Dilettante's Ball

Category: SRU

  • Metaproxy routes and filters, as I understand them

    Like most Indexdata products, Metaproxy is an incredibly useful, although damn near impenetrable, application.  I have been using it to manage our Z39.50 access in the project I’ve been working for the last year or so (Talis Aspire Digitised Content, if you’re interested).  Its purpose is two-fold: most importantly, it makes the Z39.50 services available…

  • Installing yaz, yazpp and metaproxy on RHEL 6.2

    Here the steps I just took to install metaproxy (which requires yaz and yaz++) on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2.  The reason for this exercise is because Indexdata’s RPMs don’t work for 6.2 (the versions of boost-devel and icu-devel they require seem to only be available in 5.5).  Since I expect Indexdata to eventually release…

  • 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…

  • But, you see, my wheel is nothing like all of those other seemingly identical wheels

    I am still feeling my way around Python. I have yet to grasp the zen of being Pythonic, but I am at least coming to grips with real object orientation (as opposed to the named hashes of PHP) and am actually taking the leap into error handling, which, if you have dealt with any of…

  • Metasearch Metadata Metaphor

    SRW/U is to Yngwie J. Malmsteen as OpenSearch is to Keith Richards. Yngwie Malmsteen is technically superior, however aesthetically unlistenable (unimplementable, in the case of SRW/U). Keith Richards is sloppy, unsophisticated and writes timeless melodies that resonate with the masses (OpenSearch is sloppy, unsophisticated — while time will tell if OpenSearch becomes “timeless” [seems doubtful,…