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 …

[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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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:

Honorable mention? Yes. An approved comment? Sorry.

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 …

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 …

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 …

I usually don't post about the act of blogging itself (I wonder how many middle-aged blogs have a similar post), but the confluence of a couple of things caused me to look at DLTJ with a critical and curious eye. The first was the work by David Pattern in Measuring …