τεχνοσοφια

Dear Future Me,

You’ve forgotten how to decode (or unescape) HTML or XML in Python again, haven’t you?  My, my, that old age does catch up with you.

Well, it turns out that xml.sax.saxutils.unescape() works like a charm.  I’m certain that edge cases lurk here and there, so caveat, um, coder.

I’ve been using my time at RepoCamp today to get the OAI-ORE plugin for WordPress validating again.  I’m having some trouble using the validator so I say that with some diffidence.  But the latest code which is now checked in to the WordPress plugins svn repo ought to be close, if not fully conformant, to the 0.9 version of the ORE spec.

I’m not sure the plugin is really useful; it’s just an Atom feed of all posts and pages in a WP instance.  I can think of some ways to make this more useful, by allowing blog authors to create their own aggregations, pulling in content outside of the particular instance.  I am certain that others can come up with even better uses.  I’m open to suggestions.

Thanks to Jay Datema for prodding me a bit, if indirectly.

In spite of some open questions, I’ve been making some progress on my Jython-based transport tool. Right now it’s pretty dumb and simple: it copies files to and fro via scp.

Being a newb at both Java and Jython made finding the right libraries a bit of a challenge, and so I’m posting some code here for folks in the same boat. It’s not particularly pretty due to 1) wanting to get something working very quickly, and 2) weird errors when I try to make things prettier (such as getting rid of the hard-coded bits), but I’ll resolve these soon.
Continue reading…

It’s hard to believe but I’ve been at the new job for six months already, a full half-year come the 29th. Some days it seems like I’ve been here forever; others like I’m still a rank newb. I haven’t written terribly much about what I’ve been up to (but I assure you I’ve been busy). Let me rectify that.

The Transfer Problem

Two of the projects I’ve been working on relate to a fairly general problem that we like to call “transfer,” which revolves around, well, transferring files to and fro. Sounds simple. Is simple. That is, until you start thinking about preservation and accounting for a highly heterogeneous network with idiosyncratic nodes, esoteric storage software, and differential firewall rules. And that’s where it gets interesting (and problematic). Continue reading…

Deploying Rails (to Apache servers) is about to get much easier.  Hopefully.

 http://www.modrails.com/ 

Deployment has long been the bugaboo with Rails, so this should bode well for the framework.