Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Disruptive Library Technology Jester

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Peter E. Murray

Library technologist, open source advocate, striving to think globally while acting locally

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  • Unglue.It -- a service to crowdsource book licensing fees -- launches

    You could say "this is a service to watch" but that would be missing the point. Yesterday the 'Unglue.It' service launched as a way to crowdsource the funding of a fee to authors to release their own works under a Creative Commons license. [caption id="p3675-tweet" align="alignright" width …

     Posted on  May 18, 2012
     and last updated May 18, 2012
     ·  4 minutes reading time
  • Setting Aside Time for Writing

    It is time for New Year's Resolutions, and the new habit I aim to pick up is setting aside some serious, concentrated chunks of time for writing each day. In taking a high-level review of goals and tasks at the end of the year, I found that I was tending …

     Posted on  January 09, 2012
     and last updated January 10, 2012
     ·  4 minutes reading time
  • What Happens When History Fights Back -- A Review of "11/22/63: A Novel" by Stephen King

    [openbook booknumber="OLID:OL24906649M"]
    Pluck a string and it vibrates. As it vibrates there are points along the string where it is absolutely still. Pluck a companion string and sometimes those points line up. If you pull that string tighter there are more points of stillness and a greater chance …

     Posted on  December 28, 2011
     and last updated December 28, 2011
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • Campaign Contributions and Judiciary Committee Votes on SOPA (and a Plug for Rootstrikers)

    I've been keeping an eye on the House Judiciary Committee markup session for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that have happened over the past two days along with the tweets that have been going out in reaction to the proceedings. One of the running threads in the commentary has …

     Posted on  December 16, 2011
     and last updated December 17, 2011
     ·  11 minutes reading time
  • In Opposition to the PROTECT IP Act (Also)


    Earlier this month there was an amazing groundswell of opposition to SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. I participated in a 1-day anticensorship campaign designed to bring awareness …

     Posted on  November 28, 2011
     and last updated November 29, 2011
     ·  4 minutes reading time
  • In Opposition to the Stop Online Privacy Act


    This blog will be participating in the American Censorship Day awareness campaign on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 to show opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R …

     Posted on  November 15, 2011
     and last updated November 15, 2011
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • Free Stanford AI Class is a "Beta" for a Commercial Launch?

    When Stanford University's School of Engineering announced its free Artificial Intelligence class last month, the news took the geek world by storm and even worthy of note in the New York Times. The initial news articles made it sound like another example of open educational resources -- a movement popularized by …

     Posted on  September 05, 2011
     and last updated September 05, 2011
     ·  6 minutes reading time
  • My O'Reilly Wish List

    O'Reilly Media -- my favorite technology publisher -- is offering a contest in which they are giving away $500 worth of books from their catalog. To enter, one must post a public wish list to books, e-books, and videos from the O'Reilly catalog and send the URL to O'Reilly using a web …

     Posted on  February 20, 2011
     and last updated February 20, 2011
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • First Bill for DLTJ Hosting on Amazon Web Services

    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 …

     Posted on  February 04, 2011
     and last updated February 05, 2011
     ·  31 minutes reading time
  • DLTJ In a State of Flux

    DLTJ is in a bit of flux now. After updating some underlying packages on my 9-year-old Gentoo-based personal server, I'm finding that I can't start the web server process without the 1-minute load average climbing to roughly 60 in the span of about 5 minutes. (Translation: the machine is …

     Posted on  December 28, 2010
     and last updated December 28, 2010
  • Attempting to Run Comments without reCAPTCHA

    I'm trying an experiment over the next couple days/weeks. I'm turning off the reCAPTCHA requirement for blog commenters (the figure-out-these-words-and-type-them-in anti-spam scheme I turned on three and a half years ago). The only automated scheme in place now is Akismet. This change was made Friday night, and over the …

     Posted on  December 20, 2010
     and last updated December 20, 2010
  • "Do More ... With Someone Else" -- Guest Editor Introduction to NISO ISQ Fall Issue

    I'm pleased to announce that the Fall 2010 issue of NISO's International Standards Quarterly (ISQ) is done and available online to NISO members and ISQ subscribers. Print copies are scheduled to be mailed on December 28th. The individual issue is available for purchase (see the form link to on …

     Posted on  December 15, 2010
     and last updated December 15, 2010
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • Protect Your Keyboards, Mice and Cables from Theft with a Flat Washer

    You are using lockdown security cables to protect your PCs, but your accessories -- keyboards, mice, and other cables -- are still vulnerable to theft. You can use one of these specially built products to lock down the cables, or you can use a 20¢ flat washer from the hardware store to …

     Posted on  October 17, 2010
     and last updated October 18, 2010
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • Charleston, SC Visitor's Center A/V Display

    First, sorry about this getting posted prematurely through the DLTJ blog. I was trying the post-from-Flickr function, and it was telling me that the posting wasn't working. So, it got posted here twice. And it got posted before I was ready; I was hoping it would land in the draft …

     Posted on  March 30, 2010
     and last updated March 31, 2010
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • From Joshua Kim, Ideas for Working with Vendors

    Joshua Kim, senior learning technologist and an adjunct in sociology at Dartmouth College, recently had a series of posts about working with software vendors. Although Joshua's focus is with learning technologies (course management systems, lecture capture systems, etc.), these are general enough to be useful in a variety of library …

     Posted on  March 24, 2010
     and last updated March 25, 2010
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • "Mash-Up" Term is Over 150 Years Old!

    Ron Murray, a colleague at the Library of Congress (and no known relation to me), sent me a note about the history of the term "mash-up" in the Oxford English Dictionary (subscription required). The definition of the first sense is "A mixture or fusion of disparate elements" with the notation …

     Posted on  March 04, 2010
     and last updated March 04, 2010
  • Creative Blog Spam

    I have to give the creator of the blog spam below points for trying. This is what I found in my WordPress spam queue this morning, embedded here as an image so as not to give Google juice to the spammer:

    A blog spam message including a joke as a creative twist

    Honorable mention? Yes. An approved comment? Sorry.

     Posted on  February 18, 2010
     and last updated February 18, 2010
  • 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 …

     Posted on  December 30, 2009
     and last updated January 15, 2018
     ·  12 minutes reading time
  • Why I Need Twitter Distillation Tools

    The following may not be news to those who regularly hang out in Twitter-land, but the extent of the problem recently became clear to me: there is a bunch of spam in Twitter. More specifically, there appear to be robots that do nothing but scan the web for keywords and …

     Posted on  December 29, 2009
     and last updated December 29, 2009
     ·  4 minutes reading time
  • OhioLINK Has Moved!

    My place of work has moved to office space in downtown Columbus. If you have saved contact information for me, please update it. Those connected to me via Plaxo will get updated information automatically.

    These Parts Have Changed

    Work address: 35 E. Chestnut St, 8th Floor, Columbus, OH 43215-2541
    Phone …

     Posted on  July 24, 2009
     and last updated July 24, 2009