τεχνοσοφια

Sometimes I find it useful to keep long-running processes in a session of screen.  And sometimes I launch one of said processes outside of screen, and then I yell something like “doh!” or an expletive, because, as I said, I do find screen useful.  Depending on how far the process has gotten, whether it was the sort of operation that would not run happily again, or how much cleanup a second run would require, I either kill the process and restart it or I suspend it with Ctrl+z and send it to the background with bg % so that it doesn’t die when I log off.  The latter is a decent option.  But, darn it, I like screen.

Well, perhaps I’m the last to know, but there’s this neat little tool called retty that allows you to attach running processes to your terminal.  I installed it in Ubuntu Hardy the typical way (sudo apt-get install retty).  So, the next time I screw up, I’ll Ctrl+z, bg it, and then screen retty {PID}.  Voila!

I seem to be having issues successfully submitting comments to certain WordPress blogs lately — or perhaps Akismet has finally decided to (rightly) classify my comments are spam? Anyone know of any Firefox / WordPress comment bugs? My comments seem to be submitted — there are no errors — and Firefox winds up on a link like “http://example.org/blog/foo-bar-whatever/#comment-12309″. Any ideas? At any rate, I’m left to comment via trackback for now.

Thanks for the nod, Winona. Hopefully you folks will get some good use out of the XQuery-based OAI-PMH data provider I’ve been working on.

I just want to clarify that only one small bit of the code is specific to X-Hive, and that’s a call to an extension that gets last-modified dates from the X-Hive service. We do not reliably store this information in the metadata itself, and so I needed to go this route. Some folks do store this in MODS or elsewhere in descriptive or administrative metadata. It should be a two-line change to short-circuit this behavior (xhive-exts:last-update() is only invoked in two places, I believe).

I’m currently working on adding EAD support, modularizing things a bit more, and streamlining configuration. resumptionTokens will come after that, I hope.

I’ll be interested to hear more of UVM’s implementation and how I can make this thing more useful to others.

A couple of interesting stories regarding open source library projects have come out during the past few days.

First, Carl Grant, the former CEO of VTLS, is forming a new company devoted to providing and building services for open source software. The name of the company is CARe Affiliates, and they have already struck a deal with open source software provider Index Data (creators of Zebra, YAZ, YAZ Proxy, Metaproxy, Keystone, and so forth). I have worked just a bit with Carl and he seems to be a stand-up guy. Best of luck, Carl.

Second, the Mellon Foundation has approached the GPLS with great interest in the open source ILS, Evergreen. Where this is going is yet to be seen, but it’s something to keep an eye on. It could be a fantastic opportunity for libraries that are frustrated with their current ILS and have the resources to commit development time. (With an assumption that the former set is vastly larger than the latter set.) This could be very exciting.

Those who still doubt that open source in libraries is a legitimate movement must find it more and more difficult to justify their arguments.

The unAPI plug-in for WordPress has moved to the following location: http://www.lackoftalent.org/michael/blog/unapi-wordpress-plug-in/

I’ve been hearing a lot about the Ruby programming language lately, and specifically about Ruby on Rails. After looking at different strategies to get this sucker up and running, I decided to take the path of the cowardly and install Instant Rails. I am still trying to figure out what the heck it is and does, but a lot of people seem to like it for throwing together quick, powerful, open, and structured web applications.

On a related “gaining in popularity” note is S5, an open-source, open-standards application for producing web-enabled presentations. No more must one be a slave to that wicked master, Microsoft Powerpoint (or OO.o Impress, for that matter, or whatever you crazy Mac heathens use). Now one can produce a web presentation using S5, which puts all the material into one XHTML file. It uses CSS and JavaScript for styles and functionality, respectively. I think I might check that out as well. Counterpoint: OpenOffice 2.0’s Impress application does a bang-up job as well.

And finally, what is all this talk of the Web 2.0? Here’s a more or less full run-down of Web 2.0, and five reasons why it matters.

In the meantime, I’m still cranking away on my NLB’d terminal servers.

(And another trackback test).