Posted on Fri 14 April 2017 in Libraries • Tagged with Evergreen
Progressive Web Apps are pretty cool, and for good reason: the idea is to take advantage of the advanced features of our web browsers to provide capabilities that rival native apps, while still offering good performance and functionality to users of other browsers.
However, if you've done much reading about …
Posted on Sun 19 February 2017 in Virtual Reality • Tagged with coding, libraries, progressive web apps, webvr
I've been dabbling with the A-Frame framework for creating WebVR experiences for the past couple of months, ever since Patrick Trottier gave a lightning talk at the GDG Sudbury DevFest in November and a hands-on session with AFrame in January. The @AFrameVR Twitter feed regularly highlights cool new WebVR apps …
Posted on Sun 12 February 2017 in Linked Open Data • Tagged with coding, libraries, structured data
My slides from Ohio DevFest 2016: schema.org, Wikidata, Knowledge Graph: strands of the modern semantic web
And the video, recorded and edited by the incredible amazing Patrick Hammond:
In November, I had the opportunity to speak at Ohio DevFest 2016. One of the organizers, Casey Borders, had invited me …
Posted on Thu 27 October 2016 in misc • Tagged with Libraries, libraries
I just sent the following email to the Government of Canada's Consulting Canadians on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) email address:
Hello,
As an academic librarian, software developer, and occasional author, I would like to state my opposition to the proposals contained in the TPP text that would extend the term …
Posted on Fri 02 September 2016 in Libraries • Tagged with coding
Update 2016-11-28: The brilliant folk at UNC figured out how to fix Google Scholar using a pre-scoped search so that, if a search is launched from the library web site, it will automatically associate that search with the library's licensed resources. No EZProxy required!
For libraries, proxying user requests is …
Posted on Thu 01 September 2016 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding, PHP, coding, php
Yesterday, just one day before the anniversary of the 1.1.2 release, I published the 1.1.3 release of the PEAR File_MARC library. The only change is the addition of a convenience method for fields called getContents() that simply concatenates all of the subfields together in order …
Posted on Sat 11 June 2016 in misc • Tagged with Coding, coding
On Friday, June 10th I gave a short talk at the OLITA Digital Odyssey 2016 conference, which had a theme this year of privacy and security. My talk addressed the evolution of our public and loaner laptops over the past decade, from bare Windows XP, to Linux, Windows XP with …
Posted on Sun 08 May 2016 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding, coding
For a recent strategic retreat, I was asked to prepare (as homework) a story about a subject that I'm passionate about, with an idea of where we might see the library in the next three to five years. Here's one of the stories I came up with, in the form …
Posted on Fri 15 April 2016 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding, Evergreen, coding, evergreen
Our staff were recently asked to check thousands of ISBNs to find out if we already have the corresponding books in our catalogue. They in turn asked me if I could run a script that would check it for them. It makes me happy to work with people who believe …
Posted on Sun 03 January 2016 in misc
TLDR: Set the HDMI output resolution on your PVR to 1080i instead of 1080p, and the component outputs on your FibreOp PVR will start working again, and therefore your Slingbox will start working again.
I purchased a Slingbox 350 a few years ago for the rare time I want to …