This site, blog.sutch.us, has been unavailable for the last two or three months. What happened?
Some time ago I noticed that Microsoft Outlook recognizes calendar invitations received via email and, before being accepted or declined, automatically adds these entries to my calendar. When I first experienced this, I thought it was a bit odd and accepted it as a feature.
It's been over a year since I posted anything to this site. Keeping a site up-to-date is a lot of work. Along with creating and publishing content, a site requires constant maintenance of the technology and moderation of comments.
Earlier this month a vulnerability in a Ruby standard library was announced (http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2009/06/09/dos-vulnerability-in-bigdeci...). Since this site was running Mephisto (http://mephistoblog.com/), an open source Ruby on Rails blogging system, I needed to take some action.
Some things have recently changed for those of us developing Rails applications in a Windows environment. First, InstantRails, an all-in-one package containing the complete Rails stack, has been superseded by BitNami RubyStack. Next, Windows machines now usually ship with Vista instead of XP. Finally, Rails 2.0 was released last week.
The other day I called a large company that maintains my personal and credit card information (along with that of about five million other Americans) and learned that the customer service agent could help me login to my account by telling me the password that I had previously set. Surprised, I asked "You can see my password?", to which she replied "I can see everything!"! (I know that these exclamation marks look silly, but they really did occur on both ends.)
My blog that was hosted on sutch.com is now hosted at OCS Solutions under the sutch.us domain. I expect that sutch.com will eventually be migrated too. I've hosted sutch.com with pair Networks since May of 1996. Why the switch?
In my last post (A Hook into Stellent), I described how my organization was able to create a hook into Stellent that allows an external script to be executed upon conversion of native documents to perform transformations to each converted document. I also described the problem my organization was having with Stellent’s conversion of Microsoft Word tables of contents. I will describe our current solution to the Word tables of contents (TOC) conversion problem. I’m providing this solution to provide a specific example of how we are able to hook into Stellent, but what I describe here may soon be replaced by an improved solution.
My organization uses Stellent Web Content Management for publishing content to the web. One issue that has eaten up quite a bit of our time is getting better control over the HTML that is produced by the system. The product that converts native documents (such as Microsoft Word documents) to HTML is called Stellent Dynamic Converter (DC). DC has the ability to use rules to manipulate the HTML document during conversion. We have version 7.5 of DC, which uses something called a GUI template to customize the conversion process. Unfortunately, GUI templates do not seem to be as full featured as the script templates that were available prior to version 6.
Until recently, we coped with the limitations of DC. One limitation that we deemed unacceptable was DC’s treatment of Microsoft Word’s Tables of Contents (TOC). Our expectation for the content management system (CMS) is to manage our native documents and to allow them to be displayed in the native application, printed to paper, and be displayed as web pages. The problem is that TOC is used differently in each of these cases. When a document is viewed using the native application or printed from it, the TOC is used to find a section by using the page number. When a document is viewed as a web page (or viewed using the native application), the TOC is used as a link to easily move to the referenced section.
About a month ago I purchased a Digi-Comp I v2.0 from Minds-On Toys (see http://www.mindsontoys.com/kits.htm for information). This “toy” is a mechanical computer kit that, once built, can execute simple programs. I haven’t experimented much with the programming aspect yet, but have completed the assembly of my Digi-Comp I. This posting attempts to describe my process, mistakes and hints so that others might build and use their Digi-Comp I v2.0 with a few less problems.
