An article from The Chronicle about one professor’s experience using Tor on campus: Caught in the Network The Chronicle Review - From the issue dated February 9, 2007 But it is being used all around the world, by people in countries that restrict their access to information, by corporate whistle-blowers, and by digital-rights activists. It's even being used by average people like me, as a way to keep innocuous and personal online activities private.
There’s a nice post over at Information Wants to Be Free about criticism and feedback. It’s definitely worth a read and so are the comments.
Here’s another in the series. Unicorn Export Built in. MARC21 or flat file formats. Unicode support is available as an extra. Database Access Mixed. No access to the embedded Informix database by default; API training is necessary for read-only access. Oracle is an extra option, but that only gives you a read-only license. For write access, you need a full Oracle license. SQL schema is supplied if you purchase API training.
Wordpress 2.1 is out. Again it was about a 10 second upgrade with svn. Some of the features that look useful: Autosave Page as front page built in (useful for CMS type installs) Upload manager Pseudo-cron and error class for plugins A nice addition is the voting for future enhancements. Nice to see outside of the normal forum posts.
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 with costs or other sensitive info. As the Evergreen crew is on #code4lib and don’t appear to sleep, I’ll start with them.
A few items that may be of interest: First if you happen to write an application that caches sites or content then you may be interested in the exception in the DMCA. Over at PlagiarismToday they go over what constitutes a legitimate service and why there isn’t a loophole for spammers. Recently Netscape removed earlier RSS DTD’s from their site. This apparently broke multiple RSS readers that depending on requesting the DTD for every RSS feed that referenced it.
I’m really not much of a shopper and I tend to research for so long that by the time I make a decision a new set of products are out. I do most of my shopping online, outside of groceries, and here are some of my favs. I figured I should post it so there is some record on the all-seeing google. Adagio Teas Adagio has some nice loose leaf teas but what makes it worth it is the experience.
And some more linkies for the reading, apologizes if some are old and overlinked: What is it like to eat on $30 a month. Is an API really needed or is structured content enough? Some ajaxitagging. Pulling in content from social sites on demand. I could see it being used on things like Umlaut to make the initial load quicker. You have umlaut right? Some resources on fair-use and copyright are always handy A nice article on improving libraries including the 48 hour delivery to shelf turnaround.
There’s a new issue of Dlib out with an article called “Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy”. There has been some discussion in the library blog arena about it. Here is a round-up and some thoughts. The article goes over traditional cataloging and folksonomy and concludes: The choice to use folksonomy for organizing information on the Internet is not a simple, straightforward decision, but one with important underlying philosophical issues. Although folksonomy advocates are beginning to correct some linguistic and cultural variations when applying tags, inconsistencies within the folksonomic classification scheme will always persist.
An interesting lecture. The QandA is worth a watch. Reading: Q and A