For March, the community challenge is a doodle thing. I have no particular objection to that, but I’m not ready for something quite that whimsical. So for my March challenge I’m going to spend a little time each day refreshing my web development skills. I’m starting with a udemy.com course I got cheap in a bundle last month. The Complete Web Developer Course covers a whole bunch of web tech stuff, some of which I’ve known before at various levels of competence, and some of which I’ve never used.

As in February, I’ll tweet my progress, hopefully with links to samples of whatever nonsense websites flow from my fingers.

Today I upgraded my old iMac (20-inch Mid-2007) from Mavericks to El Capitan. I did that mostly because 1password wasn’t supporting what I had and not having it was seriously cramping my style. Then I went through the first four lectures of the course which included signing up for the included free hosting account (which I don’t really need since I’ve got a server, but decided to use so I don’t wander down compatibility and configuration ratholes.) Behold my not-a-web-site.

ETA: Oops, I need a hash tag. How about #webbing. Yep, that works. On twitter it’s all about climbing and upholstery.

“Easy” is not the word I’d use. Here’s an example. Say you wanted to get the ebook of George R. R. Martin’s insanely popular book A Game of Thrones.

You’d probably go to the KCLS web page and stick “Game of Thrones” in the search field right there on the front page:

And click the shapely “Go” button. This would return a number of largely irrelevant results. First hit is the graphic novel version. Second hit is the soundtrack from the TV show. Third hit is the tie-in cookbook. Fourth hit is the paper book. Fifth hit is a different edition of the paper book. Sixth hit is the audio book on cassette (really?!). Seventh hit is the audio book on CD. Eighth hit is the ebook in audio format. Ninth hit is finally the eBook text.

Yay, found it! Click on it and you get this:

You might notice that it shows “0 holds with 0 total copies; 0 Copies available” and be puzzled. But no matter, there’s a “Place a hold” button there, click it!

You log in with your card number and pin like usual. You get the usual prompt for which library you’d like to pick your book up at. Seems weird for an eBook, but go with it. And your request for a hold fails:

Bummer.

So you hit “Cancel” since that’s all you’ve got and it takes you back to the detail page for the eBook. What now?

Well, if you’re me the first few times you tried this you give up and go read something else. But maybe the third or fourth time you try it you might notice the little link that says “Click here for Adobe Reader version” (highlight added for clarity):

Now I don’t read ebooks in Adobe Reader. You probably don’t either, but it’s something you haven’t tried clicking on yet so what the heck. Here’s where that gets you:

Yes indeed, it’s a whole different KCLS catalog for electronic resources. Who knew? Since we were looking for an ebook in the first place, maybe we might want to have started off here rather than using the regular catalog which only has empty stubs for ebooks. You might look for a link to the ebook catalog on the KCLS home page. You might look for a long time. As near as I can tell, there isn’t one.

However, there is a secret hidden way to search in the secret ebook catalog from the homepage. Just above the search field there’s a dropdown list that you probably never noticed. I know I didn’t. Anyway, if you set that to “Items in the eCollection” then the search will take you to the OverDrive catalog and present you even worse search results than you got from the regular catalog.

Seriously awful search results. The first hit is 125 Brain Games for Babies. If you switch the “Sort by” drop-down from “Title” to “Relevancy”, though, it does a little better and our desired eBook shows up in the #1 spot and we’re back to the same place as we got from the “Click here for Adobe Reader version” link back in the old catalog.

Okay, we found it! Yay! Now how do we get it?

You’ll notice that you can place a hold on three different formats: Kindle, Adobe ePub, and Adobe PDF.

Now even if the checkout process were “easy” this is where any claims of simplicity would fall apart since every ereader device has different compatibilities and processes for loading content. I use my old iPhone 3GS to read ebooks these days and I’ve tried both Kindle and ePub formats on it. They both work. Neither one is trivial, but the Kindle reader is a little better than the Overdrive reader you need to load for the ePub version, so I’ve settled on using Kindle and will continue here with the assumption that you will too. So click on the “Place a Hold” button next to the Kindle version of the book.

You’ll be presented with a sign-in screen

Sign in with your card and pin as usual. You’ll get a new screen that will prompt you for an email address where they can let you know when a copy of the ebook is available for you:

Enter your email (twice) and you’ll get the message telling you to wait.

Now if you look back up at the detail for the Game of Thrones ebook you’ll notice that it had 256 patrons on the waiting list for 89 copies. Time to wait.

The good news and the bad news is that ebooks are checked out for 3 weeks and cannot be renewed. Why are they different from regular books? We probably don’t want to know. But this does mean that we can calculate that we’ll be waiting for something like 9 weeks to get to the top of the queue if everyone goes through with their checkout and keeps it for the whole three weeks.

So if we waited for our hold to be ready we would get an email with a link to the secret ebook catalog with instructions for how to get the book. Sort of. It would look almost exactly like this:

Subject: Digital title now available for check out

Dear King County Library System patron,

The following title is now available for check out and will be held for you for 4 days (96 hours) from the time this email was sent:

A Game of Thrones: Song of Ice and Fire Series, Book 1

by: George R.R. Martin

eBook

Please visit the King County Library System website http://overdrive.downloads.kcls.org and select the ‘My Holds’ link from the ‘My Account’ page. From there, you’ll be able to add this title to your Book Bag and proceed to check out. If you do not check this title out within 4 days (96 hours), the hold on this title will expire.

Thank you for your interest in digital media!

So we’d click that link which would take us to the secret ebook catalog. Then we’d have to click on the “My Account” link, sign in, click on the “My Holds” link, and then on the link for the particular book that’s now available to us.

Rather than wait all that time to finish this overview of the (“easy”!) process, I’m switching to a different book for the rest of this post. Hmm. How about 125 Brain Games for Babies?

So to check out you first have to add it to your “book bag” (not “bulk bag”. (sorry, wrong fandom)):

Note this is the same process you’d follow after tracking down the book in your hold list after getting the email after waiting for other people to be done reading your book.

Then “Proceed to Checkout”

Then sign in. Then Confirm Check Out.

Then you’ll be presented with a button saying “Get for Kindle”

This is presumably where the process would diverge if you were using an ePub reader.

Note also that the “Get for Kindle” button cannot be displayed in Safari in iOS for some reason so you can’t do this whole process on your phone, you have to go find a computer with a browser and click this button there.

After clicking “Get for Kindle” you get a detailed warning about the dangers of visiting sites other than kcls.org on the internet since it’s about to send you over to Amazon to collect your book.

Then you get warped to Amazon.com, keeper of all things Kindle. If you’re already logged in to your amazon account you’ll get something that looks like this:

So you maybe log in and maybe select the device you want the book on then click on “Get library book”. Now it’s finally available in your Kindle cloud.

Fire up your Kindle app (or actual hardware Kindle) and the book should now be available to read.

Easy!

So, seriously, this is way more complicated than it needs to be.

I’d try to fix the following things in this order:

1. Make the ebook catalog more visible from the home page. A link would be a start. Switch the search dropdown to radio buttons (there’s only three choices) or some other visible control.
2. Clarify the link from OPAC to OverDrive. Remove the “Place Hold” button on ebooks in OPAC. Change the “Click here for Adobe Reader version” link to something more obvious. And either make entries in OPAC for all ebooks (the ebook for 125 Brain Games for Babies isn’t in there for example), or remove them all and teach people to go to OverDrive (see #1)
3. Change it so when you search OverDrive from the home page the results come out sorted by “Relevance” rather than “Title”.
4. Fix the “Get for Kindle” button in OverDrive so it can be displayed and used from mobile devices.
5. Come back and I’ll come up with some more. ;-)

Whoa, I just noticed that if you point your mouse at a star it will tell you all about it.

via James Nicoll

I told them to go ahead, but they were unable to access it. It was responding to pings, but wouldn’t answer to telnet. There are a handful of other machines of similar vintage in the same rack so I logged in to one of them to see how long it had been since it was last rebooted. 764 days. That’s over two years running continuously without a reboot for systems that are 15 years old. (These systems are all on UPS power backed by a big old diesel generator)

Since there was no display handy to show what was going wrong I tried power cycling it. It didn’t come back. The system hadn’t been in active use for a while so extreme measures weren’t called for. Time of death was 2:51pm 6/26/08.

I just didn’t think its passing should go unremarked. How old is 15 in computer years?

I’ve customized my environment extensively with various software packages. They accrete over time, so it’s hard to identify what they all are. Some of them become so ingrained that I forget that I ever installed them at all.

This is brought to mind now because I dropped my work laptop (just a few inches!) the other day and bricked the hard drive. My heroic IT guy got a new drive and image installed the same day I handed him the sad case. Now I just have to figure out what all the changes are that make life bearable. Hence this post where I’m going to try to capture all the tweaks and additions. I expect I’ll be editing it repeatedly, so apologies to those reading via RSS feeds. You might want to configure your reader to ignore edited entries for my site. I’m expecting a new desktop system soon too which will remind me of another flurry of gadgets.

The order here is the order I installed these on my laptop, so it sort of relates to urgency of need.

Tools:

VNC

Allows you to control a remote computer (that has VNC server running on it) with your local keyboard and mouse. The free download version 4.1.2 is enough for my purposes.

Firefox (plus Adblock Plus and del.icio.us and Long Titles plugins)

Do I have to explain this?

Vim

My fingers are most comfortable editing text with the vi editor and this is the best implementation I know of. I make this the default association for text file viewing and editing in explorer. (Here’s my _vimrc)

ActiveState Perl

Still my scripting language of choice. I keep meaning to learn Python or Ruby, but I’ve already got this.

cygwin default set plus tcsh

This is what makes a Windows command prompt usable. Pretty much all the command-line tools you’d find on a unix system. It’s not perfect, but it is so much better than the pathetic set of tools that come with Windows. I don’t even know how many different tools I use from this, but it’s a lot. (ls, df, grep, wc, sed, awk, du, cat, others I use without thinking). tcsh is a guilty indulgence. I can use bash, but I started in csh so its syntax comes more naturally. I know better than to write scripts in it. (Here’s my .cshrc)

Worldtime

Get the old 5.5.2.748 version unless the new version is newer than 2004. You have to tweak the timezone db for either to do the new lame US DST dates. This is not a user-friendly application, but it’s fabulous for compactly displaying multiple time zone clocks on your desktop. I regularly deal with groups on the US west coast, east coast, Germany and Slovakia, India, and Korea so I can’t live without this thing. Here’s my pre-customized version if you want to start there. It has clocks for all those timezones. Right-click on the clock face and un-select everything in the Display menu to get the best effect.

IrfanView

Simple, fast, image display and basic editing tool. Let it yank the associations from whatever crap tool Windows has for this.

Spybot Search & Destroy

I do some random surfing on the laptop that can leave some barnacles on the system. This tool hunts down the spyware and nukes it.

PuTTY

SSH telnet client

WinSCP

SFTP client

Microsoft’s Power Toys for Windows XP

This will be closer to the top on the desktop. Grab TweakUI. Primarily for the Mouse->X-Mouse setting. This makes it so the window focus changes to whatever window your mouse is over without you having to click in the window. It’s a life saver if you keep a lot of windows open. Or it may drive you crazy. I can’t live without it. There are other cool things there, but I don’t use any of them.

Palm Desktop

Need to move this off to some non-work computer, but hotsync doesn’t work very well on my old G4 iBook

iSiloX

Gadget for converting web pages and stuff to a format I can read on my LifeDrive

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Photo management and editing. The first commercial product on this list. I plan to move this to a new mac real soon now, but for now it’s on my work laptop. Don’t tell the boss.

Flickr Uploadr

Upload a batch of photos to Flickr. You can also use this to apply tags and titles and stuff, but I use Lightroom for that.

Config changes:

• delete stupid default user values for TMP and TEMP environment variables and change the system values to c:\TEMP
• add a HOME environment variable set to some useful easy-to-type local directory (like c:\jeffy) (or network directory if the network is ubiquitous (i.e., not on the laptop))

Update for the desktop system:

enable Virtual Desktop

Lets you have multiple virtual screens so you can have more windows open without having to paw through them to find the stuff you’re working on. There are free options for multiple desktops out there (one is in the Windows Power Toys above), but I came from the X windows environment on unix and was pretty picky about how I wanted this to work. The particular features I like in this one:

• ability to define custom hot keys to switch desktops
• ability to make rules to keep certain windows sticky so they appear in all desktops
• ability to drag windows around in the mini-window and drag windows out of the mini window

basically I wanted it to work just like olvwm and it comes pretty close. I don’t use the latest version because I paid for an earlier version and it works fine for my purposes. Looks like it costs $25 now ($20 plus $5 download fee. Um. Okay, whatever.)