Working around problems with IE 7 is a tedious subject of discussion, so forgive me for this. Thanks to a #code4lib exchange between Jonathan Rochkind and Gabriel Farrell I learned about overflow: hidden and Methods for Containing Floats.

I was having a problem with a page that worked fine in all browsers except IE 7. It looked like this, with the content of one div flowing out beyond its boundaries:

Adding overflow: hidden to the CSS on that div fixed it:

And it still works in all the real browsers, too.

Two quotes I read today that struck me as connected:

“I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.” (Said by Nick Jenkins, the narrator, in Anthony Powell’s The Valley of Bones, book seven in A Dance to the Music of Time.)

“The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.” (Edward Gibbon, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, quoted by Richard Feynman in the introduction to The Feynman Lectures on Physics, where he says he thinks the course he taught didn’t go very well.)

The Canadian census has been in the news a lot recently because Industry Canada Minister Tony Clement decided that for the 2011 census, instead of one in five households receiving a mandatory long-form survey (that goes into great detail, asking a lot of questions) now one in three will receive an optional long-form survey. He’s doing this because he claims lots of Canadians find the form intrusive.

The decision caused an uproar, with good reason: it makes the data statistically useless. That sampling technique makes any analysis completely unreliable. The people at Statistics Canada (who, on another point, are scrupulous about privacy) know this, of course, but the government is ignoring them.

Today Munir Sheikh, Chief Statistician of Canada, resigned from Statistics Canada:

I want to take this opportunity to comment on a technical statistical issue which has become the subject of media discussion. This relates to the question of whether a voluntary survey can become a substitute for a mandatory census.

It can not.

Under the circumstances, I have tendered my resignation to the Prime Minister.

I’m an academic librarian, and every week I see that census data is crucial to work in universities, from student assignments to faculty research to country-wide planning about the education system. It’s used in the public sector and the private sector in countless ways. It helps us understand the past and the present, and prepare for the future. Census data is at the core of all government planning. Should be at the core. Used to be at the core. Now, perhaps so that there is no evidence of the effects of their policies, the Conservative government is going to junk where that data comes from.

Throwing away the detailed 2011 census data is sheer stupidity. This decision is bullshit.

A quote from Dead Street, by Mickey Spillane (and Max Allan Collins, who finished it up after Spillane died in 2006), published in 2007 by Hard Case Crime. Retired cop and typical Spillane hero Jack Stang is investigating his long-lost fiancé’s past, and talking to the man who was her boss two decades ago:

“She was a very able person. We used to say she could even think like a computer.”

“Computers think?”

“With the high-tech advancements, so one would certainly suspect.”

“But not twenty years ago?”

“Well, they were on their way. Improvements were coming daily. New kids right out of college … and some even younger than that … were introducing developments that had unbelievable potential.”

I nodded, thought a moment, then asked him, “Looking at it now, how does that ‘potential’ stand?”

He knew what I was thinking and his wrinkled face broke into a wry smile. “For its time, it seemed incredible. There are few words to express what it’s like now. Only a genius can understand the workings of a computer today. And as for today’s potential, it takes another computer to arrange any conversation at all.”

“Bettie was smart,” I remarked, “but below genius level.”

“How would you know?”

“Because she was in love with me,” I stated quietly. “Machines don’t have love affairs.”

A dull note to say that I upgraded to Drupal 6.17 (following these instructions) and then used drush to upgrade all the modules. It went perfectly smoothly. I do wish I could upgrade Drupal with a version control system like I can upgrade WordPress with Subversion. That’s really amazing. I don’t have any idea how difficult this would be to implement, though.

My Setup

I love reading The Setup, a bunch of nerdy interviews where geeks describe what hardware and software they use. I’m always interested in seeing the tools people use and where they do their work, especially artists’ studios.

My setup is pretty plain, but I thought I’d document it. I challenge any Code4Lib types, or anyone else who wants to do it, to pick up on the idea and write up what they use.

(Note: this is my personal setup. At work I use a large Dell laptop running Windows. At home everything is FLOSS except one program, I think.)

What hardware do I use?

I have two laptops. My main one is a Dell Inspiron 13. It tells me that the chip is an Intel Dual-Core T4200 @ 2 GHz but I don’t think I paid any attention to that even when I bought it. These days any new computer is fast enough for me. It has two gigs of RAM, a 150 gig hard drive, and a 13.3" screen at 1200x800. There’s something flakey with the wifi interface inside.

I also have a netbook for travelling. I used to have an Asus Eee 701, but I just moved up to an Eee 1005PE because the tiny keyboard was really slowing me down. This new Eee has a 10" screen at 1024x600 and a 250 gig drive. The battery life is astounding. My first day really using it, it went over nine hours.

I have a D-Link RangeBooster N Dual Band wifi router and a Gnet ADSL modem. My printer is a Brother HL-2040, a cheap laser job that works well.

My phone is an HTC Dream. The screen is cracked but it works perfectly.

My MP3 player is a SanDisk Sansa Fuze 4 GB. It plays Ogg and FLAC as well as MP3. I rip to FLAC now.

And what software?

I use Ubuntu and GNOME (with a virtual desktop four across and two down). That gives me gnome-terminal, F-Spot to manage photographs GNOME Do for super-quick launching of programs without having to use a mouse (I use the equivalent Launchy in Windows), Pan as my newsreader, and Totem for video.

My editor is Emacs, with some helper modes, especially AUCTeX for LaTeX and Rinari for Ruby. I use outline-mode every day.

I use LaTeX (the TeX Live distribution) for all my writing. Source code for text: I love it.

My browser is Firefox, with a number of extensions, most especially: Adblock Plus, CS Lite, Readability, Firebug, Web Developer, Optimize Google, and Zotero.

Sometimes I use Opera and Chrome.

I use Planet Planet as my feed reader. I have two planets: one for general stuff, one for library geek stuff. I like reading feeds this way because if something scrolls off the bottom, I don’t need to worry about it. I never see “you have 2,349 unread blog posts.”

I use git every day, to manage source code, to do lists, writing, and more. I love it. I need to edit files when I don’t have net access, so I can’t use Google Docs for my crucial stuff. I use git to distribute important work across four machines.

I program in Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Maybe Python some day.

My shell is bash. I read personal mail with Alpine and work mail with Thunderbird. Audacity for editing audio, gPodder for podcasts, EasyTAG to manage audio file metadata, Freemind for mind maps, BOINC doing climateprediction.net, Hydrogen as a drum machine and sampler, and XChat for IRC. I also use Skype sometimes even though it’s not free.

For web sites I use WordPress for blogging and Drupal for my personal site.

My phone is running Android 1.5, which is now out of date, but it does everything I need and does it very well. My most commonly used apps on it are connectbot (an SSH client), Toshl to track expenses, Google Sky Map, My Tracks, Advanced Task Killer, Ring Toggle, and Aldiko for ebooks.

What would be your dream setup?

I wish my laptop wifi wasn’t buggy and that my ADSL line didn’t sometimes go bad and lose synch or give me monster packet loss for a few days. Aside from that I’m happy with what I have.

I used to have a much more complicated setup, with a big machine and a big monitor, plus one or two other older boxes (all these running FreeBSD), one acting as my gateway/router, but I got tired of it all. It was a big mess. I wanted to spend less time administering my machines and more time using them. I switched to Ubuntu on laptops and like it a lot.

(I sent something like this to the code4lib mailing list.)

About 40 of us were in Kingston, ON last Friday for Code4Lib North. It was a great day! I had a really good time and I hope everyone else did too.

Thursday there were about twenty people hanging out in the afternoon, and most went off for dinner and some ended up at The Sleepless Goat, a hippie cafe/restaurant, for dessert. I don’t think much hacking went on, but the hanging out was good.

Friday we started at 9. There were 10 twenty-minute talks, and before lunch we did an Ask Anyone session (like Dan Chudnov did at Code4Lib in Asheville). Queen’s University generously provided lunch. When we came back we had nine or ten lightning talks, the last three talks, and then broke up and some BOF sessions happened. The library shut at 4:30 and a group headed out for dinner while others went back home.

I knew some of the people there but there were lots of new faces. The talks were all very interesting. I went first and was, I’m afraid, insufficiently awake.

Walter Lewis spoke for himself and Art Rhyno about linked data and old Kingston newspapers in Our Ontario. MJ Suhonos’s location-aware mytpl.ca had people oohing and ahhing when it showed that the nearest copy in Toronto of a certain book was at a branch in the very east end of the city (Kingston being 250 km east of Toronto). Alan Harnum talked about Toronto Public Library’s use of Endeca, and attributed some of its features for a level 20 wizard.

Glen Newton’s visualization of domains of knowledge in scientific journals was eye-opening. John Miedema gave a summation of OpenBook, his WordPress plugin that he’s weaning from development, and Eric Palmitesta gave a great tutorial on XQuery and Exist. Nasser Saleh talked about Coagmento, a collaborative browsing/research tool.

I don’t have the details of the nine or ten lightning talks, but there was a wide mix of people and subjects, and everyone had the Code4Lib spirit. Fifty interesting minutes, really well done.

Thanks again to Queen’s University Library (it’s a lovely campus, with very nice libraries) and Wendy Huot for organizing everything there. (Wendy led a BOF at the end of the day, a design critique of some new home page designs she’d working on, that was a good session, the kind of thing that really helps anyone working on library web sites.) I think it was a really fun and informative day, and I hope everyone else felt the same.

Looking forward to Code4Lib North this Thursday and Friday in Kingston. Some hacking on Thursday, then dinner. Friday some people (including me) have said they’ll do talks, but there’s a lot of blank space still left in the day for who knows what. Then some hanging out after, I hope, before heading home.