Zeno's Paradox
July 17, 2003 - Scotland Entry: Work

My trip to the northern British Isles was not to sit around and drink fine Scotch whisky idly. I had been charged with work to do in order to justify my stay. Today, I managed to take care of some of those duties.

At Glasgow Caledonian University, David Donald -- the UK counterpart to Jerry Goldman in the Spoken Word project -- had ordered a very nice dual-processor Apple Xserve as a development server. My job today was to work with his technical staff to show them the ins and outs of the technical approach used in Oyez and help them set up a sample audio site. My original plan was to sit back and let them do it themselves, with some guidance where needed, but they were not at all familiar with the technologies that we use -- Tomcat, Java, XSL, XML, XSP, streaming media, etc. So I had to improvise and I ended up setting up most of the things myself, explaining as I went along about what I was doing and why.

Yesterday, I managed to get MySQL installed and running. Today, I installed Tomcat and Cocoon. Jerry brought a DVD with Robin Williams doing a bit on how the Scottish invented golf, so we figured that would be interesting test media to use. From the DVD, I created MPEG4 video, MOV video, and an audio-only MP4 track. On the Cocoon side, I showed the guys how to create an XML file with the information desired, and how to take that XML and use XSLT to transform that document into the site's HTML pages and its SMIL-based media files. We ended up using RTSP in the SMIL files, so we managed to create a pretty cutting edge system in a few hours. It's small and limited, but it was a valuable educational exercise. I helped David pick out some XML books that would bring them up to speed, and I plan on sending them some Cocoon recommendations when I get back to the states.

After that was taken care of -- and the GCU library was closing -- we came back to David's place, where I promptly went upstairs and took another nap. One positive aspect of jet lag is that I have been sleeping much deeper in the past two days than I have been in the past two months. And have I been having some kooky dreams...

The plan for tomorrow is to head to Edinburgh and have lunch with the research librarian that David is hiring away from the BBC. Sometime, I need to take my POLI-SCI exam, so I'll be studying a bit tonight. I think I have a decent grasp of the material (if anything, I'm guilty of over-processing it), so the exam should be reasonable. However, this being my first Northwestern exam, I'm still too paranoid to neglect studying. I'll know by tomorrow how much paranoia was appropriate.

Posted by br284 at 02:18 PM

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