Month: August 2010

  • What I did this week

    So, with the summer winding down, I decided to take the family for a bit of a vacation — and then took a vacation day on my own with my dad.  Here’s a few pictures of the adventures. Travelling with the family Because of my injury this summer, my wife and I have been taking…

  • Embedded advertising in Ebooks?

    I was glancing through slashdot this morning and ran across this article by the wall street journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704554104575435243350910792.html) that discusses how advertising, embedded in ebooks, could be in our future. The article looks at some of the trends that point to this being true (patent applications by Amazon, advertising in other media, etc). I realize…

  • First bike ride of the summer 🙂

    With my medical restrictions lifted, I made my first commute of the summer on my bike. And while I’ve ridden that road hundreds of times, it has never looked better. TR

  • MakeCheckDigit Plugin

    I was asked earlier this year if there was a way automatically generate check-digits in MarcEdit.  After looking at the problem, I decided to build a quick plug-in that could be used to generate such digits.   The plug-in currently supports the Codabar format.  The interface is fairly simple: To use, just install the plugin using…

  • I’m whole again and heading back on the bike 🙂

    I visited my doctor today and after a set of x-rays, found that my elbow has successfully healed. Restrictions have been lifted and I plan on celebrating tomorrow by riding the recumbent for the first time in almost 3 months. Today has been a very good day.

  • The Internet Generation

    Maybe it’s because I have two young children, maybe it’s because I honestly think that we don’t do as a good of a job as we think we do serving those so called digital natives…but I have a fascination with the Internet Generation.  Recently, I had read John Palfrey’s book Born Digital. The book is…

  • Living behind the paywall

    I wanted to highlight a series of articles currently published on Wired discussing the changing nature of the Web.  The articles are entitled: The Web is Dead.  Long Live the Internet The Web is Dead?  A Debate How the Web Wins Personally, I find these kinds of articles quite fascinating, as I’m constantly struck by…

  • Unicode Changes in MarcEdit

    This change was implemented in June 2010, but I wanted to draw users attention to it, especially since I just commented on this change via the MarcEdit listserv. As many people know, the state of Unicode usage in MARC, well, stinks.  While many systems utilize UTF-8 in their records, the UTF-8 notation that is used…

  • Thoughts about the SkyRiver/OCLC lawsuit

    So this is what it has come to…two iconic (III and OCLC that is) library software vendors wrestling in court.  Not that I think this is all that surprising…too bad…but not particularly surprising.  In fact, I think that many folks in the library community probably seen this coming.  For me, the canary in the mine,…

  • MarcEdit update

    I posted a minor MarcEdit update this evening.  The changes were minimal, mostly cosmetic.  The main issues corrected were: Z39.50 batch file checking:  If the user file isn’t generated on install, the program would throw an error.  The program will now autogenerate that file if it is missing. Window cleanup:  When running the MarcEditor and…