimics NCPEA's look and feel.

Member Profiles

2005-07-06T12:36+00:00

I've finished a draft of the member profile pages and forms. Please check them out and add comments.

XHTML/MathML-to-CNXML Converter

cbearden — 2005-07-05T11:19+00:00

Improved computation of CNXML sections from XHTML header elements in the XHTML/MathML->CNXML converter.

CNXML 0.5

cbearden — 2005-07-05T09:42+00:00

CNXML 0.5 (now with Relax NG schemas) is finished, and we are now testing Debian and other packages for release.

Author Communities

2005-07-01T16:12+00:00

Working on Author Communities

Spotlight Authors

mhusband — 2005-06-29T16:09+00:00

Connexions authors coming to the Spotlight.

Usability study results and recommendations

maxwell — 2005-06-27T19:25+00:00

Results and a list of recommendations by Chuck and me after having completed usability studies on the Word importer and the module EIP interface.

Go Back and Wait, do not collect $200

jccooper — 2005-06-27T18:14+00:00

After 'sullivan' is compromised, I end up even more in Siberia, and discover an undocumented Selenium command.

A Demo of Demos

2005-06-23T12:26+00:00

Two first try demos using the two applications we downloaded and my thoughts on them.

Off the beaten path EiP bugs fixed.

bnwest — 2005-06-22T17:18+00:00

Off the beaten path EiP bugs fixed. Most of this bugs were hard to get at funkiness.

LaTeX to MathML converter research complete

2005-06-21T13:48+00:00

I finished looking through three LaTeX to MathML converters.

Meeting with Rich on NCPEA

2005-06-21T10:30+00:00

Last Friday, I met with Rich to discuss the forthcoming NCPEA conference.

Reuse of copyright material

mhusband — 2005-06-20T16:52+00:00

Updated the IP (legal) FAQ.

Internal Document Style Guide

mhusband — 2005-06-17T16:47+00:00

Ever wonder if you spell it "e-mail" or "email" or "Email"? Take a look in the CNX Document Style Guide.

Selenium!

2005-06-17T15:01+00:00

Selenium testing is fun!

The Three Converters

2005-06-17T11:52+00:00

A brief introduction to the three LaTeX to MathML converters I've been looking at.

Tab Forum Progress

jccooper — 2005-06-16T19:20+00:00

Forum-under-tab is going well.

Finished with Doug Jones Content

2005-06-15T15:56+00:00

I have finished with my part of Doug Jones' content.

Meetings and Working with Selenium

2005-06-15T12:41+00:00

I've had a few meetings this week, plus I've been working on automated testing with Jenn!

Three DSPanish Modules Published

cbearden — 2005-06-15T09:53+00:00

The DSPanish project has published translations into Spanish of three DSP modules.

Plone's table code is naughty!

jenn — 2005-06-14T17:01+00:00

I spent most of this afternoon tracking down why a certain type of link didn't seem to be accessible by Selenium.

Finishing Doug's Content

2005-06-14T15:37+00:00

Last update on Dougs DSP content, hopefully.

Welcome to the World of Online Demos

2005-06-14T15:17+00:00

A brief introduction to online demonstration software.

New, faster way to display modules

brentmh — 2005-06-14T11:01+00:00

I'm working on a new way to render our modules that, in addition to having some nice features for the future, will give us a boost in performance.

Meeting with David Getman

cbearden — 2005-06-13T15:55+00:00

Met on Friday (6/10) with Cnx author David Getman.

DSPanish Project at UTEP

cbearden — 2005-06-13T10:30+00:00

DSPanish is a project at the University of Texas--El Paso to translate Rich's "Signals and Systems" course into Spanish.

EiP has more bugs fixed.

bnwest — 2005-06-13T10:27+00:00

Better behavior for the delete button in EiP.

Working on author profile pages

2005-06-13T09:35+00:00

Upgrading and Looking over Selenium

2005-06-10T14:57+00:00

I've recently finished a big batch of updates and took a break to read up on Selenium

Emailing for Updates

2005-06-09T14:12+00:00

I've been emailing authors to get permission to update their modules from CNXML 0.4 to CNXML 0.5.

Doug Jones Content Update

2005-06-08T13:02+00:00

Doug Jones has updated one of his courses and would appreciate feedback.

Updating

2005-06-07T16:53+00:00

Updating modules (documents) from CNXML 0.4 to CNXML 0.5

Batch Labview Upgrade

2005-06-07T14:55+00:00

The exercise and solution vi's for the NI Basics I course have been updates to Labview 8 from Labview 7.

Workgroup Discussion Forums on the Way

jccooper — 2005-06-07T14:54+00:00

Workgroup discussion forums will soon grow a tab that goes to a discussion forum.

serverdiff script

jenn — 2005-06-07T12:59+00:00

Until recently, the "serverdiff" script has only been used to compare citadel with cnx. We keep needing something like it for other circumstances too, though, so I'm gradually upgrading it.

Usability studies: Word importer and EIP-style module-editing interface

maxwell — 2005-06-06T20:42+00:00

Usability Testing of EiP

cbearden — 2005-06-06T11:53+00:00

Last week, Max administered a usability test of EiP functions to four subjects. I observed.

IEAnnotea is ready for beta.

bnwest — 2005-06-06T09:57+00:00

IEAnnotea now longer commandeers the keyboard accelerators.

First Day as Staff!

2005-06-06T09:49+00:00

Today is my first official day as Rice staff. Yay!

EiP is better shape

bnwest — 2005-06-06T09:46+00:00

Bugs have been fixed.

moving, and graphics

reedstrm — 2005-06-06T09:40+00:00

Moving and unpacking is such a time sink.

Preparing for Open-Source Release

brentmh — 2005-06-06T09:15+00:00

We've released some bits of our code as open-source before (ZAnnot, pycvs, FSDumpTool). This month (June) we'll finally be open-sourcing the rest of RISA.

Burrus Update

2005-06-01T23:10+00:00

Sent Burrus an email.

Doug Jones' courses composed

2005-05-27T11:26+00:00

Doug Jones' two new courses have been created and filled with modules.

Update on Doug Jones' Content

2005-05-24T14:22+00:00

A summary of where we are on Doug Jones' DSP content.

e-Mailbag Update 18May05

mhusband — 2005-05-23T10:10+00:00

Added a picture and a very nice and long comment from Joe Gapko.

Just the stats, Ma'am.

reedstrm — 2005-05-23T09:56+00:00

No not really. It just felt that way. I did a few things: webstats, more server config, and a touch of development. Ah, webstats: the charibdis of web apps. Pulls you down into a swirling maelstrom of hits, pages, visits, sites referers (sic) until you fear you will never see daylight again!

Relax NG for most CNXML + MathML

cbearden — 2005-05-20T14:26+00:00

My Relax NG schema for CNXML 0.5 plus MathML validates 1599 of 1604 files.

EditInPlace testing fears

jenn — 2005-05-20T12:35+00:00

The presence of some major addition/deletion bugs in the new XPathified EIP has spared me temporarily from having to tackle full formal test-plan writing for EIP...but Brian and Max appear to be closing in on them pretty quickly.

Translation Proposal

brentmh — 2005-05-19T19:13+00:00

Since Max brought up translations in a previous blog entry I've been meaning to write up my proposal on the subject.

EIP help windows

maxwell — 2005-05-18T10:36+00:00

CNXML & MDML in Relax NG

cbearden — 2005-05-17T15:56+00:00

The Relax NG schemas for CNXML (plain) and MDML now work together.

BIOS and BIOS and BIOS again

reedstrm — 2005-05-12T15:53+00:00

Power problems with the new servers

IP FAQ Update

mhusband — 2005-05-12T14:31+00:00

Updated the IP (Legal) FAQ

CALS Table Relax NG schema for CNXML

cbearden — 2005-05-12T14:29+00:00

Completed RNG schema for CALS tables; now all 'para' elements from CNXML 0.5 plain validate.

IE Annotea Problem

bnwest — 2005-05-11T12:01+00:00

I am investigating why when editing an annotation Cntl-C and Cntl-V are temporarily disabled in other apps.

e-Mailbag Updtate

mhusband — 2005-05-11T09:53+00:00

Added comments from 4 users. 2 of them included photos.

The Enhanced Edit-In-Place

brentmh — 2005-05-10T21:23+00:00

How the new enhanced EIP is supposed to work.

Conversion doc on CNXML Wiki

cbearden — 2005-05-10T13:41+00:00

Added Adan's document on converting CNXML 0.4 to 0.5 to the CNXML wiki.

Doctype data cleanup

jenn — 2005-05-06T10:10+00:00

A few weeks (?) ago, we finally tidied up the doctype data in the database.

Relax NG on 5/5/2005

cbearden — 2005-05-05T16:46+00:00

Valid Relax NG pattern for 4243 of 4351 para elements occuring in CNXML 0.5 plain files.

Testing queue available for viewing

jenn — 2005-05-05T14:16+00:00

For a while now, the main testing status and to-do list have been available here on the software site.

Potentially broader role for Selenium

jenn — 2005-05-05T13:56+00:00

As I've worked more with Selenium, I've become more confident that we can do substantial testing with it. We can at least use Selenium for developer acceptance testing, to catch obvious mechanical problems before the new code gets to the human testers.

Author Profile Pages

2005-05-05T13:33+00:00

I've been working on the author profile page and a bit more on Doug Jones content.

EiP now ready for beta/QA (and this time I mean it).

bnwest — 2005-05-05T13:28+00:00

The XPath change is now complete.

OpenSearch and Servers

reedstrm — 2005-05-05T12:40+00:00

In which our hero completes the OpenSearch implementation for A9, and begins installing new hardware

XHTML Importer (r0.0)

brentmh — 2005-05-05T11:59+00:00

LaTeX content, here we come.

e-Mailbag Comments

mhusband — 2005-05-04T17:46+00:00

Sent out nine requests to quote users in e-Mailbag.

Changing my approach to RNG dev

cbearden — 2005-05-03T17:03+00:00

Developing the Relax NG schema from the bottom up, rather than from the top down.

SCU Conference Media Streams

cbearden — 2005-05-03T16:35+00:00

Media streams, searchable transcripts, etc. from Santa Clara U. Conference.

High-points testing and Selenium

jenn — 2005-05-03T11:25+00:00

The "high-points test" is for touching every feature once and making sure its basic mechanism is intact. This includes submitting and accepting a patch, for instance, but not testing every control and combination of controls, or testing a variety of patch content.

Translation and derived copies

maxwell — 2005-04-29T19:25+00:00

Thoughts on whether/how to make a separate translation feature of Connexions. Now discuss. :-)

Progress with Relax NG

cbearden — 2005-04-29T17:17+00:00

First steps taken toward a Relax NG schema for CNXML 0.5.

IP (legal) FAQ

mhusband — 2005-04-28T16:54+00:00

FAQ adressing copyright and licensing issues.

Status, Last Week of April 2005

jccooper — 2005-04-28T14:31+00:00

Status for final week of April, 2005:

IE Annotea Plugin

bnwest — 2005-04-28T13:38+00:00

Reviewed QA problem report for the IE Annotea Plugin.

EiP closer to QA/Beta

bnwest — 2005-04-28T13:34+00:00

EiP will be QA/beta ready on e-o-d Friday I boldly and perhaps foolishly predict.

Housekeeping

2005-04-28T12:49+00:00

Relax NG for CNXML

cbearden — 2005-04-28T10:37+00:00

Digging into Relax NG schema language.

Stealth XHTML importer for Paul Padley

jenn — 2005-04-27T12:25+00:00

Brent's quick-and-dirty Padley-specific XHTML converter has gone live on the beta site, but only for a lucky (?) chosen few.

Footer redesign

maxwell — 2005-04-26T21:43+00:00

Adding the citation information to the footer has eventually inspired a redesign of the nether regions of the module/course. Yea or nay?

SCU STS Conference Report

cbearden — 2005-04-25T18:38+00:00

More than you probably want to know about the conference.

Curt Michel Publishes!

2005-04-25T17:29+00:00

Curt Michel has published his content.

Doug Jones Content Getting Done

2005-04-24T16:02+00:00

I finished my last module of Doug's content.

Third (and second) week of April Status

jccooper — 2005-04-21T14:21+00:00

Blog status report for third week of April (and second week as well) 2005.

XPaths in EiP is not ready for QA

bnwest — 2005-04-21T13:57+00:00

Progress but no cigar.

Curt Michel's Last Changes?

2005-04-20T14:18+00:00

Finally heard back from Curt Michel.

Separating out Metadata

brentmh — 2005-04-18T23:46+00:00

We'll soon be separating out metadata portion from CNXML documents. Read more about the how and the why.

DSP Lab Role Approval

2005-04-18T17:38+00:00

I heard from HC

DevBlog Considered Useful

cbearden — 2005-04-18T16:27+00:00

The DevBlog has helped me get oriented more quickly in the project.

Santa Clara U. 2005 International Conference

cbearden — 2005-04-18T10:05+00:00

On Thursday (4/21) I will be representing Connexions at the Santa Clara University Center for Science, Technology & Society 2005 International Conference.

Curt Michel to Publish Soon

2005-04-16T20:27+00:00

Update on Doug Jones and Curt Michel content on which I'm working.

'Interface' or 'Usability' Category?

cbearden — 2005-04-15T16:27+00:00

Do we need a blog category for interface and usability issues?

NI VI's

2005-04-14T19:12+00:00

Looking through NI content and contacting them about some exercise vi's.

table improvements

maxwell — 2005-04-14T15:43+00:00

Help Desk

mhusband — 2005-04-14T13:55+00:00

Help to authors since April 7, 2004

Citation info at bottom of content pages

maxwell — 2005-04-14T13:19+00:00

Web Page Updates

mhusband — 2005-04-14T13:01+00:00

Activity since April 7, 2004

Backups, samba and LDAP

reedstrm — 2005-04-14T12:59+00:00

More work on keeping our backups sane.

Multimedia Module

mhusband — 2005-04-14T12:55+00:00

Activity since April 7, 2004

Doug Jones' Content is Almost Finished

2005-04-14T12:54+00:00

Annotation Documentation

mhusband — 2005-04-14T12:48+00:00

Activity since April 7, 2004.

Selenium

jenn — 2005-04-14T12:34+00:00

First stabs at using the Selenium automated test framework to do quick "dumb" regression-testing.

XPaths in EiP is Ready for QA + Beta

bnwest — 2005-04-14T12:28+00:00

Edit-N-Place status update.

Pickling lambdas and other oddities

brentmh — 2005-04-14T12:04+00:00

Off and on for several months I've been working on a new CMF tool to do XML validating. It's been *almost* there for a while now.

Status, 2005/04/14

cbearden — 2005-04-14T11:21+00:00

Status report for Thursday meeting

Hitting upload button without giving path

cbearden — 2005-04-14T10:23+00:00

Clicking on the "Upload File" button without specifying a path to a file when editing an index.cnxml file

Windows software updates

jenn — 2005-04-13T14:25+00:00

Altova has come out with yet another service pack covering Authentic, XMLSpy, and StyleVision, so I'm doing some general Windows maintenance while I'm having to deal with the Altova upgrades anyway.

Leaving for New York City

2005-04-08T09:06+00:00

Elizabeth is going to New York! Yay!

first

charlet — 2005-04-07T14:47+00:00

Update for April 7th

2005-04-07T14:42+00:00

I organized the rest of the content for Doug Jones. I also worked with Brent on a script to fix old courses.

DSP Lab Update

2005-04-07T14:35+00:00

Drive Arrays, backups, SSL and test automation

reedstrm — 2005-04-07T14:30+00:00

fixing problems, finding bugs

Documentation and Training Status

mhusband — 2005-04-07T14:22+00:00

Activity for week of April 1 - 7, 2005.

Blog: Episode I

2005-04-07T14:14+00:00

First entry.

Customizing CMFBoard

maxwell — 2005-04-07T14:00+00:00

Status Reports Back

jccooper — 2005-04-07T12:01+00:00

Status reports are back, sort of.

A few weeks after Plone 2 launched

jccooper — 2005-04-07T11:59+00:00

Status for first week of April, 2004, and first post.

I blog therefore I am.

bnwest — 2005-04-07T10:20+00:00

IE Annotea and Edit-in-Place updates

Status, 2005/04/07

cbearden — 2005-04-07T10:02+00:00

Notes for status meeting, 2005/04/07.

Let's try status blogs

brentmh — 2005-04-07T07:44+00:00

It's like an organic group status report, only better.

Other Subject Categories

kef — 2005-04-06T21:34+00:00

What I've been doing since January

jenn — 2005-04-06T12:53+00:00

Need to try some shorter, more specific entries

What I did in Week 3

jenn — 2005-03-31T15:42+00:00

A third weekly-format status entry from January, slurped from the mntb wiki.

What I did in Week 2

jenn — 2005-03-31T15:37+00:00

Another weekly-format status entry from January, slurped from the mntb wiki.

What I did in Week 1

jenn — 2005-03-31T15:37+00:00

A weekly-format status entry from January, slurped from the mntb wiki.

Saint Patrick's Day

2005-03-17T16:51+00:00

Doing work at Connexions

Education and CNX Related Press Articles

kef — 2006-12-06T17:59+00:00

Google scrapbooks for education press and Connexions press.

Some servermanagement script updates

jenn — 2005-04-07T13:30+00:00

Tuesday I took a detour into script maintenance when I got annoyed at how long it took to do data syncs.

Testing course conversion

jenn — 2005-04-07T13:31+00:00

Monday through Wednesday this week I was testing Kyle and Brent's old-course converter.