Posts on nostuff.org archive | Chris Keene

A little run

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 21:34:31 +0000

Since leaving University 13 years a go I’ve been getting fatter. And generally not very healthy. It would be fair to say I started running to reduce the beer belly.

Getting the runkeeper app was a key development; my endeavours went from occasionally trotting aimlessly for a little while (then feeling very smug for the next month or so before doing it again) – to actually trying to improve times, distance and improve on routes taken. Stats and Maps. Pure crack.

Listening to music in three parts

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 23:38:48 +0000

Part 1 Listening to digital music

I have this theory. In fact I have lots of theories. But for the rest of this paragraph I will restrain myself to blessing you with just one. My theory is that we are all moving to digital music before we are ready for it.

I mean listening to it on an iphone/ipad thing, sure fine. We’re all doing that ok. But in the house? or in the car? How do you listen to it there?

Elected Police Commissioners

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 22:13:30 +0000

In 25 days time England and Wales will elect Police and Crime Commissioners for the first time.

Many are cynical that this will politicize high level decisions by the Police, which it will almost certainly will to some extent, but mostly people seem indifferent or simply unaware.

Me. I hoped that the candidates would not be politically aligned with parties, that we could judge them based on their policies and priorities, not because they are connected to the party we usually vote for. But this was always nothing but naive.

iplayer diary and a tool i was never going to use again

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 21:54:44 +0000

A lot of online services have tried to introduce social elements in to their product. This is normally annoying, but in the case of the BBC’s iplayer I found it interesting and useful.

The problem was I was about the only person who did.

A brief recap, when the current design was launched, it had an extra (smaller) column on the homepage. Along with Featured and Most Popular was a column called Friends Recommend or something like that. They made some sensible design choices, rather than having another site where you needed to maintain a ‘friends’ list, you could simply point it to twitter and co and it would do the rest. The problem was that in turned out that at any time it would have maybe three programs to recommend, each of which just one of my friends would have recommended, and that was about it. It was therefore showing ‘anything my friends recommend’ – due to lack of take up – rather than ‘the most recommend programs by my friends’ which would probably be more useful and avoid the slightly narrow topics that came through (oh look Formula 1 and Dr Who).

A play with the Talis Aspire API

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 19:35:39 +0000

I wanted to have a go with the Talis Aspire API and see what potential it had and how easy it was to use. Talis Aspire is a Reading List system with the key purposes being, firstly, a method to inform libraries which books and resources they need to buy, secondly, a unified way to access lists and content, especially as more and more stuff is online.

But the array of systems across a University delivering the online ‘student experience’ is staggering and often confusing, hence the need to to investigate ways of embedding data from one system (such as this) in to other systems. My end goal is to display a list on a webpage outside of the Aspire website.

Talis

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 20:02:18 +0000

Today Talis announced they are moving their focus away from Linked Data. I think my initial reaction, which I tweeted, holds true: this is on similar lines to Microsoft announcing plans to move away from Windows.

Earlier this year I was at an event where I bumped in to two people from Talis. The one who knew me introduced me to the other, I think he described me as ‘a long time Talis watcher’, whether or not I quoted him accurately, that statement is probably true, and I therefore want to muse a little. Forgive me (especially if you are involved).

Dev8D

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:20:48 +0000

Tomorrow, Tuesday 14th February is the start of Dev8D 2012. A three day event for developers working in UK Higher Education. Which I am not really one, but don’t tell anybody and we should be ok. It’s an event that is on steroids : last time I went, my brain was pounded with more information to digest in 30 minutes than I would normally expect to receive in an entire day. It’s also bloody fantastic. I’m chuffed I can go this year.

TwaperKeeper archives

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:32:31 +0000

TwapperKeeper is shutting down it seems. It’s a popular online tool for archiving hashtags and other twitter searchers, and certainly well used in UK Higher Education where I work. I actually met John O’Brien, founder of TwapperKeeper, when he attended Dev8D (a developer event for those working in UK HE) a couple of years a go, nice chap.

Anyway, Martin Hawksey has created a wonderful tool for archiving, ummm, archives before they are gone. The tool is actually a Google Spreadsheet and to me it’s a testament to Google Docs power that an application that fetches and stores data from another site can be created using it.

Meta : blogging

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 17:56:04 +0000

There’s a long tradition of bloggers blogging about blogging. This post follows in the self-obsessed insular tradition.

This blog post is somewhat unusual in that I’m posting it to nostuff, my blog. I’ve been using posterous a bit of late and like it a lot. Posterous is also setup to post to a WP instance on nostuff here: http://www.nostuff.org/posterous/ it was setup as a way to archive an externally hosted service, but the end result is very useable (and seems to rank quite highly in Google).

Underclass

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 14:54:23 +0000

What’s clear over the last few days is that there is a underclass that remains – normally – hidden from the rest of society.

If you’re reading this in August, try the following link, for me, an eye opening interview with Camilla Batmanghelidjh, director of Kids Company. It starts 11 minutes in, do listen.

It seems clear this is a vicious circle, many are automatically condemned from the day they are born. Society fails them.

Things that annoy me with itunes and iphone ipod app

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 23:48:40 +0000

Number 1. Metadata is crap. Not just bad. Not just ‘Jonny needs to try harder’ in parts. out and out crap. Even on popular albums. This is the most popular digital music system there is. by far. and they can’t get it right.

When I want to browse albums I want to see albums, not random one-off tracks that so happen to include the album they belonged to (which is often the case from iTunes). Itunes is designed to allow you to buy one track, not whole albums, so why is iTunes designed in such a way that it doesn’t cater for this. Album browse is useless because most of it is random one of tracks.

MARC Tools & MARC::Record errors

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 12:17:59 +0000

I know next to nothing about MARC,though being a shambrarian I have to fight it sometimes. My knowledge is somewhat binary, absolutely nothing for most fields/subfields/tags but ‘fairly ok’ for the bits I’ve had to wrestle with.

[If you don’t know that MARC21 is an ageing bibliographic metadata standard, move on. This is not the blog post you’re looking for]

Recent encounters with MARC

Importing MARC files in to our Library System (~~Talis~~ Capita Alto), mainly for our e-journals (so users can search our catalogue and find a link to a journal if we subscribe to it online). Many of the MARC records were of poor quality and often did not even state the item was (a) a journal (b) online. Additionally Alto will only import if there is a 001 field, even though the first thing it does is move the 001 field to the 035 field and create its own. To handle these I used a very simple script to run through the MARC file – using MARC::Record – to add an 001/006/007 where required.
Setting up sabre – a web catalogue which searches the records of both the University of Sussex and the University of Brighton – we need to pre-process the MARC records to add extra fields, in particular a field to tell the software (vufind) which organisation the record was from.

Record problems

One of the issues was that not all the records from the University of Brighton were present in sabre. Where were they going missing? Were they being exported from the Brighton system? copied to the sabre server ok? Being output through the perl scritp? lost during the vufind import process?

To answer these questions I needed to see what was in the MARC files, the problem is that MARC is a binary format so you can’t just fire up vi to investigate. The first tool of the trade is a quick script using MARC::Record to convert a MARC file to text file. But this wasn’t getting to the bottom of it. This lead me to a few PC tools that were of use.

PC Tools

MarcEdit : Probably the best known PC application. It allows you to convert a MARC file to text, and contains an editor as well as a host of other tools. A good swiss army knife.

MARCView : Originally from Systems Planning and now provided by OCLC, I had not come across MARCView until recently. It allows you to browse and search through a file containing MARC records. Though the browsing element does not work on larger files.

UK deficit and protest

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 20:55:50 +0000

The large peaceful protests on Saturday were a success. Clearly Cameron and Osborne (and the little work experience boy standing closely behind them) did not come out and announce an immediate reversal of policy. But the need to think about what these cuts are doing to jobs, living standards and essentially services hopefully will be strong in the mind. Few politicians, no matter how ideological, want to ignore the views of a decent proportion of the public. And while U-turns are unlikely, the knowledge the further cuts announcements will lead to even stronger anger will be hopefully reduced the gun-ho spirit that the Tories have gone about them so far.

VuFind in 8 minutes using Amazon EC2

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 13:02:24 +0000

I’ve created a screencast showing how easy it can be to install VuFind. Here I go from nothing (no server, no OS) to full VuFind install in under 8 minutes.

It would probably take less than two minutes (under 10mins in total) to add MARC records to the installation, but I didn’t have any to hand at the time.

This demo cheats a bit by using a script that does the heavy work, the script was a mash up I created taking existing scripts and commands that come with VuFind with a few tweaks. It probably would have been only slightly slow to run most commands manually.

Pinboard.in suites me just just fine

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 16:08:16 +0000

About a month a go I wrote a quick rant about Delicious.com and why it could have been a sucessful web2.0 business (relatively low costs and lots of opportunity for advertising and pro/paid for features). At that time I said I was moving to pinboard.in, especially as delicious.com’s future was being question at the time.

This is how I use/used the two sites

When trying to find a site, page or link – often for a product/app/site with a name I don’t remember – I will use Pinboard’s (and used Delicious’) search feature with a keyword to try and find it, hoping that I either tagged it using the word, or title/description included it. This is my primary use case.
My second use case was picking a tag and browsing by it for the same reason.
Third use case was having no idea what I can search for, so just browsing through my entire bookmark list, perhaps picking roughly the time period I might have saved it.

I’m not looking back. I like:

hifi

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 22:03:18 +0000

I’ve got the other place (here or here) for random ill-thought musings. But today I decided to put one here. Hi-Fi

< vaguely interesting background story with slight element of personal touch >

I left University in 1999. Having been in full time work before I had even finished my last term, and living in cheap shared accommodation, I could splash out. But being somewhat conservative (small ‘c’, you see that? SMALL ‘C’. I mean ‘c’. Just want us to be clear on this ok) I waited a year, before buying the hi-fi I had seen and desperatly wanted for a massive £280.

Personal URL shortener

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 16:45:08 +0000

Back in 2009 I wrote a post about creating my own url shortener. I didn’t get very far, partly due to the challenge of how to create the short url codes, and partly due to my development philosophy of having an idea, musing about it, and never getting anywhere with it. Though I did install some code Ben Charlton has written and set it up as u.nostuff.org.

Part of the drive to do this was a bizarre feeling of guilt when using ‘short urls’ from the main shortener services. Each short url I created would mean we – as a userbase – were one step closer to the URLs being one digit longer (i.e. when that service ran out of free letter/number combinations with the current number of digits). Short urls were a scarce good. Did I really need this short URL? Worse, useful services such as twitterfeed use a short url each time they add something to twitter, even if most of those links would never be followed.

Jisc bid writing

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 23:18:33 +0000

Today I submitted a JISC bid on behalf of a team, as part of the recent JISC call Infrastructure for Education and Research (’15/10′ to its friends). The call was actually a set of broadly related different strands, we submitted (with a whole 30 mins to spare) under a strand called Infrastructure for Resource Discovery, and there’s a nice web based version of the call on Jiscpress.

Jiscpress was created in part by Joss Winn and a post of his I saw today inspired me to knock out this this rambling. Go read it before you read this, thanks.

Falmer Station

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Falmer Station is a rather nice old station, serving the village of the same name. The village, which is actually just under half a mile away, due to being on a hill), got chopped in half back in the seventies/eighties when they decided to build a large dual carriage way right through the middle of it, is not it’s main source of passengers. The University of Sussex is just the other side of the A27 (with a handy bypass), and a small University of Brighton campus is the other side.

Wireless music

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 21:34:52 +0000

We live in a mega techno wonderland of always on, access anywhere, hands-free, interconnected devices no?

no.

Not when it comes to a simple thing.

You see I’ve recently moved, and here is my living room layout. Observe Macbook Pro on the left, and Hi-fi on the right where the TV is (hidden by the speaker). You see, I want to be able to play music and radio from my laptop through my Hi-Fi, just like I used to. But I don’t, and I’m sure you appreciate this, I don’t want a massive cable running across the floor.

BBC Three

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 21:06:37 +0000

In 2003 I got a freeview box. I got good reception. I could see the transmitter from my window.

BBC One or Two had being running ‘BBC Three takeover’ sessions, with several BBC Three programmes in a row. They were good. It’s not fashionable to say that nowadays.

In its early days it was innovative, cutting edge, risk taking and alternative.

One of the programmes I saw on the BBC Three take over shows was Dreamspaces, which simply explored modern buildings and architecture. It didn’t pad out the show with music montages, and the presenters gave facts, rather than the normal approach taking by shows of making the presenter be ‘fun but stupid’ and ask an ‘expert’ lots of basic questions.

Talis Aspire, checking if a course has a list

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:26:18 +0000

Talis Aspire is a new-ish Reading List system used at the University of Sussex Library.

On Aspire, a url for a Department looks like this:
http://liblists.sussex.ac.uk/departments/anthropology.html

A page for a course looks like this (for course l6061):
http://liblists.sussex.ac.uk/courses/l6061.html

The nice thing is that you can replace the ‘.html’ with .json or .rdf – while the html only has a link to the related list, the json and rdf expose other links and relationships, such as the department.

Library Catalogues need to cater for light-weight discovery clients

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:11:26 +0000

Way back I wrote a piece about the changing model for library catalogues, you can see it here. The main premise was that trying to maintain records in a Library Management System (LMS/ILS) for all the items you want your users to discover is no longer feasible. This is especially true in this here digital age, trying to maintain records for all the e-journals a University has access to is an almost impossible task, and LMS were not designed for thousands of MARC records to be dropped and then re-imported (i.e. sync’d) with another source. And what about all the free stuff, is an e-book not worth being discovered by users because it is free?

html5 and nostuff

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 00:17:07 +0000

It’s hard not to think of nostuff.org and not think of blazing web standards.

So I had a go at updating the template for this here blog to make it all html5. Turns out this is quite simple.

It seems you can probably just replace your doctype with

<!DOCTYPE html>

and you’ve got yourself a html5 webpage.

The W3C validator proves it so. From there I added some of the new section elements such as header, footer, nav, aside and article. It seems that these can apply to the page (i.e. the page’s footer) or a section (the footer of a blog post, where it shows tags and date published etc). I used various sources on the web, via Google, including a few articles, and sample sites.

Adverts that follow you

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 21:49:15 +0000

Now one of these days I will finally get my ‘moving flat’ epic published, in the mean time you can read my how to buy a property guide. It really is worth every penny.

Part of this process involves buying a sofa which doesn’t suck as much as my current sofa.

Of course, I’m doing this the proper way of procrastinating and constantly looking at websites and not deciding anything (look out for my exciting new book of the same name, the ultimate manager’s guide).

ircount : update

Sun, 30 May 2010 17:45:42 +0000

One Sunday morning in January this year I got an email sent automatically from the webhosting company. It contained the output of the script that ran weekly, when all ran fine the script produced no output. When something went wrong the error messages were emailed to me. Judging by the length of the email something big had gone wrong.

The script collected data from http://roar.eprints.org/ – to be used as this weeks ‘number of records’ for each repository.

Summon @ Huddersfield

Tue, 25 May 2010 21:38:05 +0000

I attended an event at Huddersfield looking at their and Northumberland’s experience of Summon. http://library.hud.ac.uk/blogs/summon4hn/?p=22 These are my rough notes. Take all with a pinch of salt.

The day reaffirmed my view of Summon, it is ground breaking in the Library market, and with no major stumbling blocks. They are very aware that coverage is key and seem to be adding items and publishers. It searches items that a organisation has access to (though users can tick a option to search all items in the kb, not just those they can access). They have good metadata, merging records from a number of sources, and making use of subject headings (to refine or exclude from the search).

Political reform : some quick thoughts

Sat, 15 May 2010 17:57:24 +0000

Suddenly PR is in the limelight and seems to be getting support from those disaffected by politics in the UK. I&#8217;ve long been pondering about how it is best to govern this country. Mainly about where power lies: The UK, nations, regions, counties, local councils, etc.

Some thoughts:

We need a Constitution. No “we’ve already got the Magna Carta” is not a valid answer.
The Lords needs thinking about. Almost removing hereditary peers has been a massive step. An elected upper chamber is the obvious solution. Though I’m not 100% behind it. Voting brings in a whole range of cons, pandering to popular opinion, short term-ism, and attracting those who want to be ‘politicians’. The current setup, for all its faults, avoids some of this. Appointing ‘good people’ to a upper house has merits and when it works it ensures a group of generally wise people with varied experience and skills can debate and pass legislation. The problem with elected members is that only a small set of people want to stand for election, canvas for votes, etc… and they generally are not the best for the job.
However, ‘who selects who sits in the Lords’, and ‘how do they ensure a balanced upper house’ are questions that are hard to answer, and maybe an elected upper house is the only workable solution. If so, I would want long terms (10 years for example) to avoid short term thinking, and measures to avoid whips and parties dictating free thinking.
While all those Westminster traditions are cute (the ‘other house’, ‘my Honorable friend’, divisions rather than instant votes), they actually stop the important process of good law making. They need reforming. The Digital Economy bill was a good example of this. While those (there was only 40 or so) in the house were almost universally (and across party lines) against various points and the bill in general, when it went to a vote (division), hundreds emerged from the bars etc to vote as the whips told them to. They had no idea what had been discussed. They may not have even read the bill, but vote as they were told they did. An instant vote taken in the house would have avoided this.
We need clear and simple rules about how the nations are given power. Westminster being responsible for the UK and England is stupid and broken. For example when the Treasury was faced with an urgent need to cut spending they looked at what they could cut. This included UK spending (Defence, International Development, national policing, etc) and English services (Education, NHS England, etc). Defence couldn’t be cut, we are still fighting a Blair war, and we have promised to ring fence International Development. But… what about the English Higher Education budget. That could be cut. And few would notice. Scottish HE funding is decided by the Scottish Parliament, whose budget is set by formula, so wasn’t an option to be included in the cuts (this is not a Scottish dig, another time it will be their formula ‘tweaked’ for the worse, the point is this happen at different times in different ways for the two nations). To me this highlights the problem well of our mixed up way of running the UK. Each nation should have the same local powers….
Yes that means a English Parliament. Yes that would come with costs.
Fixed term elections are an interesting idea. It would avoid the advantage a ruling party has of choosing the best time for them to call an election, and bring about an element of certainty of when election will take place.
Voting is difficult at the moment as we are effectively voting on so many things. Who will make a good Prime Minister, Which party has the best policies, which party is best placed to run the country, which local candidate is best to serve your local needs, which local candidate has the best policies. I’m not sure what the answer is…
…Maybe we need to elect those to run the executive separately from electing those to sit in the House of Commons. Would be a very big change but worth a ponder.
Obviously PR is on the cards. It has pros and cons but I think now the Pros massively out weigh the cons. The current system is simple – in a good way. Who ever gets the most votes in my area gets the seat. Party with most seats runs the country. However, it seems the country is moving away from a two party system (the two main parties now receive far less of the over all vote than they used to), and therefore this system is representing the voting habits of the nation less and less. Other countries have moved to PR quite successful in the last few years. Scandinavia, New Zealand and Germany seem to do it well. We can learn from Israel and Italy’s mistakes.
For me, the current system has another flaw. The party that has the most MPs (who mainly vote as the whips tell them to) runs the executive (which creates the Bills and controls the whips), Makes the whole parliamentary process somewhat pointless (rubber stamping).
I’m actually quite optimistic about this coalition government. While no tory fan, the two parties have compromised mainly on giving up their most extreme ideas, the Lib Dems make Tories more socially responsible, the Tories ensure the Lib Dems do not follow some of their more wacky ideas. It does actually make democracy work very well. By definition, the policy areas they agree on (e.g. scraping ID cards and the associated databases) are those which most people voted for (anyone voting LD/Tory voted for a party with that policy), are the things that got through the negotiations with ease. Surely a good thing.

Voting time

Sat, 08 May 2010 19:04:43 +0000

I was hoping to write something insightful for the election. Time (well, laziness) has meant I shall spew some random thoughts instead… After the election has happened.

Things that are important to me:

Civil Liberties, privacy, and certain fundamentals of justice not being messed with on a whim.
Reforming politics and government, in a slow and discussed manner (not Blair-boy’s ‘hey I’m so bored of a Lord Chancellor, lets scrape it…. who’s turn is it on the Playstation?’). I’m actually not convinced that an elected upper house is the answer, but if it is, it needs to avoid the mistakes of whips, parties, and short term thinking. PR must surely be a better system than first past the post.
This includes a discussion on where we want discussions to be made, nationally or locally, etc. But this requires a public which understands that ‘local decisions by local people’ and ‘post code lottery’ are one and the same (which is used depends if the newspaper agrees with it or not).
A Strong economy, which encourages small businesses (but with fair rules to protect and give employees rights… they are not all ‘pointless red tape’)
A strong economy includes a strong financial sector. But carefully regulated to protect citizens from their mistakes and excess.
A strong safety net for those (and there are many) who need it, whether it be age, ill health, disability, hard times or bad luck.
Review of copyright and libel so they are fit for the 21st century.
Strong planning laws to ensure we have a quality built-environment. but with progressive and new ideas (such as shared space streets, like the excellent New Street in Brighton). Quality public buildings and spaces (such as St Pancras Station and Wembley Stadium) are important.
Education. I don’t have any answers but it needs to get better. Teachers need to be given space to teach, but in return they need to be good (not all are fit for the job). Endless government schemes don’t help, but nor do unions which seem to be simply against change.
Ideas along the lines of ‘some people misuse X, therefore lets stop – and stigmatise X’ are generally a bad idea. Examples of X are ‘benefits’ and ‘not being married (and have kids)’.
High speed trains are needed, to discourage air/car use, and to let people travel with ease, and to help move away from a economy focused around London.While Air/Road use should not be promoted, and in the long run other ways of living/working should be nurtured to avoid the need for travel, there is a need for some road improvements and probably (I regret) an extra runway in the South East England in the decade or so.
We need an enlightened immigration policy. Though we all acknowledge open borders are not suitable for this small country (I am genuinely at a loss why people manage to illegally enter the Schengen Zone – in say Italy or Eastern Europe – and then rather head for prosperous Germany or beautiful France risk their lives on the bottom of a train trying to get in to the grey UK!), we do not want to be a place where others can not come to work, or escape from prosecution. Students and educated workers bring so much benefit to this country.
‘Heath and Safety gone mad’ is the refrain from the right of politics, and those who dislike the state interfering with their lives. This is easy to dismiss as the usual vile of a Daily Mail reader. Though there is argument that some things need to be rolled back. If people do really stupid things then that is their fault (obvious exceptions for children and those with learning difficulties). Vicarious responsibility can be a problem. Of course much Health and Safety law and practice is there for good reason but there are areas that need to be reviewed.
Working together with other European countries makes sense, we have a lot in common, shared values, and common standards benefit us all. But there are areas of the EU which seem wasteful, undemocratic, unaccountable, etc. And these need to be addressed. There needs to be clear lines of what and where the EU can legislate on.
Universities can be great for bringing in high tech companies, knowledge workers, and driving a SciTech, Medical, Creative industries economy. I’m not saying the tax payer should foot 100% of their bill, but cut backs have long term negative effects on a country.

This is not a full list, but just some of the ideas that came to mind. Feel free to comment.

Nick Clegg’s Fault. Beware the REAL Nasty.

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 13:03:19 +0000

Tonight is the second party leaders debate. As most in the UK know, Nick Clegg came out of the last one well, using a underhand tactic of using intelligence and good sense to answer the questions. #iagreewithnick immediately became a twitter trending topic.

The upshot of this is that the Lib Dems now have the slight chance that they will come a respectable third in the forthcoming election, instead of just a distant third. Obviously this is a matter of national emergency.

Mystery Solved

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:51:19 +0000

We recently (well, last summer) launched Aquabrowser as our main library catalogue. We provided a feedback link for people to comment on the new interface, as we were keen to pick up on functionality it lacked or issues we may not have thought off. You can see the feedback link on the green bar on the right, it asks the user to login, and then provides a feedback form to leave a message.

Dev8D

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 20:07:22 +0000

This isn’t a comprehensive review of dev8d, checkout the twitter stream (that link uses twapperkeeper by the way, the guy who created it was there and it was great talking to him), and wiki for and much else on the web for what went on.

ircount development

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:59:18 +0000

I’ve finally got around to spending a bit of time on the ircount code.

This post goes through some of the techy stuff behind it. If you’re just interested in features, I’m afraid there’s none yet, but you can now compare more than 4 repositories, but that’s as far as you’ll want to read.

Twitter clients

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 23:30:50 +0000

From about an hour after signing up to Twitter until very recently I used Twirl on both PC and Mac as my Twitter client. I was happy with it, and still am, but had noticed people using other clients and wanted to see if I was missing anything.

I round up my findings here:

[][2]

Three twitter clients

Apple Automator

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:32:18 +0000

Automator on OS X is one of those things I use about once a year, but it always impresses.

Many attempts to use drap and drop to replace programming lead to confusing design. Examples are yahoo pipes, Business Objects, and most of all MS Access.

What’s impressive with Automator is that it always seems it was designed with the very problem you want to solve in mind.

My Problem (apart from the drink)

People power : twitter is highlighting & affecting important issues.

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:33:50 +0000

A few weeks a go (why, the 12th Oct in fact) I was sitting at my laptop during the evening, doing this and that with Twitter ticking away on the right. I glanced at the newest tweets to pop in and noticed one from secretlondon.

Curious, I read the Guardian article it linked to. A gagging order to stop a paper report the proceedings of parliament. This is not very good. I muttered and got back on with the this and that. A few minutes later another tweet from secretlondon came in:

Google Reader – shared stuff

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 10:49:12 +0000

I’ve been using Google Reader for a while having jumped ship from Bloglines. One of its features is to share stuff. This is potentially a good thing as it avoids me bombarding my twitter followers with endless links to stuff i find interesting.

At the moment it is useless as I don’t really follow anyone on Google Reader, and they (probably good sense, and a firm value of their own time) don’t follow me.

University league tables combined data

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:52:30 +0000

Last year I collected the University League tables published from various sources and combined them in to one spreadsheet.

I’ve been updating this for this year, i.e. tables published in early/mid 2009 aimed at those starting in 2010.

You can see the UK Combined University league table data Google spreadsheet here and re-order as you please. I’ve updated the three ‘UK only’ lists, and will update the international lists in the near future.

Brighton New England Quarter Photos

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:53:17 +0000

I don’t think we’re that good at recording the world we live in (photographs, sound) for future reference.

The first question that can arise from that is: is it important? I like to think yes without being able to provide particularly good reasons why.

In any case, I used to – and still – love to look at old photographs of the places I’ve lived and grew up in, found in local shops. museums and pubs.

In was perhaps this that was the inspiration back in 2004 to take some photos of an area of Brighton that was about to the redeveloped. The area in question was next to the main station and contained various crumbling buildings from the last 150 years sticking out of the undergrowth.

PubSubHubbub instant RSS and Atom

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 16:51:37 +0000

I have just come across PubSubHubbub via Joss Winn’s Learning Lab blog at the University of Lincoln.

It’s a way for RSS/Atom feed consumers (feed readers etc) to be instantly updated and notified when an RSS is updated.

In a nutshell, the RSS publisher notifies a specific hub when it has a new item. The hub then notifies – instantly – any subscribers who have requested the hub to contact them when there is an update.

Amazon AWS EC2 and vufind

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 21:53:36 +0000

Today I saw a tweet from juliancheal, which mentioned he was setting up his virtual server on slicehost. I hadn’t heard of this company but their offering looks interesting. This got me thinking about cloud hosting and I decided it was time to actually try out Amazon’s AWS EC2.This allows you to run a virtual server (or multiple servers) in the Amazon cloud, servers can be created and destroyed by a click of a button.

The Data Imperative: Libraries and Research Data : comment

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:20:08 +0000

I put this in to a seperate post. It continues on from my previous post, but didn’t want my notes of the day to be taken over by my ill thought views.

Personal Thoughts

Reluctant to give some thoughts as I know so little about the service. However… (!)

There seems to be two clear areas here: Data formatting and Data storing. There is some linkage (Preserving surely covers both, formats can become obsolete, Servers die), yet the two seem to be somewhat seperate.

Event: The Data Imperative: Libraries and Research Data

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:26:06 +0000

Today I’m at the one day event ‘The Data Imperative: Libraries and Research Data’ at the Oxford e-research Centre. As usual, these are my own rough notes. There are mistakes, gaps and my own interpretation of what was said.

Paul Jeffreys : Director of IT, Oxford University.

Started off giving an overview of where this has come from. e-Research is more than just e-Infrastructure. e-Research is not just about outputs, but outputs (articles/data) are a part of this, and an discreet area to work on.

Research in the Open: How Mandates Work in Practice

Fri, 29 May 2009 09:28:35 +0000

Today I’m at the RSP/RIN Research in the Open: How Mandates Work in Practice at the impressive RIBA 66 Portland Place.

Slides can be found here (not available when I made this post, as semi excuse as to why my notes miss so much). These are rough notes, which I’m making available in case others are interested, apologies for mistakes and don’t take it as gospel!

After an introduction by Stéphane Goldstein, kicking off with Robert Kiley from the Wellcome Trust.

Library search/discovery apps : intro

Wed, 27 May 2009 14:41:41 +0000

There’s a lot of talk in the Library world about ‘next generation catalogues’, library search tools and ‘discovery’. There’s good reason for this talk, in this domain the world has been turned on its head.

History in a nutshell:

The card catalogue became the online catalogue, the online catalogue let users search for physical items within the Library.
Journals became online journals. Libraries needed to let users find the online journals they subscribed to through various large and small publishers and hosts. They built simple in-house databases (containing journal titles and links to their homepages), or added them to the catalogue, or used a third party web based tool. As the number of e-journals grew, most ended up using the last option, a third party tool (which could offer other services, such as link resolving, and do much of the heavy lifting with managing a knowledge base).
But users wanted one place to search. Quite understandable. If you are after a journal, why should you look in one place to see if there is a physical copy, and another place if they had access to it online. Same with books/ebooks.
So libraries started to try and find ways to add online content to catalogue systems in bulk (which weren’t really designed for this).

The online catalogues (OPAC) were simple web interfaces supplied with the much larger Library management system (ILS or LMS) which ran the backend the public never saw. These were nearly always slow, ugly, unloved and not very useful.

Free e-books online via University of Pittsburgh Press

Tue, 26 May 2009 09:27:09 +0000

The University of Pittsburgh Press has put nearly 500 out of print books online and Open Access. You can access them via their Digital Editions website. This is excellent news, making work which could be lost openly available to all.

For years there has been a movement towards making Journal articles Open Access, i.e. publicly available. However some subjects (especially in the Humanities) publish much of their research in books, not journals. Letting the world gain from the (normally publicly funded) research contained within books is more complex, and it’s not an area I fully understand. The author normally receives royalties from book sales. However I understand this are normally very small 99% of the time, and normally tail down to tiny amounts after a few years. What if funders and Universities demanded that any book written with their money (or during their employment) must be made publicly available after x number of years (let’s say 10 years)? Academics and Publishers would not welcome the move, but would still allow a window where they can gain revenue, and if this became the norm it would be something they just have to accept. Meanwhile, once open access, the book becomes much easier to archive and preserve, and ensure the knowledge is available to all in the long term. Just a thought.

ircount : Repository Record Statistics

Thu, 14 May 2009 19:34:53 +0000

I’ve updated Repository Record Statistics (which I refer to as ircount).

Some key points:

Repository names with non-standard characters were not displaying properly. They now should, though there are some parts of the site where I have not updated the code yet. Many Russian IRs are also not showing the correct name, even though it is correct in the database, which I will look in to.
If a repository changes its name (in ROAR) then the new name should be shown in ircount
When looking at the details for one Repository, you can now compare it with any other repository, not just those from the same country. You’ll see two drop down boxes, one for those from the same country (for convenience) and one listing all repositories.
I’ve removed the Full Text numbers, which only appeared for some repositories. They were inaccurate and not very useful.
There’s now a link on the homepage to ircount news (which is actually just posts on this blog which have been tagged ‘ircount’, like this one).

The code is now in a subversion (svn) repository, my first time using such a system, which should help me keep track of changes. I can make it available to others if anyone is interested.

Linked data & RDF : draft notes for comment

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:12:59 +0000

I started to try and write an email about Linked Data, which I was planning to send to some staff in Library I work in.

I felt that it was a topic that will greatly impact on the Library / Information management world and wanted to sow the seeds until I could do something more. However after defining linked data, I felt I should also mention RDF and the Semantic Web, and also try and define these. And then in a nutshell try and explain what these were all about and why they are good. And then add some links.

Academic discovery and library catalogues

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 14:24:25 +0000

A slightly disjointed post. The useful Librarytecholgy.org website by Marshall Breeding announced the eXtensibleCataloge project has just released a number of webcasts in preparation for their software release later this year.

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eXtensible Cataloge webcast screenshot

I’ve come across this project before, and put a little simply, is in the same field as the Next Generation Catalogues such as Primo, Aquabrowser and VuFind.

short urls, perl and base64

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:56:20 +0000

One of my many many many faults is coming up with (in my blinkered eyes – good) ideas, thinking about them non-stop for 24hours, developing every little detail and aspect. Then spending a few hours doing some of the first things required. then getting bored and moving on to something else. Repeat ad nauseum.

Today’s brilliant plan (to take over the world)

Over the weekend it was ‘tinyurl.com’ services and specifically creating my own one.

webpad : a web based text editor

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:13:24 +0000

So I have WordPress (and in fact Drupal, Joomla, mediawiki, Moodle, damn those Dreamhost 1-click installs) as a way of running my website.

But there are still many pages which are outside of a content management system. Especially simple web app projects (such as ircount and stalisfield) and old html files.

It can be a pain to constantly ftp in to the server, or use ssh. Editing via ssh can be a pain, especially over a dodgy wireless connection, or when you want to close the lid to your macbook.

Library catalogues, search systems and data

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:34:29 +0000

Below is an email I sent to UK Library e-resources mailing list (lis-e-resources@jiscmail.ac.uk). I’m putting it here for the same reason then I sent the original email: I think there are questions relating to the changing role of the library catalogue and new models are developing in how and where metadata exists for the items libraries provide access to.

My points in a nutshell:

The way we work with Library system (LMS) catalogues is changing, with the need to import and export large batches of records from other systems increasing, especially with online materials such as journals and e-books. This is quite a different need to those before the web, when item = physical thing in the library building, records were added one at a time, with
Library systems have not adapted to this new need, and though technically possible is often fiddly and can feel like a hack.
While it is possible to import batches of records, there are issues regarding keeping everything in sync. For example, Libraries often subscribe to publisher (online) ‘journal bundles’, the titles included in these bundles can change over time, but how to easily update/sync the catalogue to reflect this. One option is to regularly delete the imported records and reimport from the data source completely, though, if I understand correctly, Library Systems often do not delete records, but instead simple ‘suppress’ from the public view. So doing this for twenty thousand e-journal records each month would leave 240,000 hidden records on the system each year!
Why do we want them on the catalogue? Because users search the web interface to the catalogue to look for journals, books, theses etc. So we need to ensure our e-journals, e-books etc can be discovered via the catalogue interface.
A Library System (LMS) will typically have a catalogue, which cataloguers and other library staff maintain, and a public web front end for users to search (and locate) items.
However, ‘next generation’ of web search systems are now on the market, these allow the user to search the LMS catalogue and other data sources simultaneously in one modern interface.
Setting up these systems to search other data sources (in addition to the library system catalogue) so that they include records for online journals and e-books (and more) is a much neater solution, then trying to add/sync complete cataloging records in to the library system catalogue.
This to me (and I’m no scholar on the subject) has changed the model. The Library System catalogue was one and the same as the public web catalogue. What was on one was on the other. Librarians would discuss ‘should we put X on to the catalogue?’. But now these two entities are separate. Do we want something to be discoverable on our web catalogue search system, Do we want a record on our back-end library System for something? These are two separate questions, and it is possible to have an item on one and not the other. It would be easy to say that if you just want users to be able to discover a set of items, just make them available on your next generation search systems if it wasn’t for the fact that…
Third party systems can cross search or import records from multiple library catalogues, getting data from their library system. This was a simple thing to consider: do we want to allow these systems to have access to our records/holdings, and if so they would search our catalogue. These are examples and not the only things to consider, for example Endnote allows you to search a library catalogue within the application, of course this is the Library System catalogue.
This creates questions: which items do we want to make available to our users searching our web catalogue? which items do we want to expose to other systems out there? What items do we want to keep in our Library system back-end catalogue for administrative/inventory purposes? With the old simpler model these questions did not need to be asked.

I’ve drawn some rather embarrassingly bad diagrams to try and illustrate the point:

2008 : nostuff.org under review

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 17:26:28 +0000

It takes someone with a grossly over inflated ego, and thinks their website is a trillion times more important than it actually is to try and write a review of the previous year. What sort of idiot does that, as if anyone will read it!

Hello.

Think of it as a school report, annual appraisal, or cheap channel 4 air time filler around the new year.

nostuff.org has grown in the last year, so did the readership. Some of the posts were even read by humans.

“Sitting on a gold mine” – improving provision and services for learners by aggregating and using ‘learner behaviour data’

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:03:16 +0000

I’m at a workshop today called “Sitting on a gold mine” – improving provision and services for learners by aggregating and using ‘learner behaviour data’ (it rolls off the tongue!), which is part of a wider JISC TILE project looking at, in a nutshell, how we can use data collected from user and user activity to provide useful services, and the issues and challenges involved (and some Library 2.0 concepts as well). As ever, these are just my notes, at some points I took more notes than others, there will be mistakes and I will badly misquote the speakers, please keep this in mind.

Mashed Libraries

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:16:09 +0000

Exactly a week a go I was coming home from Mashed Libraries in London (Birkbeck).

I wont bore you with details of the day (or more to the point, I’m lazy and others have already done it better than i could (of course, I should have made each one of those words a link to a different blog but I’m laz… or never-mind)).

Playing with OAI-PMH with Simple DC

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:15:14 +0000

Setting up ircount has got me quite interested in OAI-PMH, so I thought I would have a little play. I was particularly interested in seeing if there was a way to count the number of full text items in a repository, as ROAR does not generally provide this information.

Perl script

I decided to use the http::oai perl module by Tim Brody (who not-so-coincidentally is also responsible for ROAR, which ircount gets its data from).

naughty boys and lots of sheep

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:58:26 +0000

I Don’t normally write about this sort of thing, but this is crazy.

Trying to ascertain the facts is almost impossible, even though supposed quality broadsheets have written huge amounts about it.

So what happened?

Russell Brand has an evening radio show on Radio 2.
This is pre-recorded (really? every week? this is the biggest scandal!)
Last week he had Jonathan Ross on the show (presumably to promote his book), though it has never been made clear whether he was co-presenting or a guest
Andrew Sachs – an actor who was in Faulty Towers – was due to be interviewed on the phone to promote a TV show.
Andrew is 78
Russell phones Andrew while chatting to Jonathan, there is much banter going on, both are known for it.
When they are put through to the answer phone the banter continues, references about Andrew’s granddaughter are made, including implying Russell has slept with her, though these are done in a somewhat joking fashion (Brand: “Andrew Sachs, I did not do nothing with Georgina – oh no I’ve revealed I know her name”)
The Granddaughter is currently touring in Satanic Sluts burlesque group.
Various reports (including the Times, which is less inaccurate than most of the press) said she had slept with Russell.
Reports keep on referring to them talking about Andrew Sachs killing himself on hearing the talk about his granddaughter, though the one edited transcript I have seen does not mention this at all.
After the show was recorded, the Times claims that a junior produce contacted Andrew Sachs to confirm it was ok to be played on air (which I understand is actually normal practice), though does not state if they actually got permission, i.e. what his response was. (from the times) Apparently a senior executive (or senior editor – to me there’s quite a difference between an executive or editor) vetted the recording before going out, presumably due to the new guidelines which mean senior staff (above the show’s producer) have to sign off controversial content.
After the show went out there were, apparently, two complaints.
Roughly a week later the Mail reports on it, and then 18,000 more complaints are made, one wonders how many have actually listened.

Since Tuesday this has been at the top of every major UK news site, including the websites of the ‘broadsheets’. Ultimately it is all about a few minutes of talk left on an answering machine.

ircount : new location, new functionality

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 20:18:08 +0000

A while a go, I released a simple website which reported on the number of items in UK repositories over time. It collected its data from ROAR but by collecting it on a weekly basis could provide a table showing growth week by week.

First it has a new home: http://www.nostuff.org/ircount/

Secondly, it now collects data for every institutional (and departmental) repository registered in ROAR across the world. Not just the UK. It has been collecting the data since July.

Top UK Universities : Combined Rankings

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 01:05:07 +0000

There are various league tables out there for UK Universities. I’ve collected the results from a number of them, a league table based on league tables. This should hopefully help to remove any biases or weaknesses in particular methodologies. The results are further down this post.

I collected results for just 53 Universities, not the full 120 odd that exist in the UK. This was due to laziness, and to be honest I’m more interested in the higher end of the numbers. However I’m fairly sure no university I’ve excluded would come higher that those I’ve included In fact it was originally going to be 50, but as I collected from the various sources I added a few more around the cut off point.

Navel gazing

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 01:30:12 +0000

I was having a quick think about the categories I use here. I have tried to use categories which match people’s interests. e.g. someone from Brighton can choose to read (and subscribe to) ‘Brighton’, same for technology or libraries.

I’ve recently started to blog a bit more about things related to my work. Which is best summed up as where technology (& web) and libraries (& information management) meet. This includes searching, metadata, cataloguing, making data and information accessible, and scholarly publishing (and changing it to be less stupid). My rule of thumb is that if I feel something would only be of interest to those in the library (or HE) tech area, I stick it in ‘libraries and technology’, if it could be of interest to those who are generally interested in techy stuff then it is added to the technology category.

Radio Pop

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 17:38:10 +0000

Radio Pop is an interesting experimental site from the fantastic BBC radio labs.

It is a sort of soical network site for radio listening. It only records your listening through the ‘radio pop’ live streams. I (like many) mainly listen to listen again and the radio iplayer, and they are working on intergrating with both. You can see my profile here.

You can ‘pop’ what you are currently listening to (basically a ‘i like this’ button). I’ve added my ‘pop’ rss feed to my dipity timeline.

WordPress themes and plugins

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:42:15 +0000

Of interest to those who use WordPress (and those who have an opinion on web design).

Had a few hours off this afternoon so have been playing around with WordPress a bit.

New plugins:

Google sitemap XML : does what it says, and easy to use
Theme Test Drive : allows you to preview other themes (on your site) without having to make the switch first. Good plugin, seems to work well, config settings are under the theme menu of WP.
‘Twitter for WordPress‘ : you guessed it, shows one (or more) twitter feeds either as a widget or by calling a function. Works well as a widget (and all config is carried out in the widget area).
OpenID for WordPress : allows those leaving comments, and myself as blog author to sign in via OpenID. While it’s been noted that OpenID does have usability issues, it still seems like a good option to have. I’m leaving this active, it does work, though can’t see it being used. You don’t it near the ‘comment’ box on a post, though it is there on the signin page (which people probably would never go to), once signed in to openid (which, if you are like me, requires trying to remember what your URL is) you are actually taken to the WP admin dashboard (which scared me to start with, anyone can do this on my blog!), but the dashboard itself doesn’t reveal anything important and all other areas are locked down. In theory the user could then set up a profile, though comeone this is nostuff, why would you want a profile here? So kudos for a good plugin, though can’t see it being used on this backwater of a blog.
links to the above can be found here.

Themes

The first browser I used was Netscape 1, possibly 2. By default it would display black text on a grey background. This was good, far easier to read than black on white.

Top 20 UK Universities

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:25:38 +0000

UPDATE: if you are looking for the Top UK Universities (according to the league tables) then have a look at this blog post.

What’s the top 20 Universities in the UK? What order would they come in?

I want you to reply right now to this blog post and add a comment listing the top 20 Universities UK 1-20.

I want people to list them as they perceive them, so don’t go and look up some list, I want to know your 1-20, if you were held at gunpoint and asked to instantly list the the best Universities in the UK, what would you answer.

blip.fm

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:00:38 +0000

Very first thoughts of blip.fm, and therefore not a proper review, and based on first impressions, not research.

blip.fm is interesting but so far for me has proved a little frustrating in understanding how to get the most out of it.

[For reasons not clear to me I have dumped my thoughts as bullet points (which would have worked just as well as sentences, but can sometimes make it more readable).]

Olympic medals by population

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:05:14 +0000

The table below shows number of Olympic gold medals (for the top three countries) as of 18/8/2008. It also shows the number of golds divided by total population (in millions, otherwise the numbers just look silly). It also shows the number of golds divided by the number people participating in the Olympics for that country.

I couldn’t find anywhere on the web details of the number of participants per country. The numbers used below where based on comments made by a TV commentator, and I could only remember the first digit of each! (I hadn’t expected the need to recall it at the time). Needless to say, take these numbers with a bucket of salt.

BBC News: BT broadband and Tiscali

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:56:06 +0000

BT seem to play on ‘the safe default choice for the nation’ image while charging high prices and miking it for all they can. For years they had ‘technical problems’ in letting anyone else put equipment in to the exhanges that got handed to them after privatisation. There were in the strange situation of being the only organisation broadband suppliers could use to provide the connection to user’s homes (due to the previously mentioned reason), setting the price to their monopoly service and also being one of the consumer broadband suppliers itself. Conflict of interest?

SQL grouping mulitple values in to one SELECT field

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:49:11 +0000

SQL is one of those things I always need to understand more than I do. Sometimes odd little problems can seem impossible with my limited understanding of the language.

One such hit this me this morning. We wanted a report from our Institutional Repository (a online archive of the University’s research publications). The report was to include title, journal title, type (journal article, book, etc), author(s) and departments for each item in the report.

Brighton New England Quarter

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 20:30:35 +0000

A few years a go I created some new pages on the ‘New England Quater’, on the site of some old railway works next to Brighton station and near me. Originally the pages just had some photos of how the site looked before work started, and at various stages since (stupidly I normally took this late in the day as the sun was setting which produced poor photos), however at the time I couldn’t find any website providing general information on the project so provided some background and useful links. Since then there has been much more information put on to the web (and lot of information removed as well).

RIOJA – Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives – live blog

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:57:52 +0000

Living Blogging http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/rioja/ see http://is.gd/N8T or , in fact, see below…

Update (8 July 2008):

This is my first attempt at using coveritlive.com (as used very sucessfully many times by Andy Powell at Eduserv). On the whole thought it was sucessful, and the software was great.

Few points: The software doesn’t seem to allow you to edit entries, I guess this keeps with the spirit of liveblogging but can be a pain when you notice a mistake just after sending a message. In fact trying to take notes and listen to what is being said lead to quite a few typos etc, the small font on the screen – further away on my lap than it would be on a desk – didn’t help. Secondly, difficult to let people know you are doing this (the other extreme would be to bombared mailing lists announcing your intentions), so some who may have had an interest in keeping an eye on the days event would not have been aware of this.

mobile phones, desires, frustrations and musings

Thu, 22 May 2008 07:31:34 +0000

I mentioned in my last post that my current phone is a Motorola RAZR2 V8. I got this because of its shape (nice to hold), large screen and large keys. These may not sound like funky features but are actually what are important to me.

I look at the iphone and nokia n95 with envy, the answer to all my problems is in these phones. Why? Which one? Why do I crave these when I do not use the features on my current phone.

mobile phones (and me)

Wed, 21 May 2008 08:29:08 +0000

I want to talk more about mobile phones. Earlier I talked about why I think they have the wrong name, now I want to talk about ‘the phones in my life’, I can’t promise this will be captivating reading but I know as if I don’t write this now it will come up in later postings as the mother of all tangents, so better to do it now as its own entry. Apologies for such a blatant me me me post.

Mobile Phones (naming)

Sat, 03 May 2008 13:01:22 +0000

First up… The name is wrong. I hear people rant I don’t want a camera on my phone. That’s reasonable. I don’t want my TV to make coffee. You say phone and people think thingy with numbers, a little speaker on one end and a little microphone on the other. It should also go ring ring when someone is calling your number (unless you are in the US, in which case is should just go riiiiing, but enough conversation on the transatlantic differences in ring style already). Only an idiot would want a camera on said device.

WordPress tags etc

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 19:32:17 +0000

For a while I have been adding tags to my posts. Tags are good. People who tag things are good. I am Web 2.0.

Only thing is they seemed to be going in to the ether, that is to say, users (that is you) had no way to see them or browse them. I was suprised that there aren’t any real options in the WordPress admin website, and considering they were only introduced in version 2.3 I was suprised I didn’t find more information on the web as to how to make use of them. I had read that WP supports things like tag clounds out of the box, but couldn’t see how to make one for my blog.

Up and Then Down

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:05:06 +0000

Factoid of the day: “Generally, England is over-elevatored”

via ‘Up and Then Down’

News Quiz

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:12:01 +0000

On a Saturday, I’m prone to remembering the fantastic News Quiz (or equally fantastic Now Show), which starts at 12.30 (why am I saying that, you know that right?), at exactly 1pm. At this point I dash to listen again (now the radio iplayer) to listen to it there. At this point I’m often frustrated as it is still playing the show from the previous week. Do the BBC not understand by problem!

JISC Library Management System Review

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:48:09 +0000

The JISC and SCONUL have just released a Review (Horizon Scan) of Library Management Systems (LMS or ILS). Intersting stuff. A lot of stuff to be expected, and some interesting findings:

Dire need to embrace web 2.0 and to get OPACs out of the 90s
The need to intergrate with campus systems such as Financial and registry systems.
Open Source is used within current systems, and as systems in their own right, the latter have no real penetration in the UK market and are unlikely to do so in the short term (lack of advantages), and are not currently more ‘open’ than other systems.
Most major systems are much of a muchness (they put it far more elegantly, though after glancing through 100 odd pages I’m not much inclined to find each quote), little reason to change system at the moment. Especially as…
It is a good time for the role and definition of a LMS to be looked at.
We are already moving away from the ‘one big system approach’ i.e. Aquabrowser, ERMs and Metasearch are all separate products. Almost certainly going to move in this direction, and this is a good thing. This requires standards and cooperation for different systems to talk to each other.
UK market is small compared to global market, though not that different to the norm, except for BL ILL server and our concept of Short Loans.
Libraries have not made good use of looking at how users work and interact with their systems.
There is a need and movement to liberate data (silios and all that)
LMS may become a back of house system (though this should not be seen as a bad thing)
Recommends that libraries increase the value of their investment by implementing additional services around the LMS. Which is fine if these new services are using standard protocols to interact with the LMS, if their are using proprietary api’s or talk direct to the database then it is another thing to lock the library in to one provider (or at least, another reason why changing LMS will have a large impact).
Procurement process is overall expensive, especially when LMSs are more or less the same-ish.
Encourages libraries to review their contracts (ie not changing system, just getting more – or better value – out of the current system with better contract).

One thing that interested me were the Vendor comments (and something the report reccommends to libraries) on the lack of consortia in the UK, and noted that other countries make good use of this (ie this is best practice). I can certainly see scope for this, especially as (like the report notes) the software has already been designed to handle consortiams.But what would the consortiams be? geographic based (London? South East? M25 group? Scotland) or perhaps using other groupings (Russel group, 94 group, CURL). Or perhaps smaller groupings based on counties or similar institutions.

web browsers

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 16:35:27 +0000

Today was a browser day.

Installed the IE8 beta. Not much to say on this. It looks very like IE7. has improved standards compliance compared with other versions of IE. I had read that there were problems due to the way if renders pages compared with IE6 and 7 (i.e. closer to the standard). However I was surprised how true this is, for example the University I work at does not do any browser specific stuff, you get the same html/css regardless, yet IE8 seems to have problems rendering certain elements. The logo often appeared in the wrong place (but would jump to the right place when you moved the mouse over it), sometimes a navigation bar at the top would appear twice, or with a gap between it and the top of the browser. Yet Firefix, Opera and Safari (all fairly good at complying with standards) all show these pages without problems, so why would IE8 be any different. I only visited a few more sites, but again odd little problems were showing up. Also of note, the beta has a developer meny pre-installed, looks useful for browsing html/css etc.

or08: eprints track, session 2

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:44:32 +0000

After coffee a little more talk about new features and the future as we ran out of time before. Christopher Gutteridge has now turned up, he may have had a few grown up fizzy drinks last night.

(lost concentration here: salt grain take) Eprints plugin will try and pick when people enter their names wrong (e.g. get first/lastnames mixed up). Report an eprint (or report an issue with an eprint) link on item/record pages?

or08: Eprints 3.1

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 09:35:18 +0000

At the sucks-less-than-dspace Eprints track today. First up Eprints 3.1 and Future. Haven’t seen anything about 3.1 before this, v3 was released over a year a go so looking forward to seeing what is new.

9:10am: Les Carr is talking. reviewing v3 released last year. Talking about the large amount of work surrounding a repository (for all), which he experienced first hand running the soton ecs repository, and the work they have put in to help this. He found that when he contacted academics to point out problems he has fixed with their items/records they seemed pleased glad that someone was doing this. Last year they (eprints team) wanted to focus on ‘things on the ground’ to make things easier and not focus too much on rejiging the internals.

or08: live blogging experiment

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:20:10 +0000

Today – as you probably have seen – I posted some badly written notes that meant nothing to no one, and interested even fewer. This was my experiment in live blogging. I’ve seen others do it quite a bit recently and always thought it worked well, so wanted to give it a try.

Some thoughts:

Using a different tense is a little weird. Normally we write in the past tense if reviewing an event, when blogging as it happens I found myself switching between current and past tense (the latter out of habit). This wasn’t helped with no internet access before coffee, so i was writing in to a text editor (not that you wanted to know, called Smultron) something I planned to paste in to a blog post in the future, which when posted will be talking about the past, but i wanted it to read as if it was live!
I looked up at one point while switching between wordpress and twitter and saw two laptop screens of people in front of me, one had twitter across the screen, the other had the wordpress composition window. Am I boring or with the in-crowd?!
Perhaps the biggest point was my difficulty in note taking. I wanted to write stuff that other people not there would find useful. However, my notes were largely rather basic, not meaty enough to say much, someone reading would get a general idea what the talk was about. It would give someone a feel of the outline of a talk, but not what the key points were, something which I think is a crucial difference.
As well as taking notes, I had various tabs open, including the excellent crowdvine conference site, twitter, bloglines, google blog search (searching to see what turned up for ‘or08’… oh look! me! god I’m so vain). At times the note taking, twittering (and learning about tags on twitter) and checking out crowdvine, I would occasionally look up and have no idea what the presenter is talking about (I’m a man, I have evolved to be an expert single tasker). Must try and ensure I’m not being distracted from the actual reason I’m there.
My notes were rough. Not helped by the fact that the lecture hall was very full (and it wasn’t one of those poncy MBA lecture theaters with big wide seats), so I was being careful of my elbows – which limits typing, and for me, using the shift key. Does the embarrassment of badly typed, ill thought, ungrammatical notes get trumped by their potential interest to others and timeliness?
Timeliness is an important point, I could have waited until the end of the day but wanted to get them out straight away.
After morning coffee I had the internet. I sat down with next to two people I had met before, while there were quite a few with their laptops open, they were not, and I felt a little self conscious. They were trying to listen to the talk, and here was this guy next to them mucking around on his laptop the whole time. Actually I don’t think they were bothered.
While talking about being self-conscious, does posting things as quickly as possible look like attention seeking and ego massaging? Never thought that about anyone else doing it so hopefully the answer is no (but then I love this sort of thing, so I wont).

So will I do it again. Yes, and I like having the web to hand while at these things. I think I need to improve my note taking, and perhaps take more time writing up points (and my thoughts) on the things of interest rather than writing lots of little snippets. I basically need to take notes anyway (whether notepad and pen, MS Word or a blog), and it does make it stick in my head better than just sitting there, so I may as well make my notes open to others. The timeliness (thats time – li – ness, not Time Lines!) is perhaps harder to argue, but I like the idea that things are hitting the web the moment they happen, so think I will continue it.

or08: session 2b: Sustainability Issues

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:22:21 +0000

[again unedited, unchecked, sorry for mistakes!]

Warewick Cathro
Assistant Direct General, National Library of Australia

[sorry didn’t take very good notes for Warwick’s good talk]

“towards the australian data commons” paper on the web for reference on Australian policy in this area.

various sites/projects:

arrow: aggregates IRs in Uni repositories, 90,000 records, expects to grow rapidly. not a ‘native search service’ intended to let others use the metadata.
future: evolve, support financially by ‘austrian national data service’ (like everything else in this talk). will use shibb and poss openid.

or08: session1 (part 2)

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:02:39 +0000

again unedited/checked:

I’m tagging with or08:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=or08&ie=UTF-8&scoring=d
http://technorati.com/search/or08?authority=a4&language=en
**
On the margins of scholarship**

Richard Davis, Uni London Computer Centre

flickr, good example of an online document repository

“flickr for eprints”
1 – the data i enter to be used by other applications
2 – rss feeds i can use elsewhere
3 – clickable keywords, leading to similar articles in other repositories.

linnean online

demo’d images in an eprints ir, allowed photos to be previewed on the same page, bookmarks, comments.

or08: session1 part1

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:39:45 +0000

again, unedited or checked. draft notes:

ian mulvany -nature (who produce connotea) – speaker.
david kane – Waterford Institute of Technology

openid

semantic web, very useful to get data from, but hard to do and very few do it.

contributing: plan text easy, semantic web hard
data mining: semantic web easy, plain text hard.

talked about how nature are working on intergrating social tools with connotea.

“we want to connect repositories with connotea”.

or08: Open Repositories 2008

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:27:40 +0000

I’m at Open Repositories 2008.

Got in to southampton central at 8:15am, for a 9 start, thought i had loads of time but wait for bus, journey, and wondering around campus only just got here for 9. so did just about everyone else, so not username and password allocated until coffee time :( [but now online, hence you seeing this!]

draft notes from the first session, unedited or checked.
peter murray-rust
repositories data

UK repositories : growth of records

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:06:36 +0000

For a while now I’ve been running a weekly script which connects to ROAR and grabs the number of records for each UK based Institutional Repository. I’ve finally got around to writing a web front end to this, which you can see here. All quite basic at the moment, and I have lots of ideas of what I could do to improve this (one idea based on the compare average number of deposits per repository). Have a look and let me know what you think, and let me know of any bugs.

Google Books API

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:58:15 +0000

Google released an API for their Book Search at the end of last week. You can implement this in two ways: static (just linking to a URL with a ISBN inserted) or dynamic, which basically means using javascript, which will check to see if Google have the book available as the page loads and can show a link accordingly.

The (very rough and basic) ‘catalogue’ I recently created already had a link to Google Books for each item. This was just a very simple URL with an ISBN stuck on the end, e.g. http://books.google.com/books?as_isbn=0596003722

Why do new web designs go down like a lead balloon

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:01:37 +0000

When I go to a website with a new look I think ‘cool’ (unless of course it isn’t), yet it seems I’m in a minority. Even when you consider that unhappy people are more likely to complain than happy people are to compliment it still amazes me that people are so openly hostile to new websites and say things that they know will be read by those who have spent months working on it which are very uncomplimentary.

nostuff library catalogue using the Talis Platform

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 11:17:15 +0000

You may have already seen that a while a go I had a little play with the Talis Platform, and specifically a ‘store’ on the platform called ukbib which holds bibliographic records. I’ve written some pages on learning about the various parts to the platform. I had seen on the Talis Developer Network (TDN) various web services, but they all blurred in to one, the pages linked to above first work out the simple ones (e.g. linking to catalogues, holdings etc), this helped clear up the different bits that are available.

Today’s new thing: LRB

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:51:13 +0000

Apparently the London Review of Books isn’t a London based magazine which reviews books. I say this not as a joke, oh you cultral ones. I really do think it is justified of me to presume a publication called London Review of Books is actually a review of sodding books. Apparently it is not. Apparently is has some interesting articles.

Upper Peter…

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:36:09 +0000

…or Northern Rock. ho ho ho

There has been zillions of stuff in the press of late about our friends Northern Rock.

They had the genius idea of rapidly increasing their mortgage business, and instead of using deposits as (a good part of) the supply of money to pay for the mortgages, they instead borrowed from other banks. Borrowing from other banks is normal, but doing it to such an extent was the thing that made Northern Rock different. They got all their eggs and placed them all in a basket. Only they kept needing more eggs. And one day there was no one to give them more.

Today’s idea

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 14:54:28 +0000

Brilliant idea:

set up blog software, so that anyone can register as a poster and post what ever they want, anonymously.
Call it anonyblog.com
Perhaps even have a few google ad boxes on it
As the world speaks its mind, the combination of insightful thought and scandalous secrets makes it a world wide hit. The media love it. I refrain from doing interviews adding to the mystery

Barriers to success

BBC Newswatch

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 13:25:58 +0000

BBC Newswatch was set up after the Hutton ~~whitewash~~ inquiry as a place to monitor and feedback on BBC News. It seems that recently it has had a bit of a slimming down, with many parts of the site being reduced to ‘nothing to see here‘ messages. However, by following just one link from the main homepage: ‘styleguide’ and you will notice the left hand menu still has a link to the archived ‘notes’ pages. Most BBC ‘downsized’ sites are simply frozen, I wonder why they didn’t do the same here. One rational explanation might be that it was generating a large amount of email from those who objected to the BBCs stance on various matters and terminology.

Fun with Lisa

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 23:33:39 +0000

Today I met Lisa on the Network Rail website. We had a nice chat and, I thought, got on quite well.

It became clear very early on that Lisa liked questions. And I knew that the secret of good conversation is to show some sort of interest in the other person, which requires good acting skills. So I asked Lisa questions, first keeping it simple:

You asked:

whats your name?

Welcome back

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 11:07:49 +0000

In August I signed up with Dreamhost.

Until now I have used Freedom2surf’s web hosting service. I originally signed up with them as they seemed a good company (and still do, though now owned by pipex) and were cheap, £25 a year. When I first started using them they transferred my domain to them (it was all a bit new to me so I just presumed this was a required step) and their domain name costs were not cheap (£10). A few years later I wanted email as well (another £25), and the cost started going up. The service was stable, but I was started to need more. They offered just one database, not much when you are playing around with different software, such as Joomla, running WordPress and trying to experiment with your own silly web apps which require a DB, plus the quote for the database was tiny (10mb). Plus their web stats were crappy, and the log files were fiddly (kept for a few days on a secure website, no ftp and wget didn’t seem able to get them which made automating difficult, plus each file would download with the same filename by default).

Talis Platform

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 22:10:47 +0000

A few days a go I was bored. I had read loads about the ‘Talis Platform’ a open standards ‘you can talk to it with an API’ type thing that holds data, and shares it with you (or more to the point, shares it with your application).

Could a non-programmer like me make use of this? Hello No! but I did wonder if a non-programmer like me could cut ‘n’ paste their examples and play for myself.

laptop

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 21:18:48 +0000

In 2002 I bought a rather shiny sony laptop. FX705 I think, can’t remember. Sony had a wide range of laptops at the time. this was the budget range. It was/is heavy, looks less sexy than the average sony laptop, but had a good spec for the price.

As a geeky tech type person I have rather surprisingly never re-installed it. I think I was resisting partly for sub-conscious reasons: at University we spent our entire time installing, re-configuring and generally tweaking (i.e. breaking, breaking and more breaking) our computers, I wanted to prove to myself that I had moved on, grown up. Now it was a tool, for listening, communicating, reading (there are some pages on wikipedia I still haven’t read) etc. Spending hours at a computer simply to break its registry and reinstall the OS again was unproductive. And I am a productive person. I know, I keep telling myself so it must be true. well okay, actually, I just read BBC news and slashdot. But the thought was there.

The great rock ‘n’ broadband rip off.

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 16:17:32 +0000

This was kicked off when I was asked to recommend a broadband service for someone. Their use would be low and they needed cheap. Wasn’t that interested in download caps or speed (so I don’t really mention it below), and I presume they will be with the service for at least 12 months (so if a provider offers free connection/signup if you stay with them that long I consider it free). Fine, I thought they might be able to get a deal for £11.

Brighton New council priorities

Fri, 25 May 2007 17:19:07 +0000

See this Argus article: New council leader spells out his party’s priorities, from the article:

Review Labour’s plans for a rapid transport bus system while re-examining the monorail project

Revisit the controversial school lottery scheme which has divided the city

Push for underground car parks in new developments to ensure extra homes do not add pressure to the already overstretched road network, and

Concentrate on delivering less congestion by removing build-outs while putting plans for a park and ride on the back burner.

OK. Council Tax, sounds good but what will need to be cut (unless we can find savings, or the increase in the number of homes brings about a big enough increase to sustain things).

Analog web statistics

Tue, 08 May 2007 14:54:41 +0000

I use the wonderful Analog for web stats. Unfortunately it hasn’t been updated for a while (2004 in fact).

However I noticed that some kind soles on the mailing list have updated analog so that it includes Vista in the OS report.

I’ve put a copy here, just download the zip (Windows), extract and replace the original analog.exe.
See this mailing list message (and the thread that follows) for more information and credit to those who produced this new version.

Euston station to be rebuilt

Fri, 04 May 2007 15:09:56 +0000

Good news, Euston station is to be rebuilt. Always rather a depressing place to travel through, and the poorer cousin of the other major stations. Suprissed to see this though when these sorts of things normally are on the drawing board for years before they are actually given the go-ahead (think crossrail, or thameslink 2000).

Talking of Thameslink 2000, part of it’s work will include London Bridge being rebuilt and transformed in to something much more impressive.

Brighton and Hove local elections

Fri, 04 May 2007 15:04:11 +0000

The Tory’s have a majority, but not overall control. How? Look around you and play spot the tory voter. Sure there are quite a few well off people, but vastly out numbered by those who look ‘brighton-ish’, students and others who just don’t look like tory voters (of course, plenty of the well off, business types also vote labour, especially in Brighton). I just don’t walk around town and think that the majority of people I see are likely to vote tory (yes I know how stupid that sounds, can’t judge by looks).

Brighton local council elections : May 2007

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 20:07:59 +0000

I live in the Preston Park ward in Brighton for the May 2007 elections.

A couple of days a go I had received anything from any party so went for a look on the net.

Labour
Conservatives: Two sites [here and here] neither of which mentions the local elections or what they stand for. Not impressed.
Lib Dem
Green Party

What do I consider when deciding my vote?

Policies of the LOCAL party
My perception of their ability to run the council
Candidates of my ward (Preston Park)
Not as a protest vote or as a message to the national parties

My choice is Labour: They have done a good job in the last few years (though no party has overall control, they have the majority). I like the fact that the council has been progressive, the sucess of the Jubilee library as one of the first PPP projects to produce such an impressive building can not be over rated. In fact the whole area around the library has been handled well and created a pleasant area of town.

R.I.P F.I.P

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 22:02:08 +0000

FIP is basically the world’s best radio station. Fact. It plays a random mix of decent new music, jazz, classical, more cool music, with no adverts, or DJs, or anything except a news bulletin at the totally logical time of 50 minutes past the hour.

Oh and the news bulletin is in French (language of inferior foreign types). But that maybe due to it being a French station. But we could pick it up in Brighton. We don’t want to get too technical about it but it had something to do with the sea being very flat between France and Brighton. or something.

Amazon : censor reviews of the high arts

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 21:04:42 +0000

Yesterday I posted a link to the reviews page of Katie Price and Peter Andre‘s A whole new world.

In what can only be proof that Jeff Bezos himself is reading my blog on a daily, no – i correct myself – hourly basis, not a day later all the reviews have been deleted. Of course, the arts have always suffered censorship at the hands of facist governments and evil corporations. It’s something we live with, but with just a touch of pride that such dark work was all down to my own little hands typing away on this here web-experience.

UK has second highest level of debt in the world

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 09:18:10 +0000

List of countries by external debt – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (see also CIA World factbook). This is not good.

Branson in Gatwick Express call

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 23:34:36 +0000

BBC NEWS | England | Branson in Gatwick Express call
This is just one article covering the plans to make changes to the Gatwick Express service, as part of a wider review of use of the line capacity between London and Brighton.

The basic idea is the line is at full capacity, the trains are full and over crowded, especially at peak time, and with no major boost of cash in the near future, the only way to ease over crowding is to try and make best use of the track capacity.

there’s a high chance you might not actually be me

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 16:57:05 +0000

Tom Roper knows everything, reads clever stuff, seems to have an impressive range of music taste and gets technology. Generally the sort of the stuff that makes illiterate uncultured un-witty people like me really hate him. He also posts things to his blog. Which is all a bit too much like work for me (blogs are like breadmakers… like the idea of having one, but never actually use it).

Anyway. He posted some stats and bits about his blog over the last couple of years and I thought of commenting and pointing towards the bloglines ‘number of subscribers’ feature as another little gem. In the comment, my brain thought, I would also point out that my blog only has one subscriber as a comparison (and hence ‘accidentaly’ end up linking to my blog from his comments…fame would then by mine). Oh, and that 1 subscriber is me. But here’s the but. But when checking this it turns out I actually have 3 subscribers.

SQL update: doing a find/replace on part of a field

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 11:10:07 +0000

SQL is one of those things I rarely use, and it’s normally the simple stuff, but doing anything a little more complex can be non-obvious. For example, I had a bunch of URLs where I just need to update a part of the URL, as we were moving some files on a website. I eventually found what I wanted within the comments to the MySQL UPDATE command documentation. (credit to Alex de Landgraaf on July 21 2004):

whitney music box (or: pretty coloured dots that make noise)

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 23:20:01 +0000

whitney music box (look they move and everything)

2026 update: archive.org link

O2 website contacting my PC

Sat, 13 May 2006 10:25:03 +0000

I was on this Mobile Reviews – O2 page just now, when I noticed firefox showing it was trying to contact 127.0.0.1, that for those who don’t know, is a special IP address which points to ‘localhost’, i.e. the client computer which is viewing the page. the line is question is:

< script language='javascript' src='http://127.0.0.1:1030/js.cgi?ca&r=4675'>script>

It appears as if this o2.co.uk page is trying to connect to port 1030 on the user’s computer and request a javascript file. This is vary strange and I presume (in good faith) that this is a mistake, but o2 should not have this on their website, people do not expect a website like this to be contacting an obscure port on the local computer.
O2 have had much worse security issues in the past (as reported on jibble.org)

Ask Yahoo!

Tue, 02 May 2006 08:04:57 +0000

Ask Yahoo! – Best of 2005

The link above goes to the ‘Best of 2005’ page. Only just found this site, but seems useful for future work avoidance.

West peer

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 08:44:33 +0000

I want this

Library 2.0, web 2.0 and Talis

Sun, 20 Nov 2005 21:01:50 +0000

Really just pointing to other places on the web regarding Talis’ recent talk and paper on the idea of library 2.0, based on the ideas behind 2.0. I found most of these after doing a search on Technorati.

ALA techsource: Do Libraries Matter: On Library & Librarian 2.0
‘Infomation takes over’: Library 2.0 at Talis Insight 2005
The shifted librarian: Prepare Yourself for Library 2.0
Library Crunch: who controls it?

The original paper can be found here.

Can Europe still compete in technology? – The Practical Futurist – MSNBC.com

Sat, 19 Nov 2005 19:18:37 +0000

Can Europe still compete in technology? – The Practical Futurist – MSNBC.com. Interesting view from the colonies. In a way it is no suprise that the main stream US media is downplaying Europe.

But perhaps there is a point, are we living on borrowed time. Should we in Europe be worried that we lack innovation (especially relating to new technologies), when it is claimed that is where the future lies for sucessful first world countries?

Davis (and Keene) wants England-only voting

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 14:01:55 +0000

BBC NEWS: Davis wants England-only voting. Something I agree with (I’m agreeing with David Davis??). Having a seperate English parliment for issues that only apply to England (due to other parliments/assemblies deciding on the same issue in Scotland, Wales etc) would be a waste of money.

Far simplier to restrict who can take part and vote in a commons debate if it only affects one or more country within the UK.

Why can’t we just copy them

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 10:34:43 +0000

I’ve always been impressed with the way Sweden and other nordic countries seem to balance a successful economy while providing very high public services and social care.

UpMyStreet.com

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 10:29:20 +0000

UpMyStreet.com‘s neighbourhood profiles are pretty good.

Here’s what they say about my area:
_Neighbourhoods fitting this profile are found primarily in Inner London in Westminster, Camden, Islington, Haringey and Hackney as well as in Brighton, Bristol, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Here is an overview of the likely preferences and features of your neighbourhood:
Family income Very high
Interest in current affairs Very high
Housing – with mortgage Low
Educated – to degree Very high
Couples with children Very low
Have satellite TV Low

Government cuts teacher training places

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 10:19:59 +0000

So, a couple of years a go we had a teacher shortage crisis, today we are still short of teachers, recruiting from all over the world to fill the shortage. With such a high demand, those who do not really have the right skills (even if they have the qualifications) to teach, inspire and control a class are finding jobs. Oh and add to that a large number of teachers are soon to retire. You are the government, what do you do? reduce the number of teacher training places of course. Obvious. That’s why mere mortals like us will never be able to come up with such great ideas.

Google my master

Sat, 08 Oct 2005 20:51:57 +0000

Time to take stock on how much I rely on my google drip of goodness and tools. What happens if they take it away from me. Cold turkey like. I would die dear reader. die.

Any way, So for work I use Google Scholar, and I’ve set ‘Google University search as our University departmental website search engine. Then there’s my gmail account (which I can not mention without slipping in that I was one of the first to get one, and was invited by Google themselves, yes, I’m on first names terms with Larry and Sergey… um sort of) and my ‘google groups’ account for newsgroups.

blog crawlers and searches

Sun, 28 Aug 2005 11:08:44 +0000

Added this feed of dribble (hereafter called ‘my blog’) to technorati, bloogz and Feedster… which is nice (why do you read this thing?)

We’ve got a what?

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 22:11:07 +0000

Apparently we (‘we’ being the mightly and superior south of england, not to be confused with north of england backward types) have a regional assembly. When? why?

Actually I’m slightly interested in this idea. I believe that the English Counties are too small to have much power/responsibilities delegated to them from central govenment, and yet there are issues which are best addressed at a fairly local level (especially on issues where different parts of the country have different needs). Maybe these regional assemeblies are the answer, big enough to run complex public services but local enough to address different needs?

Library catalogue searching

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 21:57:32 +0000

While I’m on this subject (which is a stupid thing to say as anyone reading this – ‘anyone’ = ‘me and only me’ – will be reading top down, ie newest first, ie will be unaware I was on the subject… what subject) ah yes, the subject of library catalogue searching.

Nothing too exciting really (this post has the word ‘library’ it in, so that was a pointless fact) but I’ve been reading with intrest how Talis – who supply the library management software for the Universit of Sussex – have been playing with A9, and how to get it to play nice with their web catalogue.

UK Union catalogue

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 21:30:19 +0000

a million years a go (1999?) M25 came along with a union search for most academic libraries in my part of the world. which was good, especially when looking for something obscure.

At the time, I thought it was only a mater of counting to ten before a union catalogue of all uk libraries would turn up. Where is it? I want one.

In the mean time we have a number of other options which can help for looking for odd stuff that only one or two places might have.

Google maps now for the UK

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 22:19:34 +0000

Google maps UK (niiice), in a higher league than multimap and streetmap and the lesser know map24

so to just be clear, I’m not johnny-come-lately

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 00:43:38 +0000

About 15 billion years a go things kicked off, like Continental drift, big nasty meteoroids killing poor fluffy dinosaurs, general world-being-created stuff, and of course blogging becoming trendy. (I say trendy, real trendy people don’t have blogs, like Kate Winslet, though actually, she might have one, just not admit to it, maybe she’s the http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/ answer me this, have you ever seen them in the same room at same time? ha!).