Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Back to the whiteboard for inspiration
Paul Miller (of Talis) was kind enough point out that Talis already has a product named Alto. In fact, it’s their ILS. D’oh. Given that Talis’ corporate name is “composer-based” (and, I don’t know, that they came up with the name waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay before I did) I suppose I can relinquish the name “Alto” 🙂 So,…
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Envisioning Alto
I have mentioned here several times the “alternative to the catalog” project I am trying to implement at Tech. One of the problems that I’ve had is naming the project something that lets people realize what I’m talking about, without the political hairiness of saying “catalog replacement” (since that’s technically not true, anyway). In a…
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I sound my barbaric YAWP over the walls of my cubicle.
I woke up at 4:30 this morning. One could easily write this off to a variety of stresses: an article I have no business writing; a conference I have no business helping organize; a huge project that I am having problems getting started on; a house that I apparently haven’t sunk enough money in to…
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Library 1.7.02-4 pre 6
I really, really hate this Library 2.0 meme for a couple of reasons. 1) All of our problems will not, in fact, be solved with AJAX and web interfaces 2) In fact many of our problems cannot be solved by technology at all (try doing interesting and meaningful and different work with the current body…
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echo(strtolower(COinS));
Er, anybody object to making COinS all lowercase? Because I’m starting to think its case structure is awkward and silly.
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As much as I liked gravy on my french fries…
Current weather conditions: 76 degrees and sunny.
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Reactions from Access 2005
I’ll have to keep this rather short, since the hotel wireless network is being flaky (as usual) (in fact I am having to write this while standing in the bathroom — oddly the best wireless reception in my room). Again, the conference organizers have proven why this is the only professional event I schedule in…
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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…
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Happy Birthday, you anemic ghoul!
I heard on NPR this morning that today is Nick Cave’s birthday. You can tell from my listening habits that I listen to a lot of Nick Cave, but I had never really thought about him having things like birthdays and whatnot. He’s 48. He doesn’t look a day over 375, though. So, have a…
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The NISO Riots of Ought-Five
I am at the NISO OpenURL/Metasearch Workshop, and in almost every way it’s going well. I don’t have a whole lot to say about the workshop content itself. It’s very informative and helpful, but I’ve really got nothing of value to add or comment upon. Except one thing. Today was “Metasearch” day and just after…
Got any book recommendations?