Category: Programming

  • Emulating III’s Advance Keyword Searching using Z39.50

    Its funny how things work.  I was talking today with David Walker about III and their Z39.50 implementation.  The problem that David had noticed and had asked me about was whether I had noticed that the items being returned via the Z39.50 keyword search were different than a query done via the Opac.  Up until…

  • Making metasearch work for you

    Maybe I’ll write about this — maybe not.  I haven’t decided yet — but one of the benefits of rolling our own metasearch tool is that we get to try lots of new things.  Case in point.  Last night (this morning), I setup a multi-tier caching system into our metasearch tool.  Here’s how it works:…

  • More metasearch

    Apparently the Corvallis Gazette Times contacted Jeremy about our metasearch project.  Here’s the article URL: http://gazettetimes.com/articles/2006/03/31/news/community/friloc01.txt Cool beans. –Terry

  • MetaSearch Updates

    Just thought I’d post an update on our work since we have given the ok for our library administration to start internally testing the tool. API Development: Lets see, new enhancements to the API/backend server: New session manager.  This allows the software to capture and cache all user data over the life of a session…

  • Metasearch updates

    So we continue.  The program is obviously still very basic, but at least its starting to look nice in the various UI testbeds. 🙂 –Terry

  • OSU’s metasearch development

    Ah, finally…I can sit back and rest for a minute.  After a bit of hard work, I’ve finally been able to turn over code to the interface group.   As a test — I pulled together a very quick test interface. Group Interface (grouped and ranked) List Interface (ranked) Very simple — essentially 2 xslt files. …

  • Dealing with malformed http headers

    If you have a link checker, you invariably want to just read page headers.  Well, in .NET, they enforce a very strict interpretation of the HTTP header standard.  Unfortunately, a great number of servers (Innovative Interface’s ILS for one), don’t follow the output rules, so .NET’s HTTPWebRequest object will throw a webexception when requesting headers…

  • Dealing with expired certificates and .NET’s HTTPWebRequest object

    Some folks that had tried using the Verify URL utility had notified me that it wasn’t reporting a response status when attempting to query materials through an ezproxy url.  The problem it appears, was that the servers in question had either expired security certificates or certificates that were not issued by a trusted site (i.e.,…

  • Exposing a C# component as a COM Server and other GAC related issues

    (Sorry about the initial formatting in Firefox. WordPress didn’t like the xml style comments that get inserted into C# so I’ve removed them.) Exposing a C# component as a COM Server and other GAC related issues There are actually quite a few good sites that document how this works, but during the process of setting…

  • Code4Lib: Feb. 17: Final thoughts

    Just some final thoughts on this conference.  First, IRC…I’ve not spent a whole lot of time playing around on the code4lib IRC channel — but the IRC added a very interesting dynamic to this conference.  In fact, in some cases, the back conversation provided as much information as the presentations.  It was great.  My goal…