We're Disrupted, We're Librarians, and We're Not Going to Take It Anymore
Welcome to the Disruptive Library Technology Jester. From here you can browse the musings and visions of a library technologist as he walks the fine line between the best of the library profession on one side and the best of technology on the other.
You can navigate through DLTJ several ways. Your first stop might be the introductory material about this blog and the jester himself under the "about" heading to the left. Another way would be to pick a facet below to browse: "by cagetory" for a rough categorization of postings, "by tags" for a finer granularity of topics, or "by date" for a chronological view. Third, use the search box in the left column as a keyword approach to content in DLTJ. And last, recent postings by the Jester can be found below the faceted list.
I hope you enjoy your visit. Please feel free to leave comments where you'd like or contact me directly.
Two entries on big data lead this week’s edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads. The first is at the grandest scale possible: a calculation of the amount of information in the world. Add up all the digital memory (in cell phones, computers, and other devices) and analog media (for instance, paper) and it goes to a very big number. The authors try to put it in perspective, which for me brought home how insignificant my line of work can be. (All of our information is still less than 1% of what is encoded in the human DNA?) The second “big data” entry describes an effort to make sense of huge amounts of data in the National Archives through the use of visualization tools. Rounding out this week is a warning to those who run public computers — be on the look-out for key loggers that can be used to steal information from users.
This is a preview of Thursday Threads: Estimating and Understanding Big Data, Key Loggers Steal Patron Keystrokes. Read the full post (747 words, 1 image, 2:59 minutes estimated reading time)
Last week in DLTJ Thursday Threads I posted an entry about running out of IP addresses. Since I posted that, I’ve run across a couple of other stories and websites that bring a little more context to the consequences of last week’s distribution of the last blocks of IP addresses from the world-wide pool of available addresses. The short version: channel any panic you might be feeling into making sure your systems are ready to communicate using both the existing network standard (IPv4) and the new network standard (IPv6).
This is a preview of IPv4 Address Space Disappearing, Here Comes IPv6. Read the full post (1167 words, 4:40 minutes estimated reading time)
If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.
This is a preview of Thursday Threads: Website Accessibility Reporting Service and Remixes in Film. Read the full post (479 words, 1:55 minutes estimated reading time)
I just got the bill for the first month of hosting this blog on Amazon Web Services. The total for the month was $23.60, and includes:
data transfer charges for all in-bound and out-bound content;
a full-time use of a LINUX micro-sized Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance (with backup to the Elastic Block Store (EBS));
a Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket for static files (Cascading Style Sheet and JavaScript files, images, and other media); and
use of the Amazon CloudFront content distribution network.
All told, I’m pretty pleased with the costs — particularly as I was considering the amortized cost of buying a new server to replace the one I had been using for the past five years. The itemized bill is included below.
This is a preview of First Bill for DLTJ Hosting on Amazon Web Services. Read the full post (580 words, 2:19 minutes estimated reading time)
