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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.


Recent Posts

What Does It Mean to Be a Member of OCLC?

This morning I was at the OCLC Americas Regional Council Meeting just prior to the opening of the ALA Midwinter 2010 meeting. In addition to the prepared talks and remarks, there was a series of breakout sessions the end of the meeting. Ever sense the record use policy kerfuffle got started, I’ve been thinking more about the governenace aspects of OCLC as cooperative, so I attended the session on “The Cooperative’s Shared Values and Social Contract.” It was a very interesting discussion, and for several hours after my mind was spinning with implications of the heartfelt ideas contributed by those at the meeting. In the end, I’m stuck with this line of thinking, starting with a statement then a series of questions:

This is a preview of What Does It Mean to Be a Member of OCLC?. Read the full post (548 words, 2:12 minutes estimated reading time)
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2010 01 15 Comments (4) Permalink

Why I Digitally Sign My E-Mail

Most e-mail messages I send are digitally signed using a process called “Pretty Good Privacy“, or PGP. In e-mail applications that don’t understand PGP, this digital signature will show up either as an attachment called “PGP.sig” or as a part of the message starting with “BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE” at the bottom of the e-mail. This file — containing gibberish to the human eye — is used by PGP-aware programs to verify that the message actually came from me. If you are using PGP, I could also sent you a message that only you could read (e.g. “encrypted”). This page gives some background on PGP and why I consider it important.

This is a preview of Why I Digitally Sign My E-Mail. Read the full post (1114 words, 4:27 minutes estimated reading time)
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2010 01 02 Comments (5) Permalink

A New Year, a New PGP Key

It is the start of a new year1, and it seems like a good time to update my public encryption key. My previous one — created in 2004 — is both a little weaker, cryptographically speaking, than the ones newly created (1024-bit versus 2048-bit) and also an uncomfortable mixing of my professional and personal lives. For my previous key, I attached all of my professional and personal user ids (e.g. e-mail addresses) to the same key. This time I decided to split my work-related user ids from my other ones. My reasoning for the split is that I might be compelled by my employer to turn over my private key to decrypt messages and files sent in the course of my work. If my personal user ids are also attached to that private key, my employer (and who ever else got ahold of that key), would be able to decrypt my personal messages and files as well. That is not necessarily a good thing. So my solution was to create two keys and cross-sign them. I’ve outlined the process below.

These keys are part of a computer standard and software algorithm called “Pretty Good Privacy“, or PGP. If you are interested in more of a background about PGP, see a companion post on why I digitally sign my e-mail.

Footnotes

  1. Some have even said it is the start of a new decade, but of course that isn’t true. We won’t start a new decade until 2011, just like we didn’t actually start a new millennium until 2001. [↩]
This is a preview of A New Year, a New PGP Key. Read the full post (2059 words, 8:14 minutes estimated reading time)
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2010 01 02 Comments (0) Permalink

On Being Fodder for Questionable Twitter Posts

Okay, I know this is starting to seem like an obsession, but I can’t figure out why someone(s) would be constructing tweets that consist of my blog post headlines and links back to my postings. I’m wondering how wide spread this problem is, so I constructed a list of URLs to blog posts based on the Planet Code4Lib Atom feed and pointed them to the Ubervu service. Ubervu has a view into the Twitter firehose, and constructs reports of Twitter mentions of URLs. For instance, I can see all of the odd headline tweets for my previous postings through this service. I can then easily scan through the list for other people that seem to be affected by this strange phenomenon.

This is a preview of On Being Fodder for Questionable Twitter Posts. Read the full post (1196 words, 1 image, 4:47 minutes estimated reading time)
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2009 12 30 Comments (8) Permalink
From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester (http://dltj.org/), printed on Tuesday the 16th of March 2010 at 11:05:03 AM EDT (-0400). The URL to this page is http://dltj.org/page/4/

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