Category: coding
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Faceted Search on a Shoestring
There are any number of reasons that you can attribute to Solr‘s status as the standard bearer of faceted full-text searching: Â it’s free, fast, works shockingly well out of the box without any tweaking, has a simple and intuitive HTTPÂ API (making it available in the programming language of your choice) and is, by far, the…
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Getting the whole story
A couple of months ago, I hacked up a really simple proof-of-concept Sinatra that took an LCCN, called the Library of Congress’ LCCN Permalink service’s MARCXML output for that particular LCCN and tried to model it into linked data. It was really basic: it only returned RDF/XML and had no persistence layer to it, so…
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Supercharged Ruby MARC
One of the byproducts of the “Communicat” work I had done at Georgia Tech was a variant of Ed Summers‘ ruby-marc that went into more explicit detail regarding the contents inside the MARC record (as opposed to ruby-marc which focuses on its structure). It had been living for the last couple of years as a…
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Better Paging Through Better Searching
For the last couple of weeks I’ve returned to working on Alto Jangle connector, at least part-time. Â I had shelved development on it for a while; I had a hard time finding anybody interested in using it and had reached a point where the development database I was working against was making it difficult to…
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Parsing escaped unicode in Ruby
While what I’m posting here might be incredibly obvious to anyone that understands unicode or Ruby better than me, it was new to me and might be new to you, so I’ll share. Since Ed already let the cat out of the bag about LCSubjects.org, I can explain the backstory here. At lcsh.info, Ed made…
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I’m only here for the closures
I am not a programmer. Since I first began writing code, my approach to learning a new language has been to take something that does the sort of thing I am looking for and start fiddling, seeing the results of the fiddling (most likely through some sort of error message) and refiddle until I start…
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Blindly groping towards ActivePlatform
Something I’ve taken it upon myself to do since I joined Talis is make ActiveRDF a viable client to access the Platform. While this is mostly selfishness on my part (I want to keep developing in Ruby and there’s basically no RDF support right now, plus this gives me a chance to learn about the…
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Objectifying OpenURL
Sometime in November, I came to the realization that I had horribly misinterpreted the NISO Z39.88/OpenURL 1.0 spec. I’m on the NISO Advisory Committee for OpenURL (which makes this even more embarrassing) and was reviewing the proposal for the Request Transfer Message Community Profile and its associated metadata formats when it dawned on me that…
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HACK IS NOT A CRIME
…although LinuX_Xploit_Crew, with all due respect, I think it actually is. Oh well, we’re back with a new theme (which nobody will see except to read comments, since I’m pretty sure all traffic comes from the code4lib planet) and an updated WordPress install. Look out, world! So, in the downtime here’s a non-comprehensive rundown of…
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Super arrogant programmer clique
One thing I hope that never happens at Access (and hope it hasn’t already happened and I’m too much of a super arrogant programmer to notice) is the “hotshot developers” gather round a table and whip out their laptops and break only to give supra-obtuse presentations on how to use their technologies (and opening by…