The Yonderist

All those who wander are not lost.

Tag: computing Page 3 of 4

Still Wanted After All These Years: A Simple Database App

2009-01-23

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It’s been years now, and I still haven’t found a simple database application that gives me two things simultaneously: (1) a nice GUI and (2) the ability to get to my data from a number of places.

For a long time I was content with Filemaker. It allowed me to create my own databases and my own interface. It eventually even grew the ability to create relational databases, which was a good thing despite the fact that I was mostly happy with flat ones. The down side to Filemaker was that you had to run your own web server if you were going to be able to access your database anywhere else, or sync a copy and then sync it back. (What’s the name of the process whereby one can sync two sets of records for the same database and add any new records to both sets simultaneously? I want to call it reconcile but that isn’t it, I think.)

Summary: + easy to use, – difficult to access

When I got myself on-line five or more years ago and set up this site, I became much more aware of the power of PHP and MySQL in terms of database creation. Unfortunately for me, PHP and I don’t get along, and working with a webapp is not so good when you don’t have access to the web — as our recent experience with the hotel flubbing the data line at the Project Bamboo third workshop emphasized. One can run an AMP stack locally on a Mac, but then I still didn’t know how to sync the local MySQL database with a remote one — I never even figured out, really, where the local copy of the database was stored to know how to do the syncing by hand.

The same goes for Ruby and Rails. Rails makes it easy to get up and running, but syncing the MySQL database remained a mystery to me in the Summer of 2008 when I explored this option. Oh, but the allure of using XCode to develop a front-end for the local version of the app — with a spiffy sync button like Evernote (more on this in a moment) — was deeply appealing.

I’m still thinking about Rails, but along the way I came across an article on CocoaDevCentral that promised I could roll my own Core Data Database application. Well, that’s too cool to pass up.

It’s a great idea, but it looks like going that route had one big bump: It doesn’t seem like, from reading the questions and answers that followed another article over at MacGeekery that you can use this method for developing a custom front-end for a MySQL database. CoreData has its own preferred data store format — I forget what it’s called — or it can use XML or SQLite. No MySQL for you! (I suppose one could write a script that would find the SQLite store and copy it up to a server.)

What I really want, to get back to Evernote, is something like, well, Evernote that I can store data in. I suppose I could use Evernote, but that would probably mean breaking out the checkbook and setting up more than one notebook, which is all I have with the free account that I am currently still trying. This doesn’t mean that one can’t use XCode to develop a MySQL front-end, just not go the CD route.

A Tale of Two Online Book Sites

2009-01-19

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For both personal reasons and for professional reasons, I recently signed up for O’Reilly’s Safari Online Books service and I purchased an Amazon Upgrade1 of the Robert Coles’ book I am using in my seminar this spring, Doing Documentary Work.

Personal reasons aside for the moment, my professional reasons were twofold: I wanted both access to the content the two services provided and I wanted to try out the services themselves:

  1. I needed immediate access to the Coles’ book because my own copy went missing and I wanted to finish preparing for my seminar before our first meeting tomorrow. A subscription to O’Reilly’s service would give me access to a number of titles that might play a role in my teaching now or in the future, and the chance to access those books for a relatively small sum — O’Reilly graciously admitted me into their defunct $9.99/month subscription plan while their SafariU goes on holiday — was too nice to pass up. The two titles I am reading now are: slide:ology and The Lean Forward Moment.
  2. As the humanities in particular and all of us in general slowly rumble towards a digitized distribution scheme for practically everything — well, let’s hope nutrients stay off-line (though there’s enough effluvia already passing through the internet’s “pipes”) — I wanted to try out two of the possibilities currently being deployed in the mainstream.

O’Reilly is usually a bit ahead of the mainstream — and often fairly smart — but in this instance, their online reader looks, and acts, a lot like Amazon’s reader. Here are some screen shots:

<img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3104/3223617178_90b391f677.jpg” width=”500″ height=”347″ alt=”reader-amazon” title=”Amazon’s Reader: Cramped />
Amazon’s Reader

reader-safari-1
Safari’s Reader

reader-safari-2
Safari’s Reader scrolled to maximize the page.

As can be seen in all the screen shots, but perhaps best in the last (bottom-most) one above, there is no way to see a whole page on a MacBook screen. (And I had no better luck when I had a 15″ MBP.) There’s a zoom option, but there is no way to zoom out, only zoom in. Safari is a bit more advanced in offering an HTML option for reading, but it doesn’t work on any of the books I have checked out yet. So, it’s an offer, but one you can’t accept.

All of this might be mitigated by the option to go full-screen with these readers, and I hope to explore some way to do this in Firefox, but it’s not built into the readers themselves — if Youtube can do this for videos, why can’t we do this for books?

  1. I tried to link to a generic page about the upgrade program on the Amazon website, but all the URLs I could find were very long and very ugly. Bad, Amazon, bad. ↩

More PowerPoint Frustrations

2009-01-17

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So I’m reading Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte, and I’m also trying to figure out how best to work with PowerPoint. In one of those weird moments of synchonicity, one of my PowerPoint searches lands me on Duarte’s website, on a post that is singing the high praise of some new PowerPoint transitions. Hmm, I think and I click on the link, which takes me to the PowerPoint downloads section of Microsoft’s website.

What do you know? There are some nice-looking templates on the website, too. I mean templates that don’t look like they were designed in the 1980s or by a group of adolescents. Great! I think. I can download these and really get moving along.

But, wait! You can only download all these great things if you have an ActiveX control and you’re using Internet Explorer. All these great things are for Office 2007. If you’re looking for stuff for Office for Mac, you click on a link that takes you to some really abysmal offerings for Office 2004. (Click on that link to see for yourself.)

PowerPoint Frustrations

2009-01-13

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I recently saw a really nice Word document with PowerPoint slides in it that made me curious enough to try using PowerPoint again. (I’ve been using Keynote since 1.0.) I’m at the Project Bamboo meeting in Tucson, and I’m knee deep into a presentation I want to make at some point while I’m here, but the following things are driving me nuts:

  • Thank goodness there are some barebones themes — are these fugly ones some sort of commitment to legacy users?

  • Modifying a theme in PowerPoint is not quite as intuitive as Keynote, but it works once you “get it.” PP has this nice option to replace fonts, but I can’t seem to get it work.

  • PP objects don’t seem to be too aware that one often wants to align them in reference to the slide itself — you can do this through the palette but not DEPENDABLY by dragging the object itself.

  • One of the brilliances of Word is the ability to create custom keystrokes. Why does its sibling not have this? Something one does regularly, like moving objects backwards and frontwards, is only available as a submenu off a contextual menu or as a drop-down menu on the palette — which can be torn off, but who really wants tear-off palettes lying about a screen — especially the smaller screen of a laptop computer that one travels with? CMD + SHIFT + B for “Send Backwards” is far easier and faster.

All of this because the Mellon Foundation representative at Project Bamboo, Chris Mackie, did a fantastic print version of a talk he gave. I had the chance to ask him yesterday how he got his slides over — because dragging them from the left-hand pane into my Word document consistently gives me a “you’re out of RAM” warning with no results, and his response was he:

  • clicks on the slide
  • selects all
  • copies
  • pastes into Word

And the cool captions he has in his document like “Slide 1, Animation 1”? He did those by hand! Where’s the smart interaction between suite apps? (Is Pages good about handling Keynote slides? Because I don’t use Pages, I haven’t tried this — the new outlining function has me looking twice, but I live in a world of document exchange built on Word.)

Throughput Speeds for the Rest of Us

2008-12-08

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As I anticipate moving from my MacBook Pro to one of the new MacBooks, one of the things I have to consider is that I am losing not one but both Firewire ports. I have come to depend upon Firewire — also known as IEEE 1394 (1394a for Firewire 400 and 1394b for Firewire 800) — for moving data back and forth on hard drives. In particular, I use a small LaCie Rugged drive to hold my Lightroom library. It has a USB port on it, but I don’t know that I still have the necessary, and awkward, power bricked cord. Will I be able to use my Netgear network hard drive instead? Loyal readers of this log want to know, and so let’s do some math:

The table below lines up the protocol, its claimed throughput speeds in bits, and then a more realistic speed in megabytes. (As a reminder: there are 8 bits in 1 byte.)

table{border:1px solid black}. |. Protocol |. Speed |_. In Use | | USB | 12Mbps | n/a | | USB2 | 480Mbps | 20-25 MBps | | FW400 | 400Mbps | 40MBps | | FW800 | 800Mbps | 80MBps | | Ethernet[1] | 1000Mbps | 47 to 60 MBps |

The important difference between USB and FW is that the latter does not require a computer host port, and, I believe, it is capable of bidirectional traffic. Firewire ports can also carry enough power to support 2.5″ drives, which makes it extremely useful for moving large chunks of data by sneakernet. Newer iPods, however, can be powered off USB ports, and so I’m guessing that USB carries enough power for 1.8″ drives. (Time to down-size my portable drives, I guess.)

fn1. These speeds are based on using a wired ethernet connection to an Airport Extreme gigabit router hooked up to the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo drive unit which also has gigabit ethernet.

Two More Text Analysis Tools from HDG

2008-12-04

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  1. Coh-Metrix

Has anyone here experimented with this tool (http://cohmetrix.memphis.edu/cohmetrixpr/)? It is described as follows:

Coh-Metrix is a computational tool that produces indices of the linguistic and discourse representations of a text. These values can be used in many different ways to investigate the cohesion of the explicit text and the coherence of the mental representation of the text. Our definition of cohesion consists of characteristics of the explicit text that play some role in helping the reader mentally connect ideas in the text (Graesser, McNamara, & Louwerse, 2003). The definition of coherence is the subject of much debate. Theoretically, the coherence of a text is defined by the interaction between linguistic representations and knowledge representations. When we put the spotlight on the text, however, coherence can be defined as characteristics of the text (i.e., aspects of cohesion) that are likely to contribute to the coherence of the mental representation. Coh-Metrix provides indices of such cohesion characteristics. http://141.225.213.52/CohMetrixWeb2/HelpFile2.htm

The tool has recently been used to analyse (surprise, surprise) the language of the candidates in the US Presidential election (http://wordwatchers.wordpress.com/). It would be particularly interesting if this had been tried on more demanding text or with more demanding questions.

  1. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC)

LIWC (http://liwc.net/liwcdescription.php) seems at first glance to be methodologically much simpler. As far as I can tell from a quick reading, it computes scores based on occurrences of target words pre-defined to belong to different affective categories, plus scores based on counts of sentence length and the like. It depends centrally on a dictionary of 4500 words:

The LIWC2007 Dictionary is the heart of the text analysis strategy. The default LIWC2007 Dictionary is composed of almost 4,500 words and word stems. Each word or word stem defines one or more word categories or subdictionaries. For example, the word cried is part of five word categories: sadness, negative emotion, overall affect, verb, and past tense verb. Hence, if it is found in the target text, each of these five subdictionary scale scores will be incremented. As in this example, many of the LIWC2007 categories are arranged hierarchically. All anger words, by definition, will be categorized as negative emotion and overall emotion words. Note too that word stems can be captured by the LIWC2007 system. For example, the LIWC2007 Dictionary includes the stem hungr* which allows for any target word that matches the first five letters to be counted as an ingestion word (including hungry, hungrier, hungriest). The asterisk, then, denotes the acceptance of all letters, hyphens, or numbers following its appearance.

Not being up-to-date with research in this area (psycholinguistics?) I don’t know how this tool compares with affective research via text-analysis that has been going on for decades. Perhaps someone here can say. How reliable is such research?

PhiloLine announced on HDG

2008-12-04

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This is from a recent posting in the Humanist Discussion Group:

We are pleased to announce the alpha release of PhiloLine, an extension to PhiloLogic designed identify similar passages in relatively large collections of documents. PhiloLine is based on a simple implementation of a sequence alignment algorithm, a generalized technique used in bioinformatics and other disciplines. This implementation performs an all-to-all comparison of a set of documents loaded in PhiloLogic and generates results which can be linked to and from the database. PhiloLine is an experimental implement of our more generalized PAIR (Pairwise Alignment for Intertextual Relations) implementation which functions without PhiloLogic bindings to be released in Winter 2009.

Source code, documentationand release notes, links to relevant papers, and a slide show discussing sequence alignment in digital humanities are available at [Google Code][http://code.google.com/p/text-pair/].

PhiloLine, like PhiloLogic and PhiloMine, are open source systems. Please feel free to contact us at the address listed on the site with your comments, complaints, bug reports (yes, there will be bugs), suggestions and, always most gratefully accepted, code.

Right Back Where I Started

2008-11-30

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When I first began blogging four years ago, when blogging was just getting started, I started with WordPress. At that time, the name of my blog was foobawooba — based on a traditional song with that title that I liked a lot — and I blogged about everything. I ended that blog in a fit of pique — long story untellable on-line.

I have, in the interim, wandered the blogging wilderness in search of an application that would do everything I wanted it to do: offer me the control I wanted, the user interface I wanted, and the URL structure that I wanted. I found it in a couple of Rails applications, Mephisto and RadiantCMS, but both got broken when my shared hosting provider upgraded some Ruby gems without much warning. I was willing to fix Radiant, but the fact of the matter is that battling FastCGI errors was not how I wanted to spend my time. I am committed to learning Rails and Ruby — more on that in a moment — but I don’t have time right now to fix what ails Rails when it comes to shared hosting. And I don’t have a good enough reason to spend the money on a dedicated hosting set up that would allow me to run Rails using a native web server.

So here I am back to using WordPress, which has grown up quite a bit since last I used it. In particular, the admin interface has gotten a lot less crowded and a lot of the functionality that was missing is now available through a wealth of plug-ins. How weighty and creaky all this is going to get, I don’t know. WordPress is certainly the 800-lb. gorilla in the blogosphere these days — why TextPattern looks positively svelte by comparison — but it does seem to be what everyone is using, and like Microsoft Office, ubiquity has its advantages:

  1. First, it means there are a lot of people coding additional functionality in terms of plug-ins, widgets, and themes. One doesn’t have to code it by hand — which is a good thing because I hate PHP.
  2. Second, it means that a lot of shared hosting providers tweak their servers to make the welter of PHP scripts which are the muscle, sinew, and bones of WordPress run smoothly. My experience is that being a user of a minority application means you don’t get that kind of tweaking at all.  

D2A: Direct to Archive

2008-06-15

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It’s interesting how not only one’s discipline but also one’s practice within it so sharply shapes your view of methods and technologies both near and far. Reading the Project Bamboo proposal, for example, prompted a field researcher like me to respond that the library is not … [quotation here].

As I noted in my 4/6 presentation in Chicago, I don’t want to marginalize the library. I want to re-center it as a working repository to which many contribute as well as upon which many draw. All of this means that I see the library, or archive (I will use the two interchangeably), as a collaborator in my research process. One way it can do that is to help warranty the safety of my data. How can it do that?

By acting as my backup? That’s right. The archive needs data to exist, and field researchers need a safe place for their data. The great advantage of the digital age is that copying data is easy and inexpensive — all things considered. Just as importantly, in the digital age I can give the library my data and still have it for myself. In fact, by giving a copy away early and often I guarantee I will have it for myself.

This is something I am calling Direct to Archive, or D2A for short. One of the greatest chores in going through a collection of recordings, be they images or audio or video or even pages of field notes, is properly sorting, labeling, outlining, and indexing them. It is joyous when you discover something, but in between those moments of joy are long trawls through a variety of materials. (The trawling of course is what sets up the discovery: it’s only by flipping through photo after photo of an artifact that suddenly, to one’s conscious mind but not really suddenly, a pattern emerges.) One does it when you’re logging materials as you gather then, and then there’s the later effort to do something similar when you turn over a box of materials to an archive.

But why wait? Why not simply make the two motions the same? Coders call it DRY, short for “Don’t Repeat Yourself.” The application here is simple. A lot of field researchers are already using some for of digital asset management software (DAM for short). For me, it’s an application like Adobe’s Lightroom which I use to organize my images. So right away a couple of important caveats here:

  1. I don’t have any good DAM software for audio or for video. (There’s something for a future Project Bamboo team.)*
  2. This software only organizes my digital images and the relatively small percentage of film images — slide and print — that I have had the time or wherewithal to digitize.

My current process when I get back from fieldwork is to take the memory cards out of my camera and/or my camera bag and put them in my card reader. I fire up Lightroom to import the images into my library — Lightroom’s own term. That library sits on an external hard drive, but I have the option, which I use, of simultaneously backing up images to another volume. In the image below, you should be able to make out that backing up to another volume, in this case called “StJerome”, can occur even as I am uploading images onto my main volume.

*Click here to embiggen.

Why not make that other volume a hard drive sitting in an archive vault somewhere? My current DSL connection probably wouldn’t support it, but it will some day. (I could come close now if I was willing to pay AT&T an exorbitant amount of money every month, but I’m not.) Another alternative would be something like the Flickr export plug-in that someone has already made for Lightroom. Why not a similar plug-in for an archive. All my images in my library not only have all the usual EXIF information, which one day will have GPS already built-in, but I have gone through the trouble of adding a fair number of tags:

  • Louisiana
  • Boat
  • Crawfish Boat
  • Gerard Olinger

All my images? Yes. Why not? I have nothing to hide, nothing to lose, by making all my images available. Any system could easily make it possible for a researcher uploading his data to later manage it, setting terms and conditions for usage. One easily imagined term is that no materials would be available to the public for two years, three years, five years, or until a certain date. Et cetera. In the detail below, you can see that “Flickr” is one possible export. If I can export that easily to my Flickr account, surely I should be able to export to an archives. (Here’s a complete view of the export window in Lightroom.)

Lightroom export detail

Such a system would have multiple advantages:

  • A researcher would have a reliable back-up.
  • Such a system backing one up would also encourage researchers to be more thorough-going in their logging — let’s admit that it helps to have an audience and that might take the edge off a task too easily put off for later.
  • Archives would be in a collaborative relationship with researchers from the very beginning of a research project, making it possible not only for archivists and librarians to have a fuller understanding of the research process but also for researchers to have a better understanding of data management. Equally compelling is the opportunity both parties would have in potentially developing new ideas or seeing new things in extant materials. (The old saw about more hands make the work lighter applies here.)
  • Finally, archives could guarantee their own development, nurturing collections even in their formation. (Please note that I’m not concerned about how this might bias data collection. I have faith in the process over the long term.)

Slidecasting

2008-06-03

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It sounds easy. Slide – casting. To slide is to let gravity do the work for you. To cast is to let momentum do the work: you flick your fishing pole with the right amount of force and the bit of weight at the end of the thin line does the rest of the work. Slidecasting itself is not so easy, as I learned this morning, trying to put the Project Bamboo 4/6 presentation on-line.

I should admit upfront that I own Profcast, but I have had some difficulties using it, and I wasn’t sure if it would allow me to edit the voiceover narration and/or add some background sound. I decided I would post everything in iMovie, because I still have the 06 version which allows for multiple soundtracks. (As an added bonus, I know how to use it: I have yet to “kin” iMovie 08.)

Well, if you’re going to do soundtracks, and you’re working at the consumer level, the place to start, on a Mac, is GarageBand. Oh, cool, there’s a podcasting option which even allows you to drag in artwork. I outputted my slides from Keynote and made them available in GarageBand. I quickly typed up a transcript of what I had said in May — I typed in TextMate while flipping through slides in Keynote — and read into my MBP’s screen. And now I know to use a proper microphone. The built-in microphone has too much hiss. I lined up all my slides at the appropriate places in the voiceover, dragged in some background music, and was ready to explort, er, “share,” my production. The resulting file is an MPEG-4 audio file. It’s 3.6MB and has tiny images that do in fact transition at the right time.

I am just not too sure how many people would know what to do with it. Even on my own computer, iTunes wanted to open it and play only the audio. Okay, so back to Plan A. Export audio out of GarageBand — make sure it’s an AIF file — and import it into iMovie. Now import images. Wait, iMovie does not like PNG files. Huh. Export out of Keynote using Quicktime.

Various trials and lots of errors there, including then opening the exported file in Quicktime to save it as an MP4 file because iMovie does not like MOV files. (What’s going on Apple? It’s your own container format. I believe the saying is: eat your own dog food.) So back to Plan A. Audio plus images. Export images as JPGs. Wait, iMovie keeps cropping them.

Finally, I figured out how to go into Photo Settings and turn off this obnoxious behavior. Once the images were in, I went through them and synced them with the audio by adjusting their length using CMD + I. I simply kept a running tally of the start and stop points of the clips as they went along on a piece of paper and worked from that: 0:00 0:14 0:40 1:50 2:04 … and so on. All that done, I dropped some music in — not because I think I’m that good but because the hissing of the microphone needed to be cloaked in some fashion and I am not so fond of the sound of my own voice that I wanted to record myself all over again. The short of it is: the slidecast is done, and it’s up. It’s here.

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