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Category Archives: programming

hackability

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 implementations [...]

oai-pmh and xmpp

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 [...]

simplicity

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, [...]

identi.ca and linked data

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, [...]

sicp reading

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

tools

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 [...]

pymarc, marc8 and nothingness

pymarc 1.0 went out day before yesterday with a new function: marc8_to_unicode(). When trying to leverage MARC bibliographic data in today’s networked world it is inevitable that the MARC8 character encoding will at some point rear its ugly head and make your brain hurt. The problem is that the standard character set tools for various [...]

theory

The second book I checked out of the Library of Congress with my shiny new borrowing card was Alistair Cockburn’s Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game (which happened to just win this years Jolt Award). Early on Cockburn recommends jumping to an appendix to read Peter Naur’s article “Programming as Theory Building” (thanks ksclarke).
This [...]