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Posts Tagged General

Two Upgrades of Note

The first being Operator, a firefox extension that helps with the use of microformats, including things such as exporting hcard contacts. It now boasts support for RDFa and eRDF and has changed its description to be more about the use of semantic data, rather then just microformats.

The second is Zotero, another Firefox extension which is [...]


Floating Reference

The idea of mobile reference was first brought to my attention by Alan Gray at Darien who has a nice post on the topic on his blog. He terms the current desk situation as siege warfare.

What they’ve decided is that we are NOT going to have a desk or any kind of barrier, but that [...]


Some Quickies for July 13 2007

Folksonomy Provides 70 Percent More Terms Than Taxonomy

A short article on a study on how many terms users added versus the controlled vocabulary chosen for pieces of art. The discussion centers around the findability of items where 70% of the terms people use are not present. Usually the debate in libraries revolves around the noise [...]


Rating, Tags and Facet Visualizations

Some interesting visualizations that some may want to check out.

Summize

The first is from an online shopping site called summize.

Rather than build yet another price comparison shopping site - which are great once you know what to buy - we’ve taken a reviews-first approach: we crawl the web for product reviews, aggregate those reviews, select [...]


Solr in Libraries

Note: Many of the examples below only include screenshots. As these are development versions I don’t want to overwhelm them with traffic. If you pop in #code4lib you’ll probably be able to get a peek at them.

What is Solr?

If you were at Code4Lib 2007 then you were probably beat over the head with Solr. If [...]


Listening to Words

Just came across the listeningtowords site which is collecting information on the lectures available on the web in audio or video. There’s a lot of great content online, especially with more and more universities and colleges adding their lectures to iTunes and the like. It’s nice to see sites like this that may make them [...]


Quantum Gravity Computation

Some articles that may interest some. Referenced from a recent article in New Scientist. Subscription is required to read the New Scientist online, but the articles themselves are available on arxiv:

The Computational universe: Quantum gravity from quantum computation.
Seth Lloyd (MIT, LNS) . Jan 2005. 31pp.
Submitted to Science

Quantum gravity computers: On the Theory of [...]


Machine Tag Metadata

Once referred to as “tripletags” supposedly but now called Machine Tags, due to Flickr’s adoption of their use for geocoding, etc. From machinetags.org:

Machine tags, or triple tags, are tags that are made up of three parts (namespace:predicate=value) in order to give extra information. Machine tags have been in use for a while now on sites [...]


Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons

New book available that may interest quite a few that deal with copyright or licensing. It also touches on why it is important for some cultural items to be openly accessible.

Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons, a new publication from Sydney University Press, brings together papers from some of the most prominent thinkers of [...]


The growing importance of Open *

While I still haven’t gotten time to fully grok dchud’s Open Data is not the point, some more posts regarding the importance of open data have come about. While I agree with dchud that it’s definitely not the whole story, it is an important one.

Alf over at Hublog posts some of the replies he’s gotten [...]


Posted
4 April 2007 @ 2pm

Tagged
General

Why the system hates Dick Dale

The music labels that is. A nice down to earth interview.


Raptor and Triplr

For those that work with RDF or similar you may be interested in these:

Raptor

Raptor is a free software / Open Source C library that provides a set of parsers and serializers that generate Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples by parsing syntaxes or serialize the triples into a syntax. The supported parsing syntaxes are RDF/XML, N-Triples, [...]


Retagging and Changing Logs in SVN

Found a couple tips on Ted Husted’s blog. He recommends deleting the old tag and then doing another tag as trying to overwrite will do a merge. And so to have it for prosperity here is the command to change the log for a revision:

$ svn propset –revprop -r 504523
svn:log "WW-1715 Branch [...]


Trac Performance

In the past I’ve used mod_python to serve trac and got ok performance, but my installs weren’t public. On Code4Lib it was set-up as a fcgi install. This worked ok but was extremely resource intensive.

I also host through TextDrive and found that they recommend running Trac through Tracd and then proxying the requests through apache [...]


Wordpress Update

If you run wordpress make sure you have the latest version as there was a compromised download on their site. If you use the SVN update method then you should be unaffected but there is a new version regardless. I just updated here via SVN without a problem.


ILS Data: Voyager

Again this info is from users/customers and not press releases so may be different for various versions:

Voyager

Export
Built in. Can export Marc with bib, holdings and authorities records, though marc is often mangled.
Database Access
Built in. Uses Oracle and also provides entity-relationship diagrams and some pre-build “views” to help in development. I believe the oracle license is [...]


ILS Data: Evergreen

A first post in hopefully a series. Access to data from the ILS has been a common thorn in #code4lib’ers sides. I’m hoping here to post some of the ILS’s that are out there, what data access options they offer and whether they are built in the base or are extra products. I won’t bother [...]


Identity by URI

There have been some great projects lately about moving information control into the hands of users such as Move My Data. In that vein there is the idea of profile data using microformats. For example you have a list of your friends marked up on hcard on your blog. When you sign up for a [...]


Microsoft’s Grava

News to me but it looks like MS is coming out with a tool to help build e-learning modules (learning objects) named Grava.

“Grava” is the codename to a new set of tools from Microsoft’s Education Product Group that will allow the education community to create and assemble materials that will increase discovery and allow [...]


Upgrade to ATOM

As I recent posted there was a debate over Netscape’s decision to remove the DTD’s for older RSS types (0.9 and 0.91).

One of the outcomes of this decision is that the feed validator will now give a warning if the DTD is linked to. The recommendation is to either upgrade to something else (RSS2.0, ATOM, [...]


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