Terry’s Worklog

Well, you can definitely tell that its winter. On Thursday, when I rode my bike to work, it was 16 degrees at my house and in single digits over the course of my ride on the highway. When I got to work, I was frozen over — my eyelashes, eye brows, gloves, etc. It was about as cold as I think I’ll be able to handle without actually wearing more than just a sweatshirt in the morning. Alyce snapped a picture of our yard at 1:00 PM — after the sun had been on the yard all day. It still looks cold to me.

–Terry

Even though Alyce, my wife, was busy helping with the wedding, she was able to snap a few pictures of the actual wedding itself, so I thought I would post them. Since I outlined the cast of characters in an earlier post, I’ll just post the pictures.

–Terry

I thought I’d post a little more information regarding MarcEdit’s new Preview Mode. Earlier, I’d mentioned that I will be implementing a preview mode into the MarcEditor. The reason for this is many, but here are a few of the highlights:
1) Will load just the first nnn number of bytes into the editor. This will speed up file loading, while still allowing the user to use all the global editing functions.
2) Removes the file size limitations. The theoretical file size limit in the MarcEditor is 2 GB on a 32 bit system and 4 GB in a 64 bit system. This will no longer be the case in the preview mode. Since only a snippet of the file is loaded, the Editor will now be able to process files of any size.
3) Window locking. When in the preview mode, the preview window is set as readonly by default. This means that the data in the preview pane isn’t editable via the keyboard, but all global functions work as expected. This is done to make file saving extra fast. However, if you want to edit the data in the preview pane, you can unlock the window. This slows saving from the preview mode, because of the file tracking involved, but I want to make sure everyone can work with the program the way that they want to. So example of speed differences. Using a 300 MB file as an example — if I open the file in preview mode, the file takes 0.08 seconds to load. If I load the entire file, it takes 173 seconds. If I save the file with the preview pane locked, it takes approximately 12 seconds. If I save the file with the lock off and modify the data in the preview pane from the keyboard, the save operation takes 63 seconds due to the internal file tracking and manipulation needed to reinsert the modified data in the pane. So its a big difference — but I think that this will be very useful for folks. I know that in the short period that I’ve had it and have been testing it — I’ve been very excited to have it and hope others will find it exciting as well.

Below, I’m attaching a screenshot to show what this feature is going to look like. I have some testing to do to make sure its all working like I want it to — but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to make it available first thing Monday or Tuesday.

–Terry

Officially released last week, OSU has made available a nifty new digital collection called the OSU Herbarium Type Specimens. This collection was done in collaboration with the Herbarium library on campus — and essentially takes photographed images of original specimens and matches them with the original descriptions of the specimens. It required working with a lot of publishers to get permission and a lot of student hours to “shoot” the photography, but in the end, I think its turned out fairly well. The url, for those interested, is found at: OSU Herbarium Type Specimens

–Terry

It took 28 years, but I finally got myself a little sister. I took a break this weekend from programming (well, for the most part) to attend my youngest brother’s wedding on the Oregon Coast. I have some pictures — though not as many as I’d like. Since I was the best man, I wasn’t able to get as many personal pictures as I’d like, but I’ll post what I got.

On Friday, we had the rehersal and Marsha, the bride to be, was already crying

It was actually funny, this is the first opportunity that I’ve had to meet Marsha’s family:

Lots of fun…Anyway, my oldest son, Kenny, was in the wedding party as well. He was the ring barer and did such a great job. Definitely a cutie. Here are a couple of pictures from the rehersal:

The next day, we had the actual wedding. If I think about it later, I’ll post some pictures of the actual wedding — but here are some pictures from afterwards with the wedding party.

These first two pictures of the best man (me) and the maid of honor (Marsha’s sister).
Maid of honor:

Best Man (me) — BTW, Kenny took this picture:

Kenny and Me (you can tell, by this point, Kenny was getting tired. But to be honest, the long face actually had more to do with the having to wait to get his wedding cake):

So how about the bride and groom — well, here are some pictures of the bride and groom and families:

Here is a picture of my family — grandparents & my parents with David and Marsha.

Here is David with his new in-laws.

Here’s a picture of my Mom and Dad. See the smiles — one more out of the house…whooo! Now if they can just get my other brother out of the house, they can actually get the house to themselves.

Finally, here’s a picture of the entire mob. The one sneeking out of the picture on the right, that would be my other brother.

The wedding was really nice. My mom did a fantastic job setting this up and making it a very special day for the bride, the groom and everyone that attended.

–Terry

This is just informational — a little bit of a heads up as I finish working this out. Essentially, what I’m doing it building a preview mode into the MarcEditor. The assumption here is that if you have a file over a certain size (by default, 1 MB) — the MarcEditor will default loading the file into a preview mode. Exactly what is a preview mode and how will affect your use of the MarcEditor? This is a great question and why I’m excited about this new feature. When using the global editing features, MarcEdit actually saves the data from the Editor and then handles the info outside of the Editor — and then reloads the results back into the editor. In general, file loading actually incures a pretty stiff penalty — for example, a 150 MB file takes approximately 30 seconds to load. What the preview mode then does is:
1) Allows the user to see the first 1 MB of the file
2) still use all the global editing functions without incuring the file loading penalty.
3) see results of modifications — without having to scroll through the entire file.
4) Removes memory and file size as a limitation. Currently, the theoretical file limit to the MarcEditor is 2GBs — the Windows Paging size. However, the realistic file limit is closer to 200 MB because of available physical and virtual memory. By having a preview mode, these limits are removed since the editing tools themselves have no file size limit and the actual data loaded will be no more than 1 MB.

If you want to see the entire file — no problem. There is a link in preview dialog that allows you to override the preview behavior and load the entire file.

I think that this is a good idea — at least — I know that my personal useage of the MarcEditor will increase once this has been added since I work with large files and this will elimate the file loading penalties. And from my conversations with folks, I think others will find this very useful as well.

Anyway, I wanted to give folks an idea of what this will look like just so its not a surprise when it shows up in the next build or so. Here’s a screenshot — the preview note is below the menu.

If you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

–Terry

I found an interesting little bug in the MARCEngine that occurs only when using the MARC=>UTF8 component when converting data into XML in Arabic. Its been corrected and reuploaded. One other interesting note…while testing my recent updates to the MarcEditor (improving large file loading), I found that when openning files with a mix of Arabic causes the Editor to open more slowly. Its odd — but I’ve done some looking in the MSDN documentation and I found that this is somewhat expected. I’m going to continue working on ways to speed up loading in the Editor — I’m also go to create a new editor mode (a preview mode) so that only a snapshot of the file is loaded. I’ve found when I’m working with large files, its often very unlikely that I need to actually see the entire file — rather, I only need to see maybe the first 1 mb to see what type of changes I need to make. This essentially would allow the editor to work with files of any size (even larger than the 2 GB paging limit). I just need to figure out how to make it work so that it integrates with the current MarcEditor framework. I’m going to see what I can do with this over the weekend.

The download is found at: MarcEdit50_Setup.exe

–Terry

Ha! Finally, I got the record exporting code to work again. When I’d first set it up, it worked great on our ILS, but didn’t on others. So, after a few sleepless nights (and banging my head against a wall and sobbing) I finally got this problem fixed. The program should now work as expected when exporting data to any server supporting TCP connections.

Other miscellanous fixes — the program checks for path similarities in the MARC Tools interface so that you can’t accidently make the input and output paths the same. Oh, and I’ve add the Export option to the Windows Context menu, and am testing the COM interface to the new MARCEngine. So long as I’m happy, I’ll update the package this weekend/next week to include the COM objects to access the MARCEngine via vbscript as well as update the MarcEdit 5.0 help to include full documention for both COM and .NET interfaces to the various components (MARCEngine, Sockets Engine, MarcEditor, etc.)

Anyway, the new download can be picked up from: MarcEdit50_Setup.exe

–Terry

Well, well, our puppy is turning into a little horse. Who know how fast puppies actually grew. Yikes! Anyway, here a few Goldie pictures, during the rare moments where she and the boys are not chasing each other through the house.

–Terry

I posted a rebuild at: MarcEdit50_Setup.exe. The problem was in the last update, I overwrote the master xml function list (the list found in the MARC Tools Window) with the master list on my development machine, so you will likely find that xml functions are now broken if you’d updated. This will correct it. I’m thinking that I will likely include a boot loader in the future so that this list can be updated dynamically, rather than simply being overwritten on install.

–Terry