Monthly Archives: November 2011

The center’s own records — kept in a restricted section of its Web site, but found by The New York Times in an unsecured archived version of the site… http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/us/politics/gingrich-gave-push-to-clients-not-just-ideas.html   The internet version of going through the garbage for … Continue reading →

The ruby open source community’s behavior makes two choices with interesting consequences: The ruby open source community tries very hard to never re-write what someone else has written, instead composing gems and applications out of smaller pieces of de-coupled re-usable … Continue reading →

At one time Hpricot, originally by the famous _why, was the most widely-used post-REXML html/xml parsing solution in ruby.  These days nokogiri has eclipsed it (for various reasons), but I had some old code that was still using Hpricot (and some … Continue reading →

Library vendor-provided software, as well as library-data-focused websites,  have started to offer API’s. But many of these API’s tend to, well, not be very good. Difficult to use, designed for specific pre-planned use cases instead of flexibly exposing functionality, sometimes … Continue reading →

Turns out Google Books does support searching by ISSN, using ordinary fielded search syntax, although I don’t believe it’s documented anywhere. Mostly what you’ll find is digitized bound journals from libraries (that is, digitization of some volumes of the journal, … Continue reading →

An old post of mine on threading in Rails continues to get Google traffic, even though it was written about Rails 2.1 and is now terribly outdated. I’ve recently been updating the application that uses threading with ActiveRecord to 3.0 … Continue reading →

Looks like perhaps Amazon recently started allowing libraries to ‘lend’ kindle ebooks.  Does anyone know the pricing model to libraries? An important thing to realize about how the rise of ebooks effects libraries, is the legal difference between ebook or … Continue reading →