Moving
We’ll be moving our office out of the Johnson Center and over to Fenwick next week–returning to Fenwick, actually. We left a windowless office area on the 2nd floor of that building back in 1995 but this time we’ll be moving to a newly renovated area on the 3rd floor. Will probably not get back to any useful work until the end of the month–moving all our servers will surely introduce some issues that (along with many unlabeled boxes) will take a bit of time to sort out.
No public beta release yet but I have dug through a bit of the source code for writing translators (those bits of logic that enable a click of the mouse to grab metadata for the item being displayed). I realize I need to brush up on regular expressions before tackling this in any meaningful way but fortunately, I have a copy of the bible so it’s just a matter of finding a bit of time to study it again (seems whenever I start back through this book I fully understand the first 20 or so pages and then something happens—I start uttering really regular expressions like “fuggedaboutit”). In any case, here’s a link that will show you an example of a Zotero translator:
sample code for PubMed translator
If you have a copy of Zotero, you’ll find the various translator code sections in the zotero.sqlite database (Table: translator, Field: code). I haven’t yet figured out how you get a new translator into Zotero but it seems you just add it to the database and then when Zotero launches, it gets pulled in. Of course, other code triggers the proper translator so I’ll wait for some documentation and an interest group to form around ‘translator building’ before I go much further with this.
Parallels
Have the latest build (1922) of Parallels for Mac running on my new MacPro. Early versions had problems with the 64-bit Woodcrest CPUs and memory addressing but that seems to have been worked out (no longer do you have to limit your machine’s memory to run Parallels on a MacPro). It is an amazing product. I now have both Windows XP and SuSE Linux Professional (9.3) installed and they’re both working well. Today I built a new VM for Windows Vista RC1 (Build 5600) and while I can’t see the Aqua-clone GUI (Parallels doesn’t support DirectX), it runs well enough for me to begin getting familiar with the product.
Installing Vista in a VM sandbox was as simple as could be. I downloaded an .iso image of the Vista install DVD and Parallels was able to mount the image right off my desktop. Once Vista was running, I couldn’t get network connectivity until I installed Parallels Tools (which is part of the VM controlling Parallels application). After I figured that out, it went smoothly but it does run slowly compared to Windows XP on the same host MacPro. Perhaps Microsoft hasn’t spent much time optimizing for performance (or worse, maybe they have). At any rate, with 4 GB of memory on the MacPro (and 1GB devoted to the Vista VM), I’m sure the slowness has more to do with Vista than it does with Parallels.
If my initial setup process for Vista was typical, I think I’ll recommend installing a couple of extra phone lines in the campus computer support center. I’ve been a Windows user since 1.0 and more than once I was a) unclear about what the screen prompt was trying to tell me and b) unsure of which gizmo to click to begin to fix it. I think Microsoft has perfectly positioned this UI to annoy the long-time computer user and completely baffle the newcomer. I guess many will choose to go with whatever Microsoft offers as the “default install” so for all our sakes, let’s hope it’s a secure one (I’m beginning to have doubts now that I’ve learned Microsoft is launching Vista with a completely rewritten networking stack). Wonder how long it will take before that begins getting hammered by attacks the software engineers didn’t anticipate? Vista in a VM might be the way to go.
To close this section on a library-related note: the Voyager 6.1 client programs (for cataloging, circulation and so on) run without any issues as far as I’ve been able to determine.
TechRestore
The hard drive in my 18 month old PowerBook died over the weekend…and no, I didn’t purchase AppleCare for it but I did have a backup of my iTunes folder(s). My first thought? Time to rationalize an order for a new MacBook Pro but in the end I decided to send the PB off to TechRestore for a new drive (at least upgrading it to a 7200 rpm drive in the process). They have a really nice “overnight” replacement/upgrade package for laptops. Box for shipment arrived within 18 hours of placing the order and it’s already on its way back.
I’ve decided that until the Core 2 Duo (64 bit) chip appears in a MacBook Pro it just doesn’t seem sufficiently “future proof” to last at least a couple of years. This time next year, I don’t want to find that I can’t compile 64 bit binaries on my 32 bit laptop. Besides, thanks to the explosive work Sony did on their lithium-ion batteries, Apple just last week sent me two new PowerBook batteries. Not only that, but until sometime next Spring, it runs Photoshop faster than even the MacPro (although I’ve noticed that the 10.4.8 update seems to boost Rosetta speeds).