“We’re All Just Temporarily Abled” blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/temp…


I’ve always meant to play with it more in HAProxy, nginx and WoW. Nice to see it has a Sinatra like framework now. “Lua: The Little Language That Could” matt.blwt.io/post/lua-…


Joy and Competition

“But I almost hate to say it, because the lesson is so simple. If you want to sell music, you must love those songs. If you want to succeed in journalism, you must love those newspapers. If you want to succeed in movies, you must love the cinema.” What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble’s Surprising Turnaround?

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Summer Game Prize Fulfillment Workflow

Cross-posted from the AADL Devblog The AADL Summer Game has an online shop where earned points can be spent on awesome schwag. To try to make it easy for the volunteers and staff to fulfill the orders we took advantage of some of the infrastructure we already had in place for other parts of the site. As some know our hold notices currently go through a script that sends an email along with printing a custom label to a label printer, that is used for identification on our hold shelves.

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Availability in Globally Distributed Storage Systems

Google just released a research paper entitled Availability in Globally Distributed Storage Systems. It is available for download in PDF format (14 pages). From the abstract: We characterize the availability properties of cloud storage systems based on an extensive one year study of Google’s main storage infrastructure and present statistical models that enable further insight into the impact of multiple design choices, such as data placement and replication strategies. With these models we compare data availability under a variety of system parameters given the real patterns of failures observed in our fleet.

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Unicode and Sphinx

I’m not an expert with unicode and ran into various problems in getting Sphinx up and running with bib data for SOPAC2. Below is an overview of what I ended up doing to solve it. There are probably better ways of doing it and if so please share. The Sphinx I’m referring to is the indexing/search program that works well with MySQL. The case below is using the stock searchd/indexer interface and not the mysql engine which is probably different.

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Gutter Garden

An old article but still applicable for those with small spaces. But our deck is on the wrong side of the house. Then an idea came to me that was a little unusual and might involve a little risk. The idea is essential this: Why not put rain gutters in rows along the wood siding on the sunny side of the house. It might look weird, but that was where all the heat, sun and protection from damage is best.

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AADL Library Camp 2008

Just a reminder that the library camp is tomorrow, Thursday March 20th. More information is on libsuccess.org: The next Library Camp will be held Thursday, March 20th, 2008, at the Downtown Branch of the Ann Arbor District Library, from 9:30 AM - 4:00 PM. The goal is to get a bunch of people together, and let them talk about whatever they’d like to talk about, within the rough purview of libraries and library technology.

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Google Books Availability

As you’ve probably read elsewhere Google finally released a way to get book availability on Google Books. It’s a fairly simple web service where you hand it an identifier and it gives back whether the book is on Google Books and how much so (no view, partial view, full view) along with cover images. AADL previously scraped for the information which I’ve now disabled and used the new API instead. It was fairly easy with a little jquery and small changes to catwrap.

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Txt Book Info

I’m still digesting all the discussions and information from code4lib but I remembered a conversation I eavesdropped on. Casey reminded me it was between him and Adam Brin of Tri-College. The gist was that they had put a “txt this record to me” feature onto the catalog, without any real demand, which then took off to everyone’s surprise. It was one of those “that would be cool” that then turned into a “how did we do without it” for some students.

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