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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  • IETF May Form Working Group on "Reputation Services"

    Last week I saw a post on the IETF Announcement List seeking feedback on the possible formation of a "Reputation Services" working group. That posting has more information, but the basic abstract is posted below. Now I will admit up front that I tend to see the world through librarian-colored …

     Posted on  October 03, 2011
     and last updated October 04, 2011
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • Fixing a Bad SSH authorized_keys under Amazon EC2

    I was doing some maintenance on the Amazon EC2 instance that underpins DLTJ and in the process managed to mess up the .ssh/authorized_keys file. (Specifically, I changed the permissions so it was group- and world-readable, which causes `sshd` to not allow users to log in using those private keys …

     Posted on  July 11, 2011
     and last updated July 12, 2011
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • Call for Public Comment -- W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group

    The W3C Library Linked Data (LLD) Incubator Group invites librarians, publishers, linked data researchers, and other interested parties to review and comment on drafts of reports to be published later this year. The LLD group has been chartered from May 2010 through August 2011 to prepare a series of reports …

     Posted on  June 29, 2011
     and last updated June 29, 2011
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • PPTP VPN for iOS with AT&T Uverse and DD-WRT

    Wandering into public or semi-public wireless networks makes me nervous because I know how my network traffic can be easily watched, and because I'm a geek with control issues I'm even more nervous when using devices that I can't get to the insides of (like phones and tablets). One way …

     Posted on  June 17, 2011
     and last updated June 17, 2011
     ·  6 minutes reading time
  • Does the Google/Bing/Yahoo Schema.org Markup Promote Invalid HTML?

    [Update on 10-Jun-2011: The answer to the question of the title is "not really" -- see the update at the bottom of this post and the comments for more information.]

    Yesterday Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo! announced a project to promote machine-readable markup for structured data on web pages.

    Many sites …

     Posted on  June 03, 2011
     and last updated January 15, 2018
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • "The Challenges of User Consent" -- Handling Shibboleth User Attributes

    One of the great things about the Shibboleth inter-institution single sign-on software package is the ability for the Identity Provider to limit how much a Service Provider knows about a user's request for service. (Not familiar with those capitalized terms? Read on for definitions.) But with this capability comes great …

     Posted on  May 06, 2011
     and last updated May 06, 2011
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • Recordings from Code4Lib Virtual Lightning Talks Available

    Thanks to everyone for participating in the first Code4Lib Virtual Lightning Talks on Friday. In particular, my gratitude goes out to Ed Corrado, Luciano Ramalho, Michael Appleby, and Jay Luker being the first presenters to try this scheme for connecting library technologists. My apologies also to those who couldn't connect …

     Posted on  May 02, 2011
     and last updated May 02, 2011
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • What To Do With ISO 2709:2008?

    My employer recently became a member of NISO and I was made the primary representative. This is my first formal interaction with the standards organization heirarchy (NISO → ANSI → ISO) and as one of the side effects I'm being asked to provide advice to NISO on how its vote should be …

     Posted on  April 26, 2011
     and last updated April 27, 2011
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • Iron Mountain to Close its Virtual File Store Service

    About two years ago I wrote a blog post wondering if we could outsource the preservation of digital bits. What prompted that blog post was an announcement from Iron Mountain of a Cloud-Based File Archiving service. Since then there have been a number of other services that have sprung up …

     Posted on  April 11, 2011
     and last updated April 12, 2011
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • IPv4 Address Space Disappearing, Here Comes IPv6

    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 …

     Posted on  February 12, 2011
     and last updated February 13, 2011
     ·  6 minutes reading time
  • New Web Expectations and Mobile Web Techniques

    Late last year I was asked to put together a 20-minute presentation for my employer (LYRASIS) on what I saw as upcoming technology milestones that could impact member libraries. It was a good piece, so I thought I'd share what I learned with others as well. The discussion was in …

     Posted on  January 26, 2011
     and last updated January 27, 2011
     ·  6 minutes reading time
  • Slight Tweak to WordPress Broken Link Checker Plugin

    In a futile effort to fight link rot on DLTJ, I installed the Broken Link Checkerplugin by "White Shadow". I like the way it scans the entire content of this blog -- posts, pages, comments, etc. -- looking for pages linked from here that don't respond with an HTTP 200 "Ok …

     Posted on  October 27, 2010
     and last updated January 15, 2018
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • The PERL Way to Add OmniFocus Inbox Entries from Twitter

    Over the weekend I got the bright idea of asking OmniGroup to ask an iPhone voice recognition application (like Dragon Dictation) to add a link to the OmniFocus iPhone application. That way I could simply dictate new inbox items on the iPhone rather than laboriously typing them with the on-screen …

     Posted on  October 19, 2010
     and last updated October 20, 2010
     ·  4 minutes reading time
  • Using Twitter For Service Outage Awareness

    Emily Clasper of the Suffolk County Library posted about some work she had done to embed status messages in the catalog using Twitter. This sounded like a really great idea because it is an out-of-band (e.g. something that doesn't rely on OhioLINK infrastructure for reporting downtimes) way to get …

     Posted on  August 31, 2010
     and last updated September 01, 2010
     ·  6 minutes reading time
  • RDA-as-Service Only

    At the ALA Annual Conference exhibit floor I got my first chance to see the RDA Toolkit. RDA is "Resource Description and Access" -- the new standard for bibliographic description of content. So this was the first time I really got to look at the RDA Toolkit. (By the way, you …

     Posted on  June 27, 2010
     and last updated June 27, 2010
     ·  4 minutes reading time
  • From “Moby-Dick” To “Mash-Ups:” Thinking About Bibliographic Networks at ALA Annual 2010

    Ron Murray and Barbara Tillett, both from the Library of Congress, are presenting their research in thinking about bibliographic information as networks of interrelated nodes at ALA Annual. This is a continuation of their "paper tool" work which was presented at the Library of Congress last year.

    The title of …

     Posted on  June 24, 2010
     and last updated June 25, 2010
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • Bandwidth of Large Airplanes

    Back in the early days of this blog, I had a post on Buzzwords Galore and Bandwidth that May Rival Your Station Wagon. The topic was a "hybrid optical and packet network" being deployed by Internet2 in 2006, and in the tail end of the post text I explained the …

     Posted on  June 08, 2010
     and last updated June 09, 2010
     ·  5 minutes reading time
  • Mash-Up Request for Submissions

    I'm working with some colleagues at the Library of Congress on the on the description of complex analog and digital resources. In that research, we want to get a better sense of what people who read DLTJ call a “mash-up.” We invite readers to provide examples (in any medium) of …

     Posted on  April 15, 2010
     and last updated April 16, 2010
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • Split Routing with OpenVPN

    My place of work has installed a VPN that moderates our access to the server network using the OpenVPN protocol. This is a good thing, but in its default configuration it would send all traffic -- even that not destined for the machine room network -- through the VPN. Since most of …

     Posted on  February 15, 2010
     and last updated February 15, 2010
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • Experiential Learning Enhanced with 2-D Barcodes

    QR-Code pointing to DLTJ
    This morning I attended a presentation on "Using QR Codes and Mobile Phones for Learning" at the Ohio Educational Technology Conference. Presented by Thomas McNeal and Mark van't Hooft from Kent State University, the example used in the presentation was their GeoHistorian Project from the 2009 …

     Posted on  February 02, 2010
     and last updated February 02, 2010
     ·  2 minutes reading time