The Yonderist

All those who wander are not lost.

Tag: computing Page 1 of 4

Filemaker Prices for Academics

2009-08-06

work

A couple of weeks ago I downloaded a trial copy of the latest version of Filemaker Pro — there is no plain Filemaker version, so I don’t know why they keep the “Pro” distinction — to work with the Project Bamboo scholarly narrative corpus. It came in handy and actually helped me discern a few patterns that I intuited but could not grasp readily. (See my previous post on One Digital Difference for more.)

I went on to create two more databases with the app: one to contain my vita, which struck me as a better way to build a complex document, and one in which to keep research notes. I built the vita database both as a way to build my database skills but also because one gets so many requests for a vita, but often with particular information highlighted or, in some cases, with only certain information provided.

For example, I regularly get asked to participate in grants written for the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, which only wants two-page vitas. I am going up for graduate faculty review this year, and they only want to see the last five years of activity, and they prefer to see peer-reviewed activities highlighted.

Now, I can do that by hand in a document or I can let a database build the document from scratch for me. Hmmmm … which will I choose?

But Filemaker is not cheap. I had asked the College to purchase it for me, but as anyone in Louisiana Higher Education knows, there is no money. (And, it turns out, there will be no money for many years to come.) I can cry about it, or I can suck it up and regard Filemaker as an investment not only in saving my time in the future, but also in my intellectual/professional development. (And one with less cognitive overhead, and chances of cognitive overload, than my forays into teaching myself programming — I will learn how to code one day!

So, here are prices for Filemaker Pro:

  • The Academic Superstore has it for $184.95. (I am not sure what the shipping charges, if any, will be.)
  • Amazon.com has the full version for $269.99. (I would go for the upgrade version, but I’m not sure that I have a qualifying upgrade product and some of the comments lead me to believe that this is more complicated than I care to explore.)
  • The Apple Education Store has it for $179.95 with free shipping, but they will charge me sales tax of $14.37.

Ugh. What I wouldn’t give for my university to have a really cool bookstore that negotiated great prices for faculty, students, and staff. In an ideal world, this wouldn’t be this hard, and this expensive.

One Digital Difference

2009-07-16

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Recently in the Digital Humanities On-line Seminar, there arose the question of what difference does being digital make? Or, rather, does it many any real difference apart from speeding things up? That is, has the digital only sped up otherwise conventional work?

I have two responses to such a question. The first is the observation that at least one dimension of this question suggests that speeding things up or making more convenient certain facets of work are trivial. I make no claim that any work getting done within a quickened digital regime is any better than work done by hand — one imagines the shuffling of note cards versus a quick search through a database, but the quality of the work is always in what was written on the cards, what was entered in the database. The absurdity of such claims is revealed in the fact that books and the printing press achieved the same, if not greater, speed of dissemination — and probably of composition later — than the previous tradition of copied manuscripts. So it’s not worth bothering about.

The other observation is that such speeding up or making more convenient is not enough, that unless computing radically transforms humanistic study, it has not lived up to its promise nor potential. My response to this dimension of the complaint is that such tipping points are rarely perceived during their own time but are usually discerned later. The tipping points are, in fact, sometimes a matter for historical argument.

That’s all fine and good. Let history decide and all that. In the mean time, I can report on one digital difference I have enjoyed in the lat few weeks.

I am finishing up work on my analysis of the scholarly narratives collected by Project Bamboo. In the end, I focused on forty or so texts that I first simply collected as text documents stuffed in a directory. I also had a list of the texts I had chosen in a table in a Word file. The two really needed to get together, and so, since my SQL-foo is still incredibly weak, and I didn’t feel like running sed or awk through my collection of texts, I decided to download and install Filemaker Pro — for the record that’s a link to the Amazon.com page and I would be indebted to anyone who wanted to buy a copy for me: UL is broke and I am on my own fronting the cost. Filemaker is a cross-platform database app that can also act a as a GUI front-end to MySQL databases, and so I am hoping it will help me make the transition.

I had already read and to some degree categorized all the texts I put into my Filemaker database, and I had already learned a fair amount about them using IBM’s Many Eyes — that link takes directly to the corpus I uploaded there and some of the visualizations I set up. With the FM database I was able to automate a few simple tasks, like determining the size of each text by counting its words. But where I was really able to fly was being able to do searches either on tags or on the texts themselves looking for particular words or usages. Almost instantly, I could pull up the 7 seven texts that mentioned X or the 12 that used the term Y.

All of this would have been perfectly do-able if all these texts existed only on paper, but the work would have gone much more slowly and I would probably have taken far fewer chances. (It may also be true that the slower work may have allowed for more digestion. I don’t know, and I don’t think it’s worth arguing.) What I liked was the ability to “play a hunch.” For me at least, sometimes scholarship is really about discerning patterns. The problem is at what level of cognition the patterns get distinguished. Quite often, for me at least, I know I sense a pattern but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I may even flounder around, scanning texts or flipping through pages hoping something will “catch my eye” or “jog my memory” or put the thought on the “tip of my tongue.”

One difference “the digital” makes in my own scholarship is being able to pursue a lead as soon as it pops into my mind. That may only amount to speed or convenience, but that’s a significant enough difference for me. Please don’t take my bionic memory, and recall, away from me.

Speeding Up or Getting Around iDisk’s Sloth

2009-07-15

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Now that we are a two iPhone household, it is time to upgrade Yung to a full-fledged MobileMe account so that she can keep her contacts, calendars, etc. all in sync. And, hey, whaddaya know, there’s also this way to keep your files in sync, if, of course, it doesn’t fail every time you use it. (To be honest, it appears to be working okay for Yung, who has smaller, and usually fewer, files than I do — can I help it if I’m the media member of our household?) To be fair, I was added 1.4GB to my local iDisk and told it to sync overnight, which I figured it would take given our narrow “pipe” on our low-budget AT&T DSL connection. (Come on, LUS, bring us our FttH connection soon.)

Here’s what greeted me this morning:

Last Sync Failed

Last sync failed

Here’s Apple’s advice:

5. Disable iDisk Sync (click the Stop button in the iDisk pane of MobileMe preferences, in System Preferences), restart your computer, and connect directly to your iDisk. (From the Go menu, choose iDisk, then My iDisk.) If you are able to connect to your iDisk, turn iDisk Sync on again.

6. If the issue persists, reset iDisk syncing on your computer:

Turn off iDisk Sync (click the Stop button in the iDisk pane of MobileMe preferences, in System Preferences).
Restart your computer.
From the Go menu, choose Home.
Open the Library folder.
For Mac OS X 10.5: Remove the FileSync folder
Restart your computer.
Re-enable iDisk Sync.

But I am also searching out workarounds — without going to a workaround that works entirely around iDisk, like DropBox. We’ve paid good money for iDisk; it should work. It should work out of the box, but barring that, it should work with some elbow grease applied to it.

One possibility is to use an alternate WebDAV client than the one built into the Finder, e.g. CyberDuck, which I already own (or donated to):

Server: idisk.mac.com
User Name: <your dot-mac account name>
Password:<your dot-mac password>
Initial Path: (unnecessary)
Port: 80 (default for protocol)
Protocol: WebDAV

It looks like another alternative is to connect directly to the iDisk using ChronoSync.

Stanford Offers iPhone Dev Course for Free

2009-06-24

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I’ve written before about the amazing efforts by the likes of MIT and now Stanford, with its SEE (Stanford Engineering Everywhere) initiative. Stanford is now offering free video downloads of the class, “iPhone Application Programming,” to the public on its iTunes U Web site.

Kindles for Everyone?

2009-06-21

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As we wrap up our sojourn in Louisiana, we are, as I noted previously, spending our last weekend in the Indiana Memorial Union. Our fellow guests are mostly older folks, many look like they are probably retired, who are here to attend a mini university. I don’t know what their curriculum looks like, but I do know they are having a great time. I’m guessing that a good portion are alumni, who are simply enjoying a return to campus — not entirely unlike ourselves, so we have enjoyed watching them walk and reminisce.

They are having a great time, and, from what a young woman in the IMU Bookstore told Yung, then spend a lot of money. (We ourselves bought a few tee shirts as well as baseball caps for me and Lily.) Walking around this evening, cooling off after a final supper at Little Tibet, we saw a few of them settled into the first floor lounge of the IMU, reading. One of them was reading on a Kindle. Seeing that, I couldn’t help myself. My exec ed days kicked in, and I turned to Yung and said:

The smart thing to do would be to roll the price of a Kindle into the overall package and hand each of them one with all their readings already loaded onto the thing. Throw is a laser engraving with the IU logo or a leather carrier with the logo and you’ve given them a great keepsake and a terrific calling card for the university. (Not to mention the fact that the Kindle’s adjustable font sizes are probably going to be appreciated, too.)

Such a “gimmick” probably has only a limited life-time while we all wait for the e-reader platform to develop, but while the opportunity exists, I would certainly use it. I would imagine that at least some exec ed programs are already doing this. Yung later read something in USA Today about a number of high-end hotels doing something similar.

Learning SketchUp

2009-05-17

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First of all, many thanks to the folks at AtLast Software and at Google for making SketchUp Pro available to educators at such an unbelievable price — it’s now free for instructors!

As I re-acquaint myself with the application and begin to gear up for making illustrations of the crawfish boats, I am finding that there is an amazing variety of educational materials. One is Google’s own collection of videos, which are divided into sections for new users, intermediate users, advanced users, et cetera. There’s even a video on modeling a tractor.

There is also something called The SketchUp Show, which has a variety of lessons — they are up to Show 56 at this writing.

There is also a SketchUp Cookbook published O’Reilly — link is to Amazon. If you have O’Reilly’s Safari Online Book service, then you can find the cookbook here.

Including a Language within a Language in Textmate

2009-05-17

work

If you want to include a language within a language, for the purposes of syntax highlighting for example, the include rule within Textmate allows it.

Here’s the example from the manual:

{   begin = '<\?(php|=)?';
    end = '\?>';
    patterns = (
        { include = "source.php"; }
    );
}

MacPorts requires Xcode

2009-05-13

work

It’s right there in the installation instructions, but somehow I managed to miss it. And that explains why I couldn’t get git properly installed and setup. Bit I do wish that port would tell you that at some point. After all, I can’t be the only idiot?

Phew A Google search for the Error 77 code reveals that there are other idiots out there. One of my main goals in life has thus been achieved: I have learned that I am not alone.

Pragmatic Programmers now have “Pragmatic Life”

2009-05-01

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I own several of the Pragmatic Programmers books: TextMate, How to Program, and Version Control with Git among them. I like that I can purchase paired print and PDF copies of the books and that the PDF copies are always getting refreshed. I also like that I can keep e-versions of the books not only on my Macs but also on my iPhone. Well, the prag progs now have a new series, The Pragmatic Life. The blog for the series is here.

No Hidden .Spotlight Folder, Please

2009-04-30

work

To get rid of the hidden .spotlight folder on removable volumes like flash drives, cd to the volume and then:

touch .metadata_never_index

This tip compliments of Cro Magnon on the Ars technica Mac forum, and Mac OS X Hints, from whence it came.

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© John Laudun