The ACID Virtual Communities project is hosting a workshop in conjunction with OzCHI. The workshop theme is “Approaches to the Design of Social Software for Dis-Organisations”. All are welcome, and you con register here: http://www.ozchi.org/
There has been a discussion on one of the mailing lists that I belong to about upcoming conferences. These two conference listing websites were mentioned:
The International Calendar of Information Science Conferences
EventSeer
The second one has a useful looking listing of upcoming deadlines.
Recently I attended a three-day workshop on Cocoa programming for Mac OS X. The workshop was organised and sponsored by the Apple University Consortium. It was held at the University of New South Wales in the School of Comupter Science and Engineering. The course was taught by Daniel Woo assisted by Tim Lucas.
The course was pretty fast-paced and, I thought, very interesting and well-organised. In addition to the course notes, we were given a copy of Aaron Hillgass’ ‘Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X’ book which is a very useful reference. All in all, I was very pleased that I had the opportunity to attend.
Yesterday I attended the Future of Media Summit held simultaneously in Sydney and San Francisco. It was an interesting event with five or six panel sessions. Among the speakers were UTS’s Ross Gibson and others such as Mark Jones- the IT editor of the Australian Financial Review, Chris Anderson editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, Hugh Martin- editor news.com.au etc. etc. The event is reported on by smh.com.au here
Quite a bit of the discussion was about the impact of end-user publishing technologies such as blogs or wikis on traditional media. Naturally, one of the main emphases of the discussions was on commercial opportunities and threats.
The panel sessions included: ‘How will content be created?’, ‘Where will the money be?’, ‘Challenges and opportunities in the future of new media’, ‘The Globlaization of Media’. There were also round-table discussions – I went to the ‘Online Social Networks and Media’ discussion. In addition there was an opportunity for participants to make blog postings
There was an interesting report that was produced by the organisers.
We’re supposed to print our theses on acid-free paper. This appears at first to be quite hard to come by and I was advised in a couple of shops that either it would have to be ordered specially or it was not available there at all.
It was just by chance that I noticed that the Reflex brand paper that I had in my hand while talking to the shop assistant says ‘acid free’ in small writing on the side. A check of their website confirms that all Reflex paper is acid-free.
[UPDATE: I have now replaced the internal hard drive and all is well. It seems the problem was not related to the software updates and that there must have been a problem with the drive itself after all. Comments on backups still stand, of course. 27/7/06]
Last Saturday- 14th Jan- the data on my hard drive became corrupted and my machine wouldn’t run any more. I don’t know the cause of this but I had recently updated my OS to 10.4.4 and added the new version of Quicktime (7.0.4)- the problems only started about 24 hours later so that may be completely unrelated. As far as I can tell, there is not a physical problem with the drive itself.
After the problems began I was able to restart the machine and copy my most important files to an external hard drive. I spent the whole of Sunday at UTS trying to make a complete duplicate of the ailing drive but this failed. In the end on Monday I had to erase the disk, reinstall from the operating system DVD and recover my data from the backup.
With the new, clean, disk working properly again (after about 24 hours of installing and authorising…) and again updated to the latest OS version on Tuesday I made a clone backup- a complete duplicate of the whole drive using Carbon Copy Cloner.
Everything was OK for most of Wednesday, but the disk failed again Wednesday night while I was doing my next backup. Next day (Thursday) I used the clone image of my drive to set myself up running from an external drive rather than the internal one. I reverted the operating system on the external drive to version 10.4.3.
The internal drive is inaccessible using Finder and cannot be repaired by Disk Utility or DiskWarrior, but I have been able to retrieve the work I did on Wednesday using Prosoft Data Rescue.
I worked using the external drive for a few days being careful to back up regularly, but on Monday morning (23rd) that drive failed too. It’s a hard drive inside a small enclosure and I thought that it was the enclosure that had failed so I went and bought a new one. That failed too, with a nasty ‘burning electronics’ smell so I think something has gone badly wrong with the disk itself.
I’ve now bought a really robust-looking drive from LaCie and installed everything on there from my clone backup and I can boot the system using that. The internal drive is still inaccessible except using the data recovery software, I haven’t yet tried re-reformatting and re-reinstalling on the internal drive. I have another external drive so I can still keep a copy of everything in a separate place.
The good news is that the new LaCie drive is really fast, so the system feels quite snappy.
I thought that I had a good backup policy, making regular copies of my Users folder. As it turned out, even with this and a copy of my Applications folder as well as the operating system DVD, it still took a good 24 hours to get the system running again (and for some reason I still can’t print…). From now on I think I will backup using complete clones of my drive- these only take an hour or two to restore and all my preferences, serial numbers and everything reappear when its done.
I will also:
some alternatives:
new Mac Mini 1.25GHz $799
new iMac g5 17” – $1999
I’ve found someone with a similar problem to me which is reassuring in a way. It seems that I might be able to get things working on the internal drive again but I think I’ll stick with the external drive for the moment. I really need to catch up with my work and this seems a more flexible position to be in for the moment- if my laptop packs up altogether then I can boot any other mac that I can lay my hands on from my external drive and keep working.
Here’s an explanation of the issue with recovering using backups- I was doing option B.
Lately I’ve been staying home to write rather than coming to UTS. This is good for my writing, but it means that I’m not backing up my work as regularly as normal. At the same time, the more I write, the more paranoid I become about losing anything. There are just a few critical files that are regularly updated, the most important of which is called myThesis …
For a long while I’ve been looking for something that would copy the files that I drop onto it to some other location. This wouldn’t replace my normal backup routine, but would just allow me to easily keep more regular copies of a few files. Finally, I found an Automator action called ‘upload with scp’ that does what I want. I’ve made an Automator application and put it in my dock- anything I drop onto it is copied to a server at UTS, overwriting any earlier version that’s already there.
One thing that you need to set up before this will work is ssh remote login without having to enter your password each time, notes on setting that up are here, also I think Automator only comes with Mac OS 10.4 – Tiger.
Today I presented a paper at the Australasian Conference on Information Systems, at the Manly Pacific Hotel.
I was pleased with the presentation, and I got some good feedback, also had an interesting conversation over lunch about what I’m working on.
The session, which I also chaired, was one of two on IT, Creativity and Collaboration. The other papers in the session were very interesting, both dealing with media richness theory which I hadn’t come across before. This seems to be closely related to what I have been talking about in one area of my thesis, and it will be good to add a discussion of how this theory fits in.
Weakley, A.J. and E. Edmonds, Using Repertory Grid in an Assessment of Impression Formation, in Proceedings of the 16th Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS 2005). Abstracts and CD ROM of full papers, B. Campbell, J. Underwood, and D. Bunker, Editors. 2005, Australasian Chapter of the Association for Information Systems: Sydney, Australia.
As I mentioned in this post, I use Tinderbox for quite a lot of my writing. It’s possible to include images inside your tinderbox notes, but I’ve always been a bit reluctant to do this I guess partly because I don’t want my tinderbox document to get too big or slow to use. Also, I quite like the idea of having the images somewhere else in case I need to update them. Up to now, for my thesis, I’ve just been putting in a marker with the name of the image file that should go there. When I want to make a properly formatted document, I export from Tinderbox as text, then paste this into a new word processor document and insert the images by hand.
This is becoming a bit of a nuisance, though, and I’d like to have an automatic way of inserting all the images. To summarize, this is what I’m hoping to achieve:
1. compose the document, note by note or paragraph by paragraph, inside Tinderbox, using its great facilities to work on and understand the structure of the whole thing.
2. include placeholder text about the images and figures that should be present in the final version
3. include placeholder text for references that should have the appropriate text (Jones 1998) in the text, and should be included in the bibliography at the end
4. export sections, chapters or the full thing to get a single readable document
5. import into a word processor for final formatting, page numbering and tidying up, this process should include the automatic replacement of the placeholders with the images or the references as appropriate.
Even if this only worked for drafts of the thesis, it would mean that I could quickly generate something that’s quite readable and includes figures and references but at the same time do the actual writing work with Tinderbox in the way that I’ve become used to.
This is what I’ve come up with…
This morning I realised that both Apple’s Pages.app and TextEdit.app will open .html documents, at the same time placing images inline. Using instructions that I found here, I’ve been able to write a simple export template for Tinderbox which adds everything together into one long document with headings for each section. If I make the placeholder text for the images just an html ‘img’ tag pointing to the file on my computer then the images magically appear in the word processor document. Pages.app even resizes the images to fit the document.
For references, I’ve already been inserting the correct code for EndNote to be able to build the bibliography (something like {Jones, 1998 #291} ) which is part way there. (Brigid and I made notes about this on the wiki here some time ago). EndNote will find these codes within a Microsoft Word document and create the bibliography as you work with it. Alternatively, newer versions of EndNote can scan a .rtf file and insert a bibliography at the end.
So my proposed workflow is:
1: write the document with tinderbox, including the ‘img’ tags for image files and {reference} placeholders
2: export as .html with my new template
3: open the document using Pages.app or TextEdit.app
4: save as .rtf
5: create the bibliography using EndNote’s .rtf document scan
This is still not ideal, because EndNote won’t scan an .rtfd file- rich text format with images. To work around this you have to use ‘show package contents’ then move the file called TXT.rtf out of the package, scan it with EndNote then put it back in – a bit of a nuisance, but doable…
From my ‘big ships’ photo collection….
