Category: ruby
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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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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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Working around Ruby with XSLT
My relationship with Ruby nowadays is roughly akin to somebody addicted to pain killers. I know it’s not good for me (since everything I work on nowadays is RDF, XML or both) but I’m able to still be productive and the pain of quitting, while in the long run would be better for everybody, just…
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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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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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Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain