New project passwords

If you are the manager of a project, please contact your liaison to obtain a new Oracc password. You will not be able to log into your Oracc project without it. There is no hurry to do this: please wait until you need to use your project account again.

Choosing a password

Your liaison will help you choose a strong password. It must be:

• at least eight characters long
• composed of a mix of upper and lower-case letters and/or digits and/or punctuation (i.e., at least 3 of these 4)

When you have agreed on a suitable password, your liaison will set it for you.

Logging in again

Even if you and your project editors normally access your Oracc project using Emacs or Aquamacs, the first time that each of you logs in after the password change you must use Terminal or PuTTy in order to initialise the secure connection. Instructions are on the Project Management through Emacs page.

In addition, depending on your computer's security systems, Terminal or PuTTy may tell you to delete your known_hosts file, and will tell you where to find it. To delete this file it is easiest to use Emacs: type ctrl-x ctrl-f and enter the filename (on Macs it is ~/.ssh/known_hosts). Simply delete the contents of the file, save and close it. Then go back to Terminal/PuTTy and try the log-in again.

If you have any problems or questions with the initial log-in, please contact your liaison.

Piwik

Piwik log-in isn't yet functional but will be soon. More to follow...

Documentation updates

We've added a few useful odds and ends to the Oracc documentation over the past few months, which I thought it would be useful to summarise here:

• How to report a new sign value to Niek when the ATF checker complains of an unknown value;
• How to search the Qcat (catalogue of compositions) and request new entries;
• A list of Akkadian roots;
• How to add linguistic annotations to project glossaries;
• Fuller information about discourse divisions;
• And several new options for the oracc command.

As always, just ask if you have any questions or problems - or any suggestions for correcting, improving or adding to the documentation.

NEW: portal site software

Would you like to build a portal website for your Oracc project along the lines of Knowledge and Power or Assyrian Empire Builders? Now you can!

Just this week we have finished testing and documenting ESP, an Oracc version of the electrostatic programme written by George McKerron for the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge. In order to use it, you will need to know the basics of (X)HTML and how to use Emacs (but most of us use Emacs for Oracc text editing anyway).

Instructions for use are on the Oracc website. The range of options for Oracc portal sites (including but not only ESP) is here.

As always, if you would like any advice or help, just ask me.

new Aquamacs

If you use Aquamacs (Emacs for Mac) to edit files on the Oracc server, you'll be delighted to know that the new release of Aquamacs does not require the endless retyping of passwords that the older versions do. I've been using Aquamacs 2.3 for several days now and strongly recommend it.

To install it, just open your current version of Aquamacs, choose "Check for updates..." on the Aquamacs menu, and follow the instructions you are given. Alternatively, you can go to http://aquamacs.org/download.shtml and download it from there.

If you have any problems with this, as always, let me know.


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