Terry’s Worklog

  • A visit to Santa

    One of the things that I love about our little town is the number of kid friendly activities that go on.  It was actually one of the reasons why we’ve stayed in Independence, rather than move to Corvallis.  Anyway, our city has something called the festival of lights.  It’s been a cool parade that has…

  • Why I miss strong variable typing in scripting languages

    I love strong typed languages.  Languages that require you to define all variables before use.  They save me from myself, or, from my attrocious spelling.  I was working on LibraryFind, OSU’s opensource metasearch service, three days ago making a few tweaks and changes.  One of the things that this tool has that is somewhat researchy…

  • Belated halloween pictures

    I have a number of posts that I’ve started over the past month, but obviously been busy.  At some point, I’ll start writing about why — but for now, I’m catching up.  For example: Alyce and I took Kenny and Nathan trick or teating this halloween.  They were cuties.  Kenny is obviously Superman, Nathan —…

  • Nathan and Kenny in the local newspaper

    Kenny and Nathan found their way into our local newspaper just before Thanksgiving.  They were down at the library playing turkey bingo (well, Kenny was playing, Nathan was playing) and got their pictures taken.  Here’s the picture with associated captioning information:  URL: http://www.itemizerobserver.com/images/4787.jpg Credit: Photo by Sarah HillmanDate Published to Web: 11/22/2006Caption:  Kenny Reese, 5, throws…

  • Google Spell API — Ruby

    Someone had asked if I could post the ruby code we use to interact with the google toolbar spell api.  Well, here it is. require ‘net/https’ require ‘uri’ require ‘rexml/document’ class GoogleSpell def GetWords(phrase) results = [] x = 0 i = 0 phrase = phrase.downcase phrase = phrase.gsub(“&”, “&”) phrase = phrase.gsub(“”, “>”) word_frag…

  • Wikipedia taking it in the teeth today

    Ouch — on slashdot today, two not so flattering articles surrounding wikipedia.  In the first, there are reports of the German version of wikipedia being used as a platform for speading a virus.  An interesting idea.  Given that folks trust wikipedia, noone seems to think twice about clicking on links that go outside of the…

  • Google Sitemaps

    I’d run across these a few weeks ago and thought they were pretty nifty. Essentially, I was looking for something that would allow Oregon State University’s CONTENTdm collections to be harvested by Google. Since CONTENTdm has an OAI interface, and Google’s Scholar supports OAI harvesting, I thought there must be an easy way to get…

  • Info pumpkin lives

    Well, apparently my info pumpkin was good enough for 2nd place in our pumpkin carving contest at work.  They got a much cleaner picture than I originally did, so I’ll post it here.  For those of you that don’t speak MARC, the pumpkin is a jack-o-lantern with the MARC record of the Great Pumpkin Charlie…

  • Search engine love?

    Apparently, search engines are loving wikipedia.  Nicholas Carr and others have taken notice recently that Wikipedia is quickly becoming the default source of information for a number of search engines.  Well, now there is some informal research to confirm this trend.  Carr writes today that: Well, now we have such a sample, thanks to a…

  • It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown

    Well, maybe not the great pumpkin, but a pumpkin all the same.  🙂  I spent most of Sunday carving pumpkins for my boys and one for me.  Kenny’s and Nathan’s pumpkin’s turned out well.  Kenny’s pumpkin was a picture of Goldie (or dog) — Nathan’s pumpkin was of Thomas the Tank engine.  As you can see…

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