ALEG
Weekly Report - Week 23, 5 October 2001
What I've done
- Moved difficult, unmapped old thesaurus terms to various "ghettos" within the
new thesaurus. Updated all the topic relationships to use the new thesaurus subjects, updated
the Maintenance Interface schema and the stylesheets to use these new subjects,
mapped the new thesaurus date subjects to date ranges (and disabled the thesaurus
date subjects). So, finally, the new thesaurus is in use.
- A new home page design has been implemented.
- Implemented a mechanism to age the connection objects used to
communicate between the Java server programs and the Oracle database.
After the Java server has been running for several hours under load, I've
noticed the memory consumed increases, which I suspected was due to
either a large number of SQL commands being remembered by the connection
object or a memory leak (sorry, Java doesn't have those - the required euphemism
is "Unintended Object Retention"). Now connections are retired after
a defined number of SQL commands or when they reach a defined age. So far,
this seems to have helped reduce memory use and paging.
Next Week
- Implement the searching of collection subsets of the database.
- Implement subject searching on the new thesaurus subjects.
- Implement Keyword anywhere searching.
- Revise EAD production for Lu Rees Finding Aids (following changes devised by
Megan and Marlene).
- More work on the static pages content and styling.
- Change the thesaurus selection interface to remember the last selected
subjects.
- Implement an end-user thesaurus browser.
- Multiple creation events for a work as a mechanism for allowing date ranges
to be associated with agents responsible for works, eg editors of a periodical.
- More result formatting from simple and guided searches.
Next few weeks
- First known dates (expression level).
- Advanced search screen design.
- William noticed that some of the place-of-publication data for
loaded records is wrong where the name of the place of publication (town or
city) occurs in more than one state (eg Richmond, Glebe). I'll investigate
when we map the spatial thesaurus. Dan, Chris and Terry have also noticed
similar incidents, so I think a very careful look at all place assignments
to places occuring in multiple states/countries is warranted.
Links of the week
- How credible is this? - The Stanford
Web Credibility Project.
Our goal is to understand what leads people to believe what
they find on the Web. We hope this knowledge will enhance Web site design
and promote future research on Web credibility.
- Counterpane Cryto-Gram 30 Sept 2001 -
a special issue by Bruce Schneier discussing some of the implications of the September 11
attacks.
Rarely do you see an attack that changes the world's conception
of attack, as these terrorist attacks changed the world's conception of what
a terrorist attack can do. Nothing they did was novel, yet the attack was
completely new. And our conception of defense must change as well...
Airline security measures [introduced as a response] are primarily designed to give the appearance of
good security rather than the actuality. This makes sense, once you realize
that the airlines' goal isn't so much to make the planes hard to hijack, as
to make the passengers willing to fly.
- Lose the Charisma -
"extolling the vast transformational power of the really dull executive".
Charisma is a liability -- something to be overcome, like a speech impediment.
Executive compensation and company performance are not linked. And -- brace yourself --
technology has nearly zilch to do with sparking a company's transformation
from run-of-the-mill to top-of-the-hill