The internet has survived the great SOPA blackout, and we’re still talking about the fallout. Apple made a major announcement of plans to support textbooks on iPads, but there are concerns about the implementation. But the first story this week is about a free service geared towards teaching people how to program with weekly lessons throughout 2012.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. 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. New this year is that Pinboard has replaced FriendFeed as my primary aggregation service. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my Pinboard bookmarks (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Items posted to are also sent out as tweets; you can follow me on Twitter. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Code Year: Learn to Code in 2012

Sign up for Code Year to start receiving a new interactive programming lesson every Monday. You’ll be building apps and websites before you know it!

- Code Year

Code Year is a project of internet startup Codecademy, a service that teaches people how to code (JavaScript only, at the moment). There have been three classes posted already, and the website says they are still accepting registrations at the homepage. Code Year is free, and it sends an e-mail at the beginning of each week with a link to that week’s course. More questions? See the frequently asked questions.

What I think is really cool about this is that a group of librarians has self-organized themselves to support each other through the year. There is a community area on ALA Connect and a list of resources on the catcode wiki that includes examples tailored to cataloging challenges. (“catcode” is a unique story onto itself. It is a wiki created to “help support dialogue between catalogers and coders.”)

Apple Introduces iBooks Author

Educators so far seem excited about the potential promise of a learning “revolution” enabled by Apple’s new iBooks Author app. However, not everyone is feeling that same level of enthusiasm: e-book publishing experts have concerns about the formatting that iBooks Author can output, which isn’t fully ePub 2 or ePub 3 compliant. Furthermore, Apple has added a clause to iBooks Author’s end user license agreement that prohibits selling e-books created with iBooks Author anywhere but the iBookstore.

- Enthusiasm for iBooks Author marred by licensing, format issues, by Chris Foresman, Ars Technica

Last week saw the big introduction of iBooks Textbooks for iPad and iBooks Author ebook creation utility. The combination were billed as a promising new way to have students interact with course materials and to have teachers build their own content. There were some not-so-nice surprises in the implementation, though. First, the ebook format is close to that of ePub standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum, but strays in enough important ways that the iBooks Textbooks themselves won’t be usable on non-Apple devices. Second, included the End-User License Agreement for the iBooks Author software are terms that says content created with iBooks Author can be given away freely but can only be sold through Apple’s iBookstore. Apple also reserves the right to determine if your work is sold at iBookstore with no recourse for rejected works. The article above has more details, and the press coverage of iBooks Textbooks and iBooks Author has been generally negative so far.

Update on 6-Feb-2012: Apple released iBooks Author version 1.0.1 with the only change being clarifications to the End-User License Agreement: “If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author, you may only sell or distribute such work through Apple, and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple… This restriction does not apply to the content of such works when distributed in a form that does not include files in the .ibooks format.”

SOPA and Protect-IP Are Dead

Graphic from Talking Points Memo

Leaders in Congress on Friday effectively killed two pieces of anti-online piracy legislation following the increasingly vocal protests of tens of thousands of websites and millions of Internet users.

That’s right, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate are, for all practical purposes, dead in the water.

Sure, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) used the word “postponed” in their announcements, saying that Congress would only take a breather, but would certainly not give up for good on its goal of passing some sort of legislation designed to combat overseas “rogue” websites hosting pirated American content.

But whenever Congress decides to re-engage the online piracy fight — and it could be a while, given just how acrimonious the debate over the bills became in the last week — it’s almost certain that SOPA and PIPA won’t be revived in any recognizable form.

- How The Web Killed SOPA and PIPA, by Carl Franzen, Talking Points Memo Idea Lab

Who would have thought — grass roots organizations convince major internet presences to “black out” or otherwise inform users of ill-considered provisions (at best) in legislation, and in turn those users bury both houses of Congress with so much anti-SOPA and -PIPA feedback that they effectively kill the bills. Is this the closest we’ve come to direct democracy since ancient Athens? Perhaps! The article quoted above goes into great detail about the formational elements of SOPA and PIPA and the forces that gathered to stop them.

The response to Wikipedia being blacked out in particular was interesting. The Washington Post, The Guardian and National Public Radio announced that they would answer questions posted to Twitter with the hashtag #altwiki. Closer to the library community Credo Reference announced that free access for a day.

After a longer than intended hiatus, DLTJ Thursday Threads is back.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. 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.

A Pro-Library Protest Song

I’m a Child of the Lib’ry, it made me who I am, /
It taught me about freedom and the fellowship of Man /
A sea of story waits for you behind the lib’ry door, /
Don’t say we can’t afford them any more.

- Chorus from “Child of the Library”, by Piers Cawley, OSCON 2011

OSCON is the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, held this year July 25-29, 2011 in Portland, OR. Normally an event for all things open source software, Piers Cawley stepped outside that box this year by asking attendees if they have ever used a library and if they have used a library in the past month. He then sung a song he wrote earlier this year when he learned about the drastic cuts facing public libraries in the U.K. Piers has released the song under a Creative Commons license and asks that people spread it far and wide.

How Google Makes Improvements to Its Search Algorithm

Here’s a short video we put together that gives you a sense of the work that goes into the changes and improvements we make to Google almost every day. While an improvement to the algorithm may start with a creative idea, it always goes through a process of rigorous scientific testing.

- How Google makes improvements to its search algorithm – YouTube, Google

Curious to know how Google engineers try to find the best search results? This video from Google’s web search team talks about how it uses various “signals” and adapts the algorithm as often as once a day to improve relevance ranking.

New Web-based Tool Teaches the Basics of JavaScript Programming

Three days ago I wrote about Codecademy — a slick, fun way to teach yourself how to program. The app has done an excellent job minimizing the frustration often associated with writing your first lines of code, and it sports a good-looking and intuitive interface. Another plus: the initial signup flow doesn’t show up til you’ve completed your first few lessons, so you’re writing code within a few seconds of landing at Codecademy.com.

I’m not the only one who liked it: cofounder Zach Sims tells us that in the three days since the application launched, it has drawn 200,000 unique users. That’s users who have actually interacted with the app — and not people who hit the webpage and bounced away a second later. Perhaps even more impressive: users have completed a total number of 2.1 million exercises.

- Codecademy Surges To 200,000 Users, 2.1 Million Lessons Completed In 72 Hours, by Jason Kinkaid, TechCrunch

A popular topic on library technology mailing lists is librarians asking for advice on how to get started with programming. This was, in face, a key part of Diane Hillman’s keynote at the Code4Lib conference this year — getting catalogers and programmers closer together.

Enter a new option: Codecademy. A new startup that went public this week, it teaches the basics of JavaScript programming through an interactive, web-based interface. There are just eight lessons at the moment, but there is the promise of more to come. Now if only we had an equivalent way to teach coders about cataloging and the MARC format…

Thanks, Noel, and everyone else who made the video editions of Code4Lib 2008 presentations possible. I just had a chance to notice that the video from my JPEG2000 to Zoomify Shim lightning talk was online:

Some updates since the post and the presentation were first done. The code that exists in the source code repository now was refactored to use JJ2000 as part of the Sun ImageIO package. We were seeing non-threadsafe problems with Kakadu and thought that using the multithreaded ImageIO package would help. Unfortunately, even with extensive caching, it did not. My next task is to bring Kakadu back into the picture using the threadsafe JNI implementation that is part of the ImageIO-ext project to see if that helps.

Unfortunately, time ran out before this needed to go into initial production with the OhioLINK DRC roll-out, so it isn’t in production. The scheme shows promise, though, so I’m going to keep working with it…

The text was modified to update a link from http://jj2000.epfl.ch/ to http://code.google.com/p/jj2000/ on January 28th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to https://jai-imageio.dev.java.net/ on June 9th, 2011.

This one goes out to all of the MacOS X users out there. (For the rest of you, why aren’t you switching?) Perhaps you have seen PocketMod — the origami-like manipulation of an 8 1/2″ by 11″ piece of paper into an 8-page booklet.

Example PocketMod, courtesy of the Boston Globe.

Touted as a way to “get back to the basics” using analog media over digital media, it is a scheme by which you can transform pages of text into a pocket-sized form for carrying around. Many use it as a way to synchronize their digital to-do lists with the analog world, while others use it document shortcuts and cheat-sheets in a convenient form.

I’m migrating from Thinking Rock to iGTD as my Getting Things Done tool-of-choice. One of the things I’m missing about Thinking Rock is its built-in ability to create PocketMods for the actions in the GTD system. The only real easy way to create the PocketMod format was via a Flash applet or a Windows application. Some have set up shell scripts or worked with other programs, but I was looking for something as simple as the MacOS X print dialog box. And with a little bit of Automator, Java, and shell scripting, it is possible!

Step 1: Get the “Multivalent” PDF Manipulation Toolkit

Step 2: Create the Automator Action

In the ‘Run Shell Script’ action, change “Pass input” to “as arguments” then replace “cat” in the command box with this (ignoring any line breaks that may appear here — this text should be entered without line breaks):

cat "$1" > /tmp/temp$$.pdf && java -classpath [location]/Multivalent20060102.jar tool.pdf.Impose -dim 2x4 -layout "1l,2r,8l,3r,7l,4r,6l,5r" -paper letter -verbose /tmp/temp$$.pdf 2> /tmp/temp$$.err && open /tmp/temp$$-up.pdf

Replace [location] with the complete file path where you downloaded the Multivalent20060102.jar file. The final results should look something like this:

Now save this as “PocketModMac” in either the “/Library/PDF Services” directory (to make it available to all users of your machine) or to “Library/PDF Services” in your home directory for just you.

Step 3: Using PocketModMac

After a few seconds, the Preview application will open up with the PocketMod-ed document. Print this document as you would to any printer, then follow the directions for folding and cutting the page to create your booklet.

Troubleshooting and Known Issues

This isn’t necessarily a very nice solution because it leaves files laying around in the /private/tmp directory after it is done. The /etc/periodic/daily/500.daily maintenance script will clean them out automatically after three days, but still — it is somewhat sloppy to leave them around.

The Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK) is seeking an energetic, creative individual to participate in the creation and maintenance of our internationally recognized set of digital library and electronic information services. OhioLINK serves the higher education population in the State of Ohio with service to over 85 colleges and universities.

The position requires a four-year degree in Computer Science, or a graduate degree in Information or Library Science, or equivalent technical experience. The candidate should have strong programming skills including experience with Perl and Java, and should be comfortable working in a Unix/Linux environment with open source development tools. Experience with the following is highly desired: Apache Tomcat, JSP, XML, XSLT, SQL, Eclipse IDE. Experience with the following is desirable: Cocoon, DSpace, Fedora Digital Repository, aspect-oriented programming.

Salary: $49,000 minimum

If you are interested in this position, please send a resume, a summary statement of experience, and an indication of your salary expectations to resume@ohiolink.edu.

There are days that I feel like Tom Cruise. No, I have no idea what it is like to be married to Nicole Kidman or Katie Holmes and I don’t have the secrets of Scientology. Let me rephrase: there are days that I feel like Jerry Macguire, the character Tom Cruise played in the movie by the same name. Have you seen it? Very early in the movie there is a scene where Jerry’s life as a top-tier sports agent is crumbling. He is on the phone with what turns out to be his last client — desperately trying to keep his business. The athlete (Cuba Gooding Jr. — I have no idea what it is like to be him either) gets Jerry to scream “Show Me The Money!” into the phone as a precondition for remaining his agent. In that vein, here is what I’m screaming into this PowerBook. (Imagine now that I am dancing around the room and standing on top of desks — not really a stretch for those that have seen my presentation style, I’ll admit.)

What has set off this rant, you might ask? The trigger was Dan Chud’s “Dear Casey” post. But it has been building up for a while. Another prodding came two weeks ago when an OhioLINK staff member commented (paraphrasing) “the only people really interested in open source are those that want to take what others have created.” Other instances include various discussions with people that tend to drift off at the point of “well, I’ll release it when I get a chance to clean it up” or “you know, there are so many institution-specific hard coded things in it”. Look, folks — if you care about the code at all, you may never consider it clean enough to share with others. — and if there are institution-specific pieces in it, what incentive do you really have to generalize it.

I’d like to think I strive to practice what I’m preaching. The OhioLINK DRC code is available for all to see as it is being built. Now admittedly its development appears to come in fits and starts. And there are definitely activities happening that are not registered in the Subversion code repository. But it is there — mistakes, ugliness, refactoring, and hard-coded stuff.

If you want to ascribe to the principles of open source, well then welcome to the party. But that means you have to come to the party with your code and not just your words. Please don’t tease by saying that you’ll release your code but never do, even if you have the best intentions. Open source is as much about giving back — improving your code by submitting patches, helping clean up the ugliness, and refactoring out institutional-specific pieces (because it would be in my interest to do so) — as it is about borrowing from others. Or, in the words of Eric Steven Raymond in his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar: “Release Early, Release Often.”

So my hope is that this inspires you to release your own code. This is not picking on any one individual or institution, but if it helps you may now believe that there is a virtual finger pointed to you if you have had one of these “I’ll release it into open source” conversations with me in the past. Making source code available does take a few additional steps and a little bit of work, but the steps aren’t hard and the work isn’t significant compared to the effort you’ve already put into the code. If you need help, please ask — in the comments here, on the Code4Lib (or similar) mailing list, in private correspondence, wherever. If you need letters explaining the importance of releasing code or acknowledging your contribution to the open source community, let me know. If you need further inspiration to follow the open source path, well, I’ll see what I can do.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Resources tagged with ‘librarysoa‘ in del.icio.us will also appear in the aggregator.

Mechanics

Chris Wilper gave this presentation on behalf of the work that he and Aaron Birkland did to improve the performance of the Fedora Resource Index.

Version 2.0 of the Fedora digital object repository software added a feature called the Resource Index (RI). Based on Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples, the RI provided quick access to relationships between objects as well as to the descriptive elements of the object itself. After about two years of use using the Kowari software, the RI has pointed to a number of challenges for “triplestores”: scalability (few triplestores are designed for greater than 100 million triples); performance; and stability (frequent “rebuilds”).

The real motivation behind experimenting with a new triplestore, however, was the NSDL use case. The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is a moderately large repository (4.7 million objects, 250 million triples) with a lot of write activity (driven by periodic OAI harvests; primarily mixed ingests and datastream modifications). The NSDL data model also includes existential/referential integrity constraints that must be enforced. Querying the RI to determine correct repository state proved to be difficult: Kowari is aggressively buffering triple, sometimes on the order of seconds, before writing them to disk. Flushing the buffer after every write is also computationally expensive (hence the drive to use buffers in the first place).

The NSDL team also encountered corruption under concurrent use and with abnormal shutdowns, forcing the rebuild of the triplestore. And the solution was not scaling well; performance was becoming notably worse. In looking for solutions other triplestores were considered but rejected. Using a RDBMS seemed attractive — efficient transactions, very stable, generally speedy — but a “one big table” paradigm to store all of the relations did not seem to give them a desired scalability.

NSDL developers observed that total number of distinct predicates is much lower than the number of predicates or objects; NSDL has about 50 distinct predicates. Based on this observation, their solution, called “Mapped Predicate Tables,” creates a table for every predicate in the triplestore. This has several advantages: a low computational cost for triple adds and deletes, queries for known predicates are fast, complex queries benefit from the relatively mature RDBMS planner having finer-granularity statistics and query plans, and flexible data partitioning to help address scalability. This solution comes with several disadvantages, however: one needs to manage predicate to table mapping, complex queries crossing many predicates require more effort to formulate, and with a naive approach simple unbound queries scale linearly with the number of predicates.

So the NSDL team created the MPTStore triplestore and contributed it back to the Fedora core developers for use by the community. MPTStore is a Java library that handles all of the predicate mapping and accounting behind the scenes. The basic API remains the same as for other triplestores, performing triple writes and queries, and the library hides all of the implementation details of translating queries from a particular language (SPO, SPARQL) into SQL statements. The library is also designed to expose transaction/connection semantics should the developer wish to have direct access to the predicate tables.

A solution like MPTStore is well suited for NSDL use case. The NSDL team was very familiar with the operations of RDBMS administration: performance tuning, backups, etc. The stored triplestore data is transparent and “hackable” — adhoc SQL queries and analysis are relatively simple. In fact, the RDBMS triplestore helped track down Fedora middleware bugs that resulted in an inconsistent state. Fixing these bugs also improved the performance of the Kowari-based RI.

[Updated 20070129T1447 to include links to Chris' presentation on SlideShare.]

Sometimes the best way to solve a programming problem is to see how others have done the same thing. When that happens, having immediate access to the various search engines helps get you back on track quickly. Here are OpenSearch plug-ins (suitable for Firefox and MSIE7) that will search the Java code in five of the more popular source code search engines.

Krugle

Install Krugle Java Code Search for Firefox and MSIE7. Plug-in source:

<!-- Generated by searchplugins.net search plugin generator -->
<!-- http://www.searchplugins.net/generate.aspx -->
<!-- Plugin list available at http://www.searchplugins.net/pluginlist.aspx -->
<opensearchdescription>
  <shortname>Krugle Java Code Search</shortname>
  <description>Search Krugle Java Code Search</description>
  <tags>krugle java programming code</tags>
  <image height="16" width="16" type="image/x-icon">http://www.krugle.com/favicon.ico</image>
  <url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.krugle.com/kse/files?query={searchTerms}&lang=java">
  <inputencoding>UTF-8</inputencoding>
  <adultcontent>false</adultcontent>
</url></opensearchdescription>

Koders

Koders.com is the leading search engine for open source code. Our source code optimized search engine provides developers with an easy-to-use interface to search for source code examples and discover new open source projects which can be leveraged in their applications.

Note also that you can get a plugin for Eclipse to perform the searches right from the IDE. Install Koders Java Search in Firefox or MSIE7. Plug-in source:

<!-- Generated by searchplugins.net search plugin generator -->
<!-- http://www.searchplugins.net/generate.aspx -->
<!-- Plugin list available at http://www.searchplugins.net/pluginlist.aspx -->
<opensearchdescription>
  <shortname>Koders "Java" Search</shortname>
  <description>Search Koders for Java code</description>
  <tags>koders programming java</tags>
  <image height="16" width="16" type="image/x-icon">http://www.koders.com/favicon.ico</image>
  <url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.koders.com/default.aspx?s={searchTerms}&btn=Search&la=Java&li=*">
  <inputencoding>UTF-8</inputencoding>
  <adultcontent>false</adultcontent>
</url></opensearchdescription>

Codefetch

Install Codefetch Java Search in Firefox or MSIE7. Plug-in source:

<!-- Generated by searchplugins.net search plugin generator -->
<!-- http://www.searchplugins.net/generate.aspx -->
<!-- Plugin list available at http://www.searchplugins.net/pluginlist.aspx -->
<opensearchdescription>
  <shortname>Search Codefetch for Java Code</shortname>
  <description>Search Search Codefetch for Java Code</description>
  <tags>codefetch programming java</tags>
  <image height="16" width="16" type="image/x-icon">http://www.codefetch.com/favicon.ico</image>
  <url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.codefetch.com/search?qy={searchTerms}&lang=java">
  <inputencoding>UTF-8</inputencoding>
  <adultcontent>false</adultcontent>
</url></opensearchdescription>

O’Reilly Publishing

Install O’Reilly Java Code Search in Firefox and MSIE7. Plug-in source:

<!-- Generated by searchplugins.net search plugin generator -->
<!-- http://www.searchplugins.net/generate.aspx -->
<!-- Plugin list available at http://www.searchplugins.net/pluginlist.aspx -->
<opensearchdescription>
  <shortname>O'Reilly Java Code Search</shortname>
  <description>Search O'Reilly Java Code Search</description>
  <tags>o'reilly java programming code</tags>
  <image height="16" width="16" type="image/x-icon">http://labs.oreilly.com/favicon.ico</image>
  <url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://labs.oreilly.com/search.xqy?t=code&q={searchTerms}+cat%3Ajava">
  <inputencoding>UTF-8</inputencoding>
  <adultcontent>false</adultcontent>
</url></opensearchdescription>

Google Code Search

Google Code Search helps you find function definitions and sample code by giving you one place to search publicly accessible source code hosted on the Internet. With Google Code Search, you can:

• Use regular expressions to search more precisely
• Restrict your search by language, license or filename
• View the source file with links back to the entire package and the webpage where it came from

The use of regular expressions seems to give Google an edge over the others, although I don’t think the Google service is as comprehensive in coverage as Koders.

Install Google Code Search for Java into Firefox or MSIE7. Plug-in source:

<!-- Generated by searchplugins.net search plugin generator -->
<!-- http://www.searchplugins.net/generate.aspx -->
<!-- Plugin list available at http://www.searchplugins.net/pluginlist.aspx -->
<opensearchdescription>
  <shortname>Google Code Search for Java</shortname>
  <description>Search Google Code Search for Java</description>
  <tags>googlecodesearch java programming google</tags>
  <image height="16" width="16" type="image/x-icon">http://www.google.com/favicon.ico</image>
  <url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/codesearch?as_q={searchTerms}&btnG=Search+Code&hl=en&as_lang=java&as_license_restrict=i&as_license=&as_package=&as_filename=&as_case=">
  <inputencoding>UTF-8</inputencoding>
  <adultcontent>false</adultcontent>
</url></opensearchdescription>

A while back we created an LDAP directory to consolidate account information for various back-room services, and when we created it we decided to use the individual’s e-mail address as the account identifier (uid in LDAP-speak). It seemed like the logical thing to do — it is something that the user knows and it is a cheap and easy way to assume that the account identifiers will be unique. This is not uncommon for many internet services, of course.

Now we’re bring up a Drupal content management system and of course want to tie the authentication into the existing LDAP directory. The initial configuration appeared to work, but there were odd, unexplained failures — most notably, Drupal would not consider it a ‘real’ account because it didn’t have an e-mail field. Even weirder was the fact that we configured Drupal to know exactly which LDAP attribute to use as the e-mail address (mail, in LDAP-speak). It wasn’t until one of our system engineers wondered out loud if the at-sign (‘@’) in the user id wasn’t causing problems that we started making progress towards a solution.

As it turns out, he was right. Without spending so much time in the guts of the Drupal code to know exactly if this is true, it seems like Drupal wants to reserve the ‘@something‘ construct for inter-Drupal authentication. In other words, if you have an account on one Drupal server (let’s call it DrupalA) and want to access a second (let’s call it DrupalB) — and if the two servers agree to share user accounts — the account from DrupalA would be recorded in the database of DrupalB as “UserId@DrupalA“.

The ‘at’ symbol for us, though, is just a normal part of an e-mail address. We really didn’t want to reconstruct our LDAP account scheme, so the best choice seemed to be to find a way to trick Drupal into accepting these account identifiers. This, unfortunately, was no easy task. I couldn’t find the root cause of the problem, but did diagnose enough of the symptoms to force a patch into the system. The patch, in the form of a new module (code included below) forces the account to have two necessary attributes that seem to go missing whenever a ‘@’ character appears in the user id. If you have similar problems, I can’t claim that this will work for you, nor can I guarantee this approach will be supportable in the future. All’s I know is that it seems to work for us in our situation right now.

 <?php
 
function olinkldap_help($section) {
  $output = '';
  switch ($section) {
    case 'admin/modules#olinkldap':
      $output = 'olinkldap;
      break;
    case 'admin/modules#description':
    case 'admin/help#olinkldap':
      $output = t('Sets up OhioLINK-specific LDAP parameters.');
      break;
  }
  return $output;
}
 
function olinkldap_settings() { }
 
function olinkldap_user($op, &$edit, &$user, $category = NULL) {
  switch($op) {
    case 'load':
      olinkldap_user_load($user);
      break;
  }
}
 
function olinkldap_user_load(&$user) {
  // Calculate the DN for the user -- you'll need to adjust this to match your LDAP base DN
  $ldap_dn=sprintf("uid=%s,ou=People,dc=somewhere,dc=outthere", $user->name);
 
  // Create a new array with the two LDAP-specific values that seem to be missing.
  $forced_data=array('ldap_authentified' => 1, 'ldap_dn' => $ldap_dn);
 
    // It seems like this should work, but it doesn't (it throws a segmentation fault)
    //  user_save($user_edit,array($forced_data);
    // so we're going to interact directly with the database
  if ($user->uid) {
    // Get the 'data' field for the user and put it in the $data array
    $data = unserialize(db_result(db_query('SELECT data FROM {users} WHERE uid = %d', $user->uid)));
    // Put all of the attributes from $forced_data into $data
    foreach ($forced_data as $key => $value) {
      $data[$key] = $value;
    }
    // Reserialize the $data array and update it in the database
    $v[] = serialize($data);
    db_query("UPDATE {users} SET data='%s' WHERE uid=%d",array_merge($v,array($user->uid)));
  }
}
?>

Save this as ‘olinkldap.module’, update the DN to reflect your LDAP server’s base DN (see comment in code), copy it into your Drupal modules directory, and activate it. Your ‘@’-impaired userids should start working again. If you are using the inter-Drupal account sharing (we’re not) this might break something for you. That’s not interesting for us, so I’m not testing it against that condition. If you use this and find that it works or doesn’t work, or you have a better way of solving the problem, please leave a comment or traceback…