I had a great — great! I tell you — 30 second conversation with Ken Varnum (of RSS4Lib fame) that went something like this (much paraphrasing, obviously):
B: You’re gonna have to fix that interface. The standard header won’t work. K: Well, no, we’re going leave it as it is. B: It’s not gonna work. K: We’ve decided to [...]
Updated: I missed a ‘?’ in the original code that pushed a single cutter into the second-cutter position. Fixed below.
Crap. Update 2: Initial letters can be three characters long. Regexp and output changed.
LoC Call numbers tend to be a mess, and I’ve been working this morning trying to normalize them for easy string comparison.
The perl [...]
No matter where I’ve gone today and for the past few days, I keep running into people (on both sides) who are sure that if Their Guy Doesn’t Win, it’s going to be because of dirty tactics.
I’m not an expert in this stuff. Not by a long shot. But I thought it would be fun [...]
We in the library world have a problem. We spend a zillion-with-a-Z dollars subscribing to online databases, purchases which presume our ability to make sure only authorized people can look at them. The alternative is to be in breach of contract law, which I’ve been assured is something we’d like to avoid.
The problem I see [...]
Inspired by the Inquiring Librarian, I just used Wordle to create a “tagcloud” of the current Planet Code4Lib feed.
What kills me is the tiny little “Library” in the lower left-hand corner.
Not long after I started working in the library, I heard someone talking about “Evidence Based Librarianship.” Like the good little kind-of-a-librarian I’d become, I looked it up and found this article which states that:
EBL employs the best available evidence based upon library science research to arrive at sound decisions about solving practical [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
[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 [...]