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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.
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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.

On Monday I woke up with a very mild and very annoying bronchial infection. Doctor Me prescribed two days of rest, relaxation, and chicken soup. Where "chicken soup" is "finally dropping the unreasonably expensive and embarrassingly outdated web hosting package at Speakeasy and transferring all of my domains and content to Dreamhost," that is. I am now paying less than a third of what I had been for a hell of a lot more features. And, I must say, administering DNS records, transferring files, and upgrading long-neglected software is rather amusing when you're loopy and feverish.

My experiences thus far with Dreamhost are very promising. I'm impressed but perhaps that's because I've been in the web hosting ghetto for so long. I understand there will very likely be downtime and sluggishness — that I can deal with. Being shackled to 1999 technologies for $30/mth, while my e-mails go unanswered, not so much.

I upgraded both Technosophia and my wife's blog to the latest WordPress release (2.3) from something ridiculous like 2.0.3. In doing so, I also switched to the svn upgrade configuration Ryan Eby detailed a while back.

I crossed my fingers and it turns out the unAPI server plug-in still works in WP2.3. Huzzah! Not sure if it works in the 2.1 or 2.2 branches, but I suspect it does.

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.