Just in case anyone was in any doubt about the reality of global warming, the BBC Ceefax service is currently reporting (on page 402) that we'll have a peak temperature of 54°C (129°F) tomorrow…
So, for anyone heading to London for Internet Librarian International 2008, I'd recommend lots of sun cream and a big hat.
posted in misc | 0 Comments
I've lost count of the number of times this year it's felt like I've woken up in a parallel universe — it's happened again this morning when I read about the US Lingerie Football League on the BBC News web site, which features "teams of models playing an American football game while dressed in lingerie".
Now, I'll be the first to admit I don't know very much about American Football, but I'm pretty sure when men play it, they seem to wear full body armour and the kind of shoulder pads that would make a 1980's Joan Collins green with envy. Can a couple of millimetres of silk and lace really provide the same level of protection? Where can you buy babydoll negligees with reinforced shoulder pads?
This opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities for alternative versions of popular sports whilst wearing totally inappropriate clothing. How about…
So, it's Friday and we're all winding down for the weekend — what's the best combination you can think of?
posted in misc | 0 Comments
The press release for Horizon 7.4.2 has just gone online.
Both Talin Bingham (Chief Technology Officer) and Gary Rautenstrauch (Chief Executive Officer) use the word "worldwide" in the press release:
This new version adds functionality requested by our customers worldwide and offers great benefits to libraries and patrons alike…
Providing the features librarians need and delivering the best user experience worldwide are SirsiDynix’s highest priorities.
However, the reality is that Horizon 7.4.2 is a North American only release. Much as I would love to be able to roll out some of those new features here at Huddersfield, and much as I would love to have all those really nasty security holes in HIP fixed, the bottom line is that I can't — SirsiDynix's definition of "worldwide" is a curiously US-centric one.
Horizon customers in the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Netherlands, etc, are not "qualifying customers", despite paying their yearly maintenance.
SirsiDynix International made a decision a year or two ago that they would no longer provide regional variations of Horizon, and I can fully understand why. As a non-American customer, I might not be happy about it, but I can understand why. What I can't understand (and frankly, it's starting to really piss me off) is why the company continues to pretend in public that they are.
If anyone senior from the SirsiDynix US office would like to contact me today, then please do — I'm sure you'll find my direct telephone number in your UK customer contacts database. Maybe there's a perfectly good reason why most of your Horizon customers in Europe are no longer classified as being part of your "worldwide" customer base and I'd really love to hear it.
posted in Horizon/HIP, misc | 11 Comments
Kudos to Owen Stephens for getting Mashed Library '08 off the ground! According to the mashed library page on ning.com, the event will take place at Birkbeck College, London on Thursday 27th November.
("mash and gravy" by chotda)
In the spirit of all things unconferency, the aim is to…
…have a reasonably informal event at which we try to do interesting stuff with library technology and/or data.
Come hell or high water, I intend to be there! :-)
posted in misc | 3 Comments
No disrespect to the family of Damilola Taylor, but I'm not sure why the BBC have deemed this ("Porn posted on Damilola web forum") to be a newsworthy headline story? The forum in question only appears to have ever had 1 legitimate thread since it was set up and only a couple of non-spambot members.
The news item was posted on the BBC site 2 hours ago and the hard-core links are still there. In fact, porn links from several days ago are still there. So…
Please, BBC, stick to reporting real news.
————
answers to the above questions:
1) a couple of minutes at the most
2, 3, & 4) because the person administering the forum is clueless
5) because the BBC News Editor on duty this afternoon is clueless
The new Google Book Search Data API has some really cool features and I'm wondering how much of it I can shoehorn into the OPAC?
Our students increasingly expect the OPAC search box to be searching the full-text of our book stock — i.e. they type in several words that it would be useful to borrow a book about. Searching just the bog-standard MARC metadata, you'll be lucky to get much back… and perhaps then, only if we've got the full table of contents in the the MARC record.
So, for example, if I do a keyword search for "english media coverage of immigrants and social exclusion" on our OPAC, I'll find nothing. However, if I run the same query through the Google API and then filter the results (using the ISBN) to just items we hold in the library, I get 6 hits from the first 40 results that Google sends me:
(I'd probably find more if I also used thingISBN or xISBN to match on associated ISBNs)
I'm not going to claim that those 6 are the most relevant books we hold in the library for that particular search (I'm not sure if I'd find anything of use in the "California politics" book)… but that's only because I have no idea what the most relevant books are and, no matter how closely I scrutinise our MARC records, I probably never will ;-) So, short of quizzing a Subject Librarian, some of those books might be a worth a quick browse …which I could do virtually with the Embedded Viewer API:
I guess the big question is "how many API searches will Google let me do every day?"
posted in misc | 5 Comments
This opens up all sorts of possibilities for tasty representations of data :-)
(found at information aesthetics)
posted in misc | 3 Comments
May the road rise up to meet you
May the wind be ever at your back
May the sun shine warm upon your face
And the rain fall softly on your fields
Congratulations to our friends, Amanda and Paul, who tied the knot yesterday on a sunny autumnal day in Yorkshire!
posted in misc | 0 Comments
Warning — long blog post ahead!
I've been promising to post something about our new catalogue PCs …but first, a bit of background:
Like most large(ish) academic libraries, we've got dedicated catalogues PCs… lots of them… on every floor! From memory, we had at least 35 of them before the start of the refurbishment. We tended to use PCs that were no longer suitable for staff and they'd often be 5 or 6 years old. Unless staff remembered to turn them off every evening, chances are they'd get left on 24/7.
After a quick Google search, it looks like the average PC & monitor uses around 2.5 pence (UK) per hour (probably more now that electricity costs have risen in the last 12 months). So, if left on 24/7, then it would use 60 pence per day, £4.20 per week, or around £218 per year. Multiply that up by the total number of PCs (35) and we might have been paying around £7,600 per year! :-S
When I saw the plans for the refurbished floors, the first thing I noted was that there was an increased number of catalogue PCs on each floor (bringing to grand total to 45). Again, if left on 24/7, that could cost us nearly £10,000 per year.
Anyway, a couple of things coincided this summer. Firstly, the University (which has been busy improving recycling, etc) was crowned the "Most Improved University" in the annual People & Planet's Green League table (more info here). Secondly, at the Poster Promenade event in June, I spotted something interesting on one of the stands…
On the left-hand side of that photo is a small black box with a cool blue LED — a Viglen MPC-L mini PC. It ships with Xubuntu Linux, 256MB of memory and a 80GB hard drive, and has all the usual connections that you'd see on a PC (6xUSB, VGA, audio, and network). There's no fan inside, and the metal case acts as a large heatsink for the low spec'd CPU.
Our IT Dept had evaluated them, but the non-standard operating system and the relatively poor performance had put them off. However, they looked ideal for catalogue PCs and, according to the Viglen web site, they only use £1 of electricity per year!
A quick hunt around on the Viglen web site also threw up the fact that they can be purchased with a VESA mount, so the PC can be attached to the back of a flat screen monitor — potentially a huge space saver.
Due to the limited time available, I didn't fancy trying to figure out how to run Xubuntu as a PAC and instead I installed XP and configured it in the same way as our other catalogue PCs (using Public Web Browser as the Windows shell). The mini PC is *just* about powerful enough to run a web browser smoothly. We normally use McAfee antivirus on University PCs, but that killed the mini PC (it uses far too much CPU and too much memory), so I went with a freebie antivirus option instead.
The mini PCs weren't too difficult to image. After finally managing to get Norton Ghost to run off a USB drive, it took about 20 minutes to image each mini PC.
So, enough talk, let's get to the good bit with some pictures!
First of all, you'll need a TFT monitor with 4 VESA mounting holes on the back:
The VESA mounting cage for the mini PC looks like this:
You can see the mini PC connections on these two photos:
And here you can get a feel for the size (that's a 17" TFT monitor behind it):
The mini PC would have no problems fitting into a 5.25" drive bay on a standard PC:
Here's the mini PC inside its cage:
Next up, you screw the cage onto the back of the monitor:
Shame they don't bundle a short VGA lead with the PC!:
Then slip the mini PC into its cage and hook up the VGA cable:
The whole thing is secured using a padlock, which traps all the cables (no more stolen mice!):
From above, you can see just how small the mini PC is:
Setting them up took a little bit of time, as tidying up the various cables so that they're hidden behind the TFT is a bit tricky:
And, voila — 6 new eco-friendly catalogue PCs and not an ugly PC base unit in sight!
I set the mini PCs up to drop the monitor into standby after 15 minutes, so hopefully we're going to save a few thousand pounds in electricity this year and maybe we'll manage to stay in the top 10 in next years' Green League table :-)
—-
[edit] I forgot to mention that the mini PC is powered using a 12 volt laptop style power adaptor.
posted in misc | 5 Comments
Iman first mentioned Processing ages ago, but it's only recently I've gotten around to having a play with it.
So, this is my first stab at coming up with something visual and it's in the same vein as Dewey Blobs…
…you'll need Java installed to view it.
Rather than lay Dewey out on a 2D gird, I'm using a 10×10x10 cube (000 is at the front-top-left and 999 is at the back-bottom-right of the cube). The code then cycles through all of the check-outs (orange) and check-ins (blue) from a single day, with a zigzagging 3D line linking up the previous transactions.
What I originally wanted to achieve was to have two curving lines, snaking their way through the cube, but figuring out how to do the Bezier curves made my brain hurt ;-) Anyway, if you want to see a version where the line runs more quickly, click here — it's harder to read the book titles, but the lines fade away more realistically. Or, here's a 3rd version that doesn't include the Dewey classification or book title.
A word of warning: the Java might chomp away at your CPU, so I'm not sure how well it'll run on a slower PC.
