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Category Archives: programming

simplicity and digital preservation, sorta

Friday, August 27, 2010

Over on the Digital Curation discussion list Erik Hetzner of the California Digital Library raised the topic of simplicity as it relates to digital preservation, and specifically to CDL’s notion of Curation Microservices. He referenced a recent bit of writing by Martin Odersky (the creator of Scala) with the title Simple or Complicated. In one [...]

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version control and digital curation

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

For some time now I have been meaning to write about some of the issues related to version control in repositories as they relate to some projects going on at $work. Most repository systems have a requirement to maintain original data as submitted. But as we all know this content often changes over time–sometimes immediately. [...]

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wee bit

Friday, April 30, 2010

As is my custom, this morning I asked Zoia (the bot in #code4lib) for this day in history from the Computer History Musuem. Lately I’ve been filtering it through the Pirate plugin, which transforms arbitrary text into something a pirate might say. Anyhow, today’s was pretty humorous. 11:32 < edsu> @pirate [tdih] 11:32 < zoia> [...]

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hackability

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Adam Bosworth has some good advice for would-be standards developers in the form of a 7 item list. It is strangely reassuring to know that someone in the US Federal Government called someone like Adam for advice about standards…even if it was at some inhuman hour. Number 5 really resonated with me: Always have real [...]

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oai-pmh and xmpp

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

As an experiment to learn more about xmpp I created a little utility that will poll an oai-pmh server and send new records as a chunk of xml over xmpp. The idea wasn’t necessarily to see all the xml coming into my jabber client (although you can do that). I wanted to enable downstream applications [...]

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simplicity

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

So we have a few bookshelves in our house–one of which is in our kitchen. Only one or two of the shelves in this bookshelf actually house books, most of which are food-stained cookbooks. The rest of the 4 or 5 shelves are given over to photographs, albums, pamphlets from schools, framed pictures, compact discs, [...]

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identi.ca and linked data

Friday, July 11, 2008

If you’ve already caught the micro-blogging bug identi.ca is an interesting twitter clone for a variety of reasons…not the least of which is that it’s an open source project, and has been designed to run in a decentralized way. The thing I was pleasantly surprised to see was FOAF exports like this for user networks, [...]

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sicp reading

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

If you’ve ever harbored any interest in reading (or re-reading)

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metadata hackers

Monday, December 31, 2007

I opened the paper this morning to read a story of another person involved in the creation of MARC who has just died. I hadn’t realized before reading Henrietta Avram and Samuel Snyder’s obituaries that there was a bit of an NSA LC connection when MARC was being created. From 1964 to 1966, [Samuel Snyder] [...]

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tools

Thursday, October 18, 2007

At $work recently many late nights were spent hackety-hacking on a prototype that got written up in the New York Times today. Apart from some promotional materials, not much is available to the public just yet. I just got pulled in near the end to do some search stuff. Over the past few months I’ve [...]

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