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Month: May 2011

2011-05-26 / Bill Dueber

Using SQLite3 from JRuby without ActiveRecord

I spent way too long asking my friend, The Internet, how to get a normal DBI connection to SQLIte3 using JRuby. Apparently, everyone except me is using ActiveRecord and/or Rails and doesn’t want to just connect to the database. But I do. Here’s how. First, get the gems: gem install dbi gem install dbd-jdbc gem install jdbc-sqlite3 Then you’re ready to load it up into DBI. require ‘rubygems’ # if you’re using 1.8 still require ‘java’ require ‘dbi’ require ‘dbd/jdbc’ require ‘jdbc/sqlite3’ databasefile = ‘test.db’ dbh = DBI.connect( “DBI:jdbc:sqlite:#{databasefile}”, # connection string ”, # no username for sqlite3 ”, #…

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2011-05-25 / Bill Dueber

How good is our relevancy ranking?

For those of us that spend our days trying to tweak Mirlyn to make it better, one of the most important — and, in many ways, most opaque — questions is, “How good is our relevancy ranking?” Research from the UMich Library’s Usability Group (pdf; 600k) points to the importance of relevancy ranking  for both known-item searches and discovery, but mapping search terms to the “best” results involves crawling deep inside the searcher’s head to know what she’s looking for. So, what can we do? Record interaction as a way of showing interest One possibility is to look at those…

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2011-05-06 / Bill Dueber

Ruby gem library_stdnums goes to version 1.0

I just released another (this time pretty good) version of my gem for normalizing/validating library standard numbers, library_stdnums (github source / docs). The short version of the functions available: ISBN: get checkdigit, validate, convert isbn10 to/from isbn13, normalize (to 13-digit) ISSN: get checkdigit, validate, normalize LCCN: validate, normalize Validation of LCCNs doesn’t involve a checkdigit; I basically just normalize whatever is sent in and then see if the result is syntactically valid. My plan in my Copious Free Time is to do a Java version of these as well and then stick them into a new-style Solr v.3 filter so…

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2011-05-03 / Bill Dueber

A short ruby diversion: cost of flow control under Ruby

A couple days ago I decided to finally get back to working on threach to try to deal with problems it had — essentially, it didn’t deal well with non-local exits due to calls to break or even something simple like a NoMethodError. [BTW, I think I managed it. As near as I can tell, threach version 0.4 won’t deadlock anymore] Along the way, while trying to figure out how threads affect the behavior of different non-local exits, I noticed that in some cases there was still work being done by one or more threads long after there was an…

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