Category: coding
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In search of… Bigfoot
Before I left for Guatemala, Ian Davis at Talis asked if I could give him a dump of our MARC records to load into Talis Platform. I had been talking in the #code4lib channel about how I was pushing the idea of using Talis Source to make simple, ad-hoc union catalogs; we could make one…
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To build or to modify
I readily admit that I have a bit of a NIH problem. A lot of this is laziness (hey, it’s a lot of work to figure out how somebody’s code works) coupled with the fact that I write fast married to the dilemma of if I modify this program to meet our needs, what happens…
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Ãœps
Argh.  I’ve recently migrated to using Opera on our desktop at home (long story, but basically the experiment with Ubuntu didn’t go over well; we went back to Windows; and IE7 is too slow to be considered useful in any capacity.  And Selena uses Firefox.).  While in the middle of a long post about how…
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Nice threads
I have been working on Fancy-Pants quite a bit in the last couple of weeks. This is an AJAX layer over Voyager’s WebVoyage — an attempt to de-suck-ify its interface a bit. Why is it called Fancy-Pants? Well, Voyager still has the same underwear, it’s just got a new set of britches. There are two…
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The Soul-sucking vacuum that is EAD
I have a very conflicted relationship with our archives department. While their projects still need to get done, their services get very little use (especially when compared to other pending projects) and every time I get near any of their projects, it starts to become “Ross Singer and the Tar Baby”. Everything, EVERY SINGLE THING,…
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“I dropped my pick”
Library Geeks #4 is out. I’m back (instead of being the ‘Poltergeek’ of episode 3), and Dan set this one up in kind of a neat way. He certainly leads and guides the dialogue, but it’s much more of a roundtable and informal discussion. No doubt this is largely due to the fact we’re all…
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Post-mortem
The Umlaut “launched” last Monday. I wouldn’t call it the most graceful of take-offs, but I think it’s pretty much working now. We immediately ran into a problem with ProQuest as a source. ProQuest sends a query string that starts with an ampersand (“&ctx_ver=foo…”) which Rails strongly disliked. Thankfully, it was still part of the…
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Üpdate
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything about the ümlaut. It’s been a while since I’ve written about anything, really. Lots of reasons for that: been frantically trying to pull the ümlaut together in time to launch for fall semester, and I’ve got this little bit of business going on… Still, it’s probably time…
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Explosive Diaereses
I’ve been waiting for a while to have this title. Well, actually, not a long while, and that’s testimony to how quickly I’m able to develop things in Rails. While I think SFX is fine product and we are completely and utterly dependent upon it for many things, it does still have its shortcomings. It…
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Ruh-ropenurl Raggy
Ed Summers has been helping me write an OpenURL library for Ruby. Preliminary work available on Ed’s “business in front” site via svn. Note, I am very new to Ruby, so these are probably not terribly well written.