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Month: May 2008

The friend of my enemy’s friend’s enemy’s…err…

Move over, Axis of Evil! Our 43rd president, George W. Bush (and you gotta know that his dad hangs on to that ‘H.’ with two white-knuckled hands) is now in search of “the surest way to defeat the enemies of hatred.” Of course, we’re the best of friends with hatred here at Robot Librarian, so we should be safe.

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Google Doctype — open documentation, open code

Because you can never have too many open encyclopedia-type-thingies, Google has launched Google Doctype, a “Google-sponsored open encyclopedia and reference library for developers of web applications. By web developers, for web developers.” It’s set up to use an open license (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License) and, unlike other similar resources, is explicitly set up to include code for testing and browser-compatibility tables generated by running that code against different browsers. Simple, direct… what’s not to like?

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JSON, JSON everywhere

Via Ajaxian, just saw an announcement for Persevere, a network-centric, JSON-based generic storage engine. It features: A REST-based interface over regular old HTTP JSON as the native data going in and out, including circular references and such Search interface based around JSONPath RPC interface based on JSON-RPC Seemingly buzzword compliant across the board I’ve been thinking about these sorts of servers a lot lately (couchdb and strokedb are two others) in the context of the “not-the-catalog” data we track here at the library. For some stuff, clearly we need the power and speed of a real database. That power and…

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Psst. We’re not printing cards anymore

[From a series I’m calling, “Things About The Library I Think Are Stoooopid”, part one of about a zillion.] I’m going to wallow in a little bit of hyperbole here, but only a little. The problem Suppose, just for a moment, that you’re a computer programmer working anytime in the last twenty years, and someone wants you to set up a data structure to deal with a timeless issue — how to keep track of who’s on which committees in a library. If you’re a computer person Easy enough. First off, what’s a committee? Committee Committee name (string) Committee inception…

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UPenn library has video “commercials

The University of Pennsylvania Library has a set of video commercials touting their products — some of which are musicals! Worth a look-see.

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