Ok, you’re a security conscious Mac user so you’ve enabled the Open Firmware password. Now you want to boot from a CD and just holding down the “C” key while the computer starts up won’t work. What do you do?
You boot into Open Firmware (hold down command-option-O-F while the computer starts up), hit return and, when prompted, enter your Open Firmware password. Then at the prompt type
boot cd:,\\tbxi
Posted in Uncategorized | 17260 Comments »
I usually use CTRL+T to open a new blank tab, but you can also double click the tab bar
Internet Explorer 7 First Impressions
Yeah, because double clicking my tab bar or middle clicking a link is harder then clicking a blank tab.
Who knew?
Posted in Note-to-Self | 20196 Comments »
Delocator helps you find places other than Starbucks for your cup of coffee. Very cool and community minded, though the results seem to be upside-down—the cafés closest to my zipcode come out at the bottom of a pretty long list. They also encourage you to download their toolkit and start a similar project of your own.
Posted in Uncategorized | 32023 Comments »
It’s happened a few times—I’m transfering data from one database to another and the old one has a few accented characters in it, but came from the days before Unicode. So if you’re using Perl to pull data from the first database, if you have a string with a a word like “façade”, when you try to insert it into the second database you get an error like DBD::Pg::db selectrow_array failed: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding “UNICODE”: 0xe76164.
Fortunately, Unicode::MapUTF8 makes it easy with its to_utf8 function. For instance, if the source data is in iso-8859-1:
use Unicode::MapUTF8 qw(to_utf);
#
# ... snip
#
# query $source for the value, and put a converted version
# into $dest
my $value = $source->selectrow_array('get my_val from my_table');
$dest->do('insert into my_new_table (my_val) values (?)', {},
to_utf8( { -string => $value, -charset => 'ISO-8859-1' });
Based on information found here: Problem with LATIN1 characters from Perl-DBI
Posted in Perl, Unicode, Note-to-Self | 16616 Comments »
I don’t know much about how Google’s vaunted “PageRank” works, but since reformatting and adding some to my Ovid FAQ, it has made it to the top of the results for “Ovid” (except for a few links to ovid.com, “an internationally recognized leader in medical information services”).
Update: Things got pretty volatile a few days after I wrote this, whether from changes to Google’s PageRank algorithms, or just do to the small sample size of page about Ovid. Anyway, this is no longer true, but it was fun while it lasted.
Posted in Ovid | 3240 Comments »
Someone has reviewed the Basquiat show on IndyMedia, and apparently in the printed counterpart, the Indypendent. I think the reviewer really caught what it means to mount this exhibition in Brooklyn:
The Brooklyn Museum retrospective is another hit from their gambling curators. To see Basquiat juxtaposed with the vast collection of African art he had visited as a youth, underscores the principles of Sankofa. “We must look to the past to understand the present and prepare for the future.”
Not only is this cool in an anarcho-radical kind of way, but it’s also great that Google News—which is where I found out about it—includes IndyMedia as one of their news sources.
Posted in Brooklyn Museum | 88330 Comments »
While idly searching Google for Ovid I discovered that a FAQ that I had written several years ago was still one of the top results. That seems like a position with a fair amount of responsibility, and I’ve spruced it up so that I might be able to maintain it a little better:
The new Ovid FAQ
Coming sometime, a sprucing up of Recent Ovidian Bibliography and the Greek Unicode Converter
Posted in Ovid | 1132 Comments »
Gotta love the Brooklyn Paper. Not only are they pretty good about raking Bruce Ratner over the coals, but Bruce Springsteen’s recent visit to the Brooklyn Museum was
front page news on April 2.
I was standing behind them (a fair ways behind them) when they took this picture of the Boss and my boss, Museum director Arnold Lehman, so some small percentage of the scattered background photons scattered off me. Word got around around pretty fast that Springsteen was coming to see Basquiat, and about half the staff coincidently started milling around the gallery.
Posted in Brooklyn Museum, At the Museum | 18531 Comments »
Banksy now has “screenshots” of web pages from the museums where he recently “exhibited”, so I feel like the Brooklyn Museum web site has dipped a tiny toe into the water of art history.
Posted in Brooklyn Museum, On the Website, Hacks | 3163 Comments »
We finally put up a clickable floor plan on the Brooklyn Museum website. What had been holding it up was the need to do something special for the special exhibitions galleries so that we wouldn’t have to be constantly updating the floor plan.
Since we have recently (finally) moved to database-backed content for much of the exhibition information, I implemented a virtual URL handler (one of my favorite parts of OpenACS) for URLs like /exhibitions/gallery/1/blum which will look up what’s in the first floor Blum gallery, then either redirect to the page for that exhibition or display a message saying that there is nothing currently in that gallery. No updating of the floor plan necessary. The next step is obviously to say what will be in that gallery soon.
We also broke the map legend out of the graphic and redid it in text. The legend is done as an unordered list, and I recreated the two-column layout of our printed floor plans using a better version of the “Layered Fudge” technique that was recently featured in A List Apart. Besides being (I hope) more accessible, this allowed me to list only those icons that are featured on a map for any particular floor without having to edit a graphic.
I think we’ll have an even more interactive map in the next couple of weeks!
Posted in Brooklyn Museum, On the Website, OpenACS | 18427 Comments »
Meander’s Nod is proudly powered by
WordPress
Entries (RSS)
and Comments (RSS).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.