Month: September 2006

  • Adding user comments and tagging to CONTENTdm

    At OSU, we’ve played with this on and off and finally decided to just take this live.  For those that use CONTENTdm, I’ve created a small document that discusses how this works and what it looks like.  As I said, simple implementation at this point, but if use takes off, I’ll look to add things…

  • Dspace Community-list; adding most popular collections entries hack

    As I’ve started to get more involved in the Dspace work here at OSU, one thing that has struck me is the interface really could use a once over.  No place could this be more obvious than the community-list page.  While I doubt that this page was every meant to be the default access mechanism…

  • Dspace hack #2 — Did you mean?

    Its funny how things work out.  As some folks know, we are currently in the process at OSU of re-writing our hybrid metasearch tool from PHP to ruby, and now that much of the heavy lifting has been accomplished (a simple caching engine, wsdl api, oai harvesting, ferret integration, etc.), its been time to start…

  • ruby-oai 0.0.3 — thanks ed

    Ed posted revisions to the ruby-oai package.  It includes the ability to utilize libxml as the xml parser.    For those interested, this can now be coupled with the following class to parse a normal dublin core unqualified record into an object version of the record. BTW, I realize that this code makes some use…

  • Kenny’s first day at school

    A milestone for Kenny (seems we are having a few at the house lately) — it was his first day at kindergarten.  He’s been so, so, so excited about today.  Last week we went in and met his teacher and his teacher got to see first hand how much hard work Kenny has been doing with…

  • Daily commute

    I’ve been playing with the Microsoft Live Writer and have been itching to include a map into one of my posts.  So here’s a good one.  Here’s a map of my daily commute — 50 miles, round-trip down hwy. 99.  It’s actually a fantastic ride — with mostly courteous drivers (till you hit Corvallis anyway) —…

  • ruby-oai and processing metadata elements

    Since modifying the ruby-oai module to work with libxml — I’ve found extracting the data from “metadata” to be much easier.  And the nice part — using libxml, I was able to do an initial metadata harvest from 4 collections in under 10 seconds.  Here’s the code from the harvesting component — see below. –TR…

  • Happy birthday Nathan!

    Two years ago, my wife and I were blessed with our second son, Nathan Wallace.  Most folks probably don’t realize it — but Nathan’s name has a special meaning.  When Kenny was born, we choose a name that would give him his own personal identity.  Most folks in our family had thought that Kenny would…

  • More reasons to avoid REXML (like the plague)

    I’ve been having a great time playing with ruby — but one of the things that I find myself constantly running up against is the “ruby way”.  The place where I notice this most is when dealing with XML.  One of the things I’ve noticed in working with XML in ruby is that the ruby…

  • IronPython 1.0 available

    Very cool.  I’ll admit that my experience with Python is limited to IronPython — but I’ve been playing with it a bit and benchmarking it against the C-based implementation of Python, and in many places, its actually faster or dead even.  See: IronPython version 1.0.  Great work by the IronPython team. –TR