new Universal box set

Universal have announced a new box – “Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection“.
Initial reports suggested that it would simply be a repackaging of the 14 existing region 1 releases, along with a bonus 15th disc of new material.
However, a new press releases has confirmed that although the DVDs will still contain the previously releases extras, the film transfers will be new digitally re-mastered versions.

Universal Studios Home Video have announced the Region 1 DVD release of Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection for 4th October 2005 priced at $119.98 SRP. This 15 Disc collection brings together 14 Hitchcock classics plus a bonus disc in a special gift set collection.
All 14 films are digitally re-mastered for the best quality ever with all bonus features from the existing releases carried across. The films are: Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubth, Rope, Rear Window, The Trouble With Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy and Family Plot.
The all-new bonus disc showcases Hitchcock’s films, career and legacy, while the set is presented in ultra-premium velvet packaging which includes a 36-page collectible book.
[source: DVD Times]

Hopefully this will mean anamorphic US releases of Psycho and Vertigo!

improving the “setfocus” JavaScript

HIP3 contains some JavaScript that sets the focus to the search box everytime a page is loaded – this means you can start typing text straight in to the box.
However, if you’ve already done a search, then it can be frustrating for the user to have the page suddenly jump to the top (especially if they are using the back button to return to a list of search results). In fact, it make more sense for the JavaScript to only set the focus on the initial search screens.
Here’s a quick hack that disables the JavaScript “setfocus” function for search result and full bib pages:
Open up searchresponse.xsl file and find the <body> tag (it’s around line 230)
A few lines down you’ll find the onload attribute code – this tells the web browser to execute the startTimer and setfocus JavaScript functions as soon as the page has loaded:

<xsl:attribute name="onload">startTimer();setfocus();</xsl:attribute>

Replace that entire line of code with the following:

<!-- disable the setfocus for search result pages -->
<xsl:if test="not(boolean(/searchresponse/yoursearch))">
<xsl:attribute name="onload">startTimer();setfocus();</xsl:attribute>
</xsl:if>
<xsl:if test="(boolean(/searchresponse/yoursearch))">
<xsl:attribute name="onload">startTimer();</xsl:attribute>
</xsl:if>
<!-- end of changes -->

Save the searchresponse.xsl file and check your HIP to see if the change works!
The usual notes apply:

  1. this worked fine for our UK HIP 3.04
  2. back up your original searchresponse.xsl file before you make any changes!
  3. if you’ve got one, try it on your test HIP server first

Busiest month yet!

Just looking at the weblogs for May 2005 and it was the busiest month yet for the site – for the first time ever, the site used over 3GB of bandwidth.
Not surprisingly, the majority of the bandwidth was taken up with images (2.42GB of JPGs, GIFs & PNGs).
There’s also been an increase in the number of people trying to link directly to images hosted on the site (known as leeching), but the web site is set up to disallow that so they’ll normally see this instead:

By my reckoning, there are 16,975 images on the site. Of those, 3,522 are DVD screen grabs and hi-res DVD packaging scans.
A bit thanks to everyone out there who’s spread the word about the site – it always gives me a little buzz to see people linking back to the site 🙂

More screen grabs added to the site

I’ve added the two remaining DVDs from the French “Hitchcock – Le Maître du Suspens” box set to the site:

Although I had high hopes for this box set, it’s let down by the poor quality English audio language track on Lady Vanishes (Une Femme Disparait) and the enforced French subtitles.
Unless you speak French, then the older German Early Years box set is still the recommended purchase (plus it contains Downhill and The Lodger).
Speaking of things French, I’ve also added details of the bootleg release of Waltzes from Vienna to the site.

Remind users to Log Out

Just a quick addition to the toolbar2.xsl file to remind a logged in user to log out:

Open up toolbar2.xsl and search for the following comment:

<!-- Logout option -->

A couple of lines below that, insert the code shown in blue after the <td> tag:

<xsl:if test="$patron_empowerment_disable = $false">
<td>
<span style="color: red; border-bottom: dashed black 1px; font-size: x-small;
font-weight: bold;">Don't forget to logout when you have finished!</span>
<xsl:variable name="list"> . . . .

some notes:

  1. this worked for me with the UK HIP 3.04 release
  2. back up your original toolbar2.xsl file before you make any changes!
  3. if you’ve got one, try it on your test HIP server first!

HIP Floor Maps JavaScript

HIP Floor Maps JavaScript
I’ve put together a much simpler version of the floor plan code that we use on our HIP. This version uses JavaScript and only requires a single HIP XSL file to be edited (items.xsl).
The full changes are shown in this copy of items.xsl taken from a fresh installation of HIP 3.04 (UK releases):

I’ve put together a much simpler version of the floor plan code that we use on our HIP. This version uses JavaScript and only requires a single HIP XSL file (items.xsl) to be edited.
The full changes are shown in this copy of the file taken from a fresh installation of HIP 3.04 (UK releases):

The added sections of JavaScript are shown in red (and green for the two commented-out debug lines that might be useful for testing).
The JavaScript “checkMaps” function has 3 examples – here they are along with an example of what they would match:

  1. showMap( ‘plan1.gif’, ‘Loan Collection Floor 3’ );

     
  2. showMap( ‘plan2.gif’, ‘Music Library’, ‘Score and Parts’ );

     
  3. showMap( ‘plan3.gif’, ‘Audiovisual Collection Floor 5[^|]+Available’ );

You’ll need to copy and paste the red JavaScript sections into your existing items.xsl file – don’t replace your entire file with mine because I’ve edited out large sections of the Dynix code to make it easier to read!!!
Don’t forget to:

  1. back up your existing “items.xsl” file first in case it all goes wrong
  2. try the script on a test HIP server first

As shown, the code will be expecting to display floor plan images stored in a sub-directory called “maps” in your “hipres.war” folder:

…however, you can easily tweak the code to get the images from another server.
The JavaScript uses regular expressions (regexs) to do the matching – if you are familiar with these then you can easily do matches that take into account call/class numbers, availability, etc to display even more specific floor plans.
If you need help building a certain regex, then I’ll try and help out. Otherwise, most Perl and Unix people are familiar with building regexs.
If you have any suggestions, comments, questions, corrections, improvements, etc then please feel free to contact me (email@daveyp.com).

Lots of new DVDs!

I arrived back from a 3 day MetaLib training session in Newcastle to find a huge pile of Hitchcock DVDs waiting for me! 🙂
You can expect to see screen grabs and confirmed specs for the following releases appearing on the site over the next few days:

…along with 7 other Korean DVDs: