Terry’s Worklog

  • 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…

  • University fundraising campaigns

    Wow — I was reading MSNBC today and found an article from Newsweek on higher education fundraising campaigns.  4 billion dollar campaigns…wow.  OSU is looking at doing a fundraising campaign — though our goals are much more modest — I believe the last stated goal was somewhere in the 400 million dollar range.  Still lots…

  • First frost

    Ah, enjoyed the first frosty ride of the morning today.  It was 37 degrees at my house and ~31-32 our on the highway (its actually interesting, I’ve found that temperature can vary by almost 10 degrees once you get out into the farmland) making the farm land a very sparkly white.  Fortunately, I grabbed some…

  • Random Google Thoughts

    I was following a thread today talking about some of the legal wrangling’s related to Google and their Google Books project.  The message that made me laugh was a series where someone had commented that Google had long since forgotten their ‘do no evil’ philosophy and have become pure evil.  Of which, someone said it was…

  • MarcEdit 5.0 Update

    Quick update to MarcEdit 5.0.  The following has been updated: Support for .pac files in the Z39.50/SRU client I think that this works.  We don’t use pac files anymore — so lets just say that if the documentation that I have was correct — it should work.  Corrected problem with Find function.  (The program wouldn’t…

Got any book recommendations?

Get In Touch