Technology on nostuff.org archive | Chris Keene

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

[][3]

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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’

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.

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.

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

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.

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.