Category: Programming

  • OSCON 2006 Wed. Keynotes (Tim O’Reilly)

    In the openning keynote, Tim O’Reilly presented what he calls his 5 big ideas about open source.  Some I thought were fairly interesting.  Architectures of participation beyond software development (Web 2.0) The idea here is that in this new world of Web 2.0, successful companies are looking to architectures where people build systems simply by…

  • OSCON 2006

    I’m going to be away from the office for a few days while attending the OSCON 2006 conference here in Portland, Oregon.  I’ll be periodically blogging about the sessions throughout the conference — so stay tuned.  BTW, if anyone is here at OSCON, give me a hollar. –TR

  • Character conversion in .NET

    I had someone who uses UniMARC ask me about some problems that they were having with the conversion between Unimarc to Dublin Core.  Some of the characters where being skewed when the translation occurred.  The problem of course relates to the characterset that the Unimarc records are encoded in.  Because a number of MARC formats…

  • Has anyone ever used Saxon.NET?

    Within MarcEdit, the MarcEngine makes use of the .NET System.xml libraries.  This has been a very good thing in that Microsoft has a very special class setup specifically for XSLT translations — and by adding some additional code and extending the class, I’ve been able to create a very fast XSLT processor.  The downer however…

  • Red Hat Patent lawsuit and its far reaching consequences

    I seen that Red Hat has recently found themselves ensnared in a patent lawsuit stemming from their purchase of JBoss.  The lawsuit is centered around the Hibernate 3 technologies — or technologies that deal with object-oriented access to a relational database.  The story can be found here: http://www.infoq.com/news/RedHat-Sued-Due-to-Hibernate-3-O My assumption, looking over this lawsuit, is that there will likely be much prior art to pull from to hopefully invalidate this particular claim.  However, in a worse case scenero (i.e., the patent is upheld), frameworks made popular by languages like Ruby and Python would be…

  • Project Gutenburg update

    Andrew Houghton let me know that this project did start creating MARC records for their data sets at some point.  Here’s the link I got: http://www.gutenberg.org/feeds/catalog.marc.zip  I haven’t looked at the records yet — but I’ll look at them shortly.  I’ll still post the XSLT in case anyone is interested in just looking at it…

  • Project Gutenburg MARC records

    I’m not sure how many folks will be interested, but I had someone ask me how difficult it would be to generate MARC records from the Project Gutenburg RDF catalog records.  Since I couldn’t remember if anyone has already generated a process for creating MARC records from these sets — I quickly generated an XSLT…

  • Ruby and Rails

    So, because of a project that I’m working on — I’ve started learning Ruby with Rails.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that Ruby is a really easy language to learn.  I have a feeling that when Microsoft developed C# — they based it on languages like Ruby because the overall feel is pretty much…

  • Spell Checking with Aspell and PHP

    One of the things that I like about PHP is the many built in functions found in the language. Within our metasearch tool, one of the things that I wanted to start looking at adding was spell checking. Since Aspell works as a good open source dictionary and is available as a php extension (pspell)…

  • MetaSearch Updates

    Ah — well, it looks like we are getting close to a formal public release….Friday actually.  There are a few things that I’d still like to work better (III’s Z39.50 server for example) — but we are ready to make it available to our patrons and start taking our lumps.  Some of the new things…