It’s 7am in Utah, and I guess the delegates will be stirring from their Horizon filled dreams …or nightmares!
Weather wise, it looks like it’s going to be partly sunny with thunderstorms in Salt Lake City today, with a fair chance of rain.
Here’s an update on what’s hit the web in the last few hours…
Luke the Librarian has posted a request over at The Gordian Knot for any podcasts and audio feeds to be passed on to him.
Garry Collum (of Collum’s Column) has uploaded some photographs tagged with codi2006 to flickr, including these:
Garry is joined by redsquirrell57 who’s also posted some photos to flickr, including:
Tag: sirsidynix
CODI 2006 – Salt Lake City
As the crow flies, I’m about 4,720 miles away from the CODI 2006 Conference, but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to keep up with all the gossip from the conferences bloggers and flickr snappers.
So, for the next few days I’m going to try and bring everything CODI 2006 related I can find together into one place. Please feel free to post comments if I’ve missed anything!
Wednesday is the first day of the main conference, but I guess all but the most serious party animals will be tucked up in bed at the moment. However, lets see what’s out there already…
Kevin Smith (aka “The Fiddling Librarian 3.0”) has already posted a couple of entries on his blog:
» CODI Conference 2006 (01/Oct/2006)
» A Grand Day Out (01/Oct/2006)
Kevin’s also posted 62 photographs tagged with “codi2006” on flickr:
“betdjibouti” has also started a flickr set:
I had the great pleasure of meeting Ben Ostrowsky (aka “sylvar”) at CODI 2005, and I know from his blog that he’s jetting his way towards Salt Lake City. Ben was a prolific snapper last year, so hopefully we’ll start seeing some photos soon! Just looking at this photo from last year gets me drooling all over the keyboard — seriously folks, you cannot buy white chocolate covered pretzel sticks in the UK for love nor money!
It looks like a bunch of librarians (Mary, Carol, Robin, Melissa, and Amy) have got together to contribute to the CODI 2006 / Salt Lake City Blogger weblog.
Maxine has also started blogging about her trip to CODI 2006 on Maxine’s Place:
» Salt Lake City, here I come!
Next up, an anonymous delegate is posting at thezbar.net:
» VISIONS OF CODI: arrival
Finally, keep an eye on The Gordian Knot blog, as there’s bound to be some action on there soon!
Tonight is also the ’70s Party event, so I can’t wait to see some of the photos!!!
DUG/HUG 2006 – Day Three
A little later than planned (due to a mislaid memory stick containing the final Powerpoint!), here’s a link to the “Free Software” presentation:
https://library.hud.ac.uk/mediawiki/dughug2006/UsingFreeSoftware.zip
…and here are the photos from the end of day two and from the award ceremony on day three:
http://www.daveyp.com/gallery/categories.php?cat_id=14
http://www.daveyp.com/gallery/categories.php?cat_id=15
Grace Bays also emailed her photos through to me, so I’ve added them to the conference wiki:
https://library.hud.ac.uk/dughug2006/DUG/HUG_2006_photographs
…if you have any photos you’d like adding to the wiki, please feel free to email them to me: d.c.pattern[at]hud.ac.uk
A big thank you to everyone who came along to the sessions I presented in — I’m sure you were all sick to death of the sight of me by Friday, but I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to share some of the things we’ve been doing at Huddersfield!
Also, many thanks to David Bigwood, Michael J Giarlo, Luke the Librarian, and Susan Johns-Smith for their Library 2.0 examples. I just managed to squeeze the Web/Library 2.0 presentation into 45 minutes but, given the chance, I could have happily gone on for another 45. However, that would have meant missing Professor Bruce Royan’s excellent keynote speech “The Library, The Web, and the Warp Factor“.
Finally, another big thank you to everyone at Lincoln for making us feel so welcome, to the DUG/HUG team for all of the hard work they put into organising the event, and to the staff at SirsiDynix — I can’t wait for the conference next year!
white dog poo?
Sarah Houghton (aka LibrarianInBlack) has blogged that Answers.com has a new natural language “Web Answers” feature which lets you pose life’s great unanswerables – e.g.:
(I should point out that Sarah didn’t pose that exact question, but it’s one that’s been niggling at the back of my mind for years!)
After reverse engineering the new feature, it looks like they’re using Ajax and XML – e.g.:
Some of you will already know that we’ve been using Answers.com on our OPAC to provide serendipity keyword suggestions, so I’ll have a go incorporating the “Web Answers” output into those suggestions too.
DUG/HUG 2006 – Day Two
The only problem with offering to do presentations is that they don’t leave you any time to blog about the actual event itself!!!
For those who prefer an electronic version, here are the 3 presentations I gave today:
If you have any questions or comments, you can always use this blog or you can email me at:
- d.c.pattern [at] hud.ac.uk
….right — got to dash off to get ready for the conference meal!!!
OPAC keyword email alerts
One of the medical conditions I suffer from is the common “not-enough-hours-in-the-day-itus” — bits of software and new stuff gets prototyped or developed to the proof-of-concept stage, and then put to one side when something more important comes up.
This is something I originally coded in January 2006, briefly blogged about in mid February, then got slightly miffed when Hennepin County Library went live with something similar, and finally almost managed to forget all about it!
Anyway, I’ve dusted off the code and plugged it into ye olde OPACeth. All I can do now is sit back and see if anyone will actually use it!
Continue reading “OPAC keyword email alerts”
It’s July already?!?
I can’t believe how quickly this summer if flying by!
The UK is currently broiling itself under the first decent spell of sunny weather we’ve had this year, and the annual DUG/HUG (Dynix User Group/Horizon User Group) conference is just 9 days away — let’s hope the weather holds until then 🙂
This years conference is being held at the University of Lincoln:
https://library.hud.ac.uk/dughug2006/
I’m down to do a couple of sessions (HIP Tweaks & Introduction to Web 2.0 and Library 2.0), as well as chipping in with some of the other sessions (Access Control, Email Notices, and Free Software).
Wireless network permitting, I will hopefully be blogging the event again this year. If anyone else is planning to blog, then I’m going to use “dughug2006” as the Technorati tag. Please feel free to use the same tag on your blog posts or Flickr uploads.
Once I get the Powerpoints polished, I’ll also be adding them to the blog.
Hope to see some of you in Lincoln next week!
p.s. if you’re going, but you’re not on the attendees map yet, please get in touch!
Getting HIP updates & add-ons via a HTTP proxy
A couple of years ago we wanted to try out the optional ADA Profile for HIP 3 but, try as I might, I could not get the add-on to download using the HIP admin pages.
After much pondering, I realised that it’s because our external firewall was blocking HIP from being able to connect to the SirsiDynix server to fetch the download. Even the servers in our DMZ need to be configured to use the university’s Squid HTTP proxy servers before they can get external web access.
Google soon came up with the answer on one of the JBoss discussion sites and here’s what you need to do for a Windows HIP 3 server (it should be a similar process for a Unix/Linux HIP 3 server):
1) locate the batch file that starts JBoss — firstly, find the directory you installed the Application Server into, then open the “jboss” folder, then the “bin” folder, and you should find a Windows Batch File named “run.bat”
2) make a safe backup of the “run.bat” file before you make any changes
3) right-click on the “run.bat” file and select the “edit” option — this should open the file for editing in Notepad
4) if you search through the file, you’ll find several lines that start with set JAVA_OPTS=
5) find the very last occurance, and insert the following two new line of text after it:
set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Dhttp.proxyHost=12.34.56.78 set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Dhttp.proxyPort=3128
…where “12.34.56.78” is the IP address of your HTTP proxy and “3128” is the port number.
For example, on our HIP 3.04 UK server that section of the file now looks like this:
rem Standard options set JAVA_OPTS=-server -Xms384m -Xmx512m -DISO_8859_1=UTF-8 %JAVA_OPTS% set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Dhttp.proxyHost=161.112.231.22 set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Dhttp.proxyPort=3128
Once you’ve added the settings for the proxy server, save the file and restart JBoss.
If all has gone well, then you should be able to fetch updates and add-ons using the HIP admin interface!
Or, if all has gone pear-shaped, then simply restore that safe backup of the file you made earlier!
It should be a similar process for Linux/Unix users — locate the script that starts JBoss, open it in Vi, and add the extra two lines to the script.
HIP XML Parser (v0.01) – search parser
Okay folks – here’s the companion piece of code to the bib parser I posted a few weeks ago!
http://www.daveyp.com/files/stuff/xmlparser/search.pl
As with the previous code, this is alpha at best and should be treated as such. However, if you have any suggestions then please feed them back to me.
As well as specifying your own $url, you can also tweak the $maxResults value to determine just how many results you’ll actually get back. This will override the npp value in the URL — this means you should be able to lift a keyword search URL from HIP (which might just return sets of 10 or 20 at a time) and get the script to actually bring back as many results as you want (e.g. 100 or 1,000).
Continue reading “HIP XML Parser (v0.01) – search parser”
HIP XML Parser (v0.01)
This is some code that I’ve been meaning to make available for public consumption for weeks, but we’ve been up to our necks with our RFID tender at Huddersfield recently.
The basic idea is to convert the XML output of HIP 2 and HIP 3 into a Perl data structure, which you can then use to repurpose your bib data and searches for other uses (e.g. to provide an OpenSearch interface).
The first chunk of code I’m making available provides a function (parseBib) that will convert the XML from a full bib page into a data structure. Given the v0.01, you should treat this as alpha code at best!
http://www.daveyp.com/files/stuff/xmlparser/bib.pl
The above Perl script also contains some code to fetch the XML (using LWP) and will also dump (using Data::Dumper) the resulting Perl data structure to an output text file (dump_output.txt). I’ve also uploaded the code as a CGI file that you can run to display the Data::Dumper output – e.g.:
Building an object-oriented database system : the story of O2 /
Just to get you started, here’s some further info…
Continue reading “HIP XML Parser (v0.01)”