In which I perceive that gossip is not science

Posted on Sun 24 January 2010 in misc • Tagged with Coding

Marshall Breeding published the results of his 2009 International Survey of Library Automation a few days ago. Juicy stuff, with averages, medians, and modes for the negative/positive responses on a variety of ILS and vendor-related questions, and some written comments from the respondents. One would expect the library geek …


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PKG_CHECK_MODULES syntax error near unexpected token 'DEPS,'

Posted on Wed 09 December 2009 in misc • Tagged with Coding

The next time you bash your brains against autotools for a while wondering why your perfectly good PKG_CHECK_MODULES() macro, as cut and paste directly from the recommended configure.ac entry for the package you're trying to integrate (in this case libmemcached), and you get the error message PKG …


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Changing the default run level in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Posted on Fri 06 November 2009 in misc • Tagged with FSOSS

Dear Dan:

You felt pretty pleased with yourself for jumping on the latest Ubuntu release back in the alpha stages on your virtual machine, then having it running on your laptop and Lynn's Asus EEE 701 the day after the final release came out.

But did you ever have to …


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Linux on the desktop, ten years later

Posted on Wed 09 September 2009 in misc • Tagged with Personal

It's a running joke at the Linux Weekly News at the start of each year to predict that "this will be the year of Linux on the desktop". In our household, it's been Linux on the desktop for over ten years now.

A week or so ago, I received an …


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Seven things

Posted on Mon 09 February 2009 in misc • Tagged with Personal, PHP

I was tagged by Lukas for the "7 things" meme, and meant to do something about it, but I've been kind of preoccupied with the new baby and the sprinting toddler and work. Anyway, it seems like a heck of a lot more reasonable than the evil Facebook's "25 things …


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Making Skype work in a Windows XP VirtualBox guest instance

Posted on Tue 06 January 2009 in misc • Tagged with Coding

If you, like me, install Skype in a Windows XP VirtualBox guest instance running on an Ubuntu host on a ThinkPad T60 with an Intel 2300 dual-core 32-bit processor, it might throw Windows exceptions and generate error reports as reported in VirtualBox ticket #1710.

If you then go into your …


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In which my words also appear elsewhere

Posted on Tue 02 December 2008 in misc • Tagged with Coding

I'm excited to announce the availability of my first post as an invited contributor to the More than Bookends blog over at the revamped Academic Matters web site. My fellow contributors are Anne Fullerton and Amy Greenberg, and I'm delighted to be included with them in our appointed task of …


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Dear Dan: why is using Flash for navigation a bad idea?

Posted on Mon 03 November 2008 in misc • Tagged with Coding

I received the following email late last week, and took the time to reply to it tonight. I had originally been asked by a friend to help diagnose why his organization's site navigation wasn't working in some of his browsers. I noticed that the navigation bar was implemented in Flash …


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For the paranoid: deleting Flash local storage objects

Posted on Thu 30 October 2008 in misc • Tagged with Personal

I'm reasonably careful about the cookies I accept from Web sites - I don't want companies to be able to track every site I visit, for example, so that they can build a nice little profile about me. It's for the protection of the companies more than anything else: someone there …


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Get out of jail, go free, part I

Posted on Mon 16 June 2008 in misc • Tagged with Evergreen

As Mark Leggott mentioned in Vendor to Open Source ILS in 1 Month #1, I had the pleasure of assisting the migration of the University of Prince Edward Island library system from Unicorn to Evergreen. A little over a year ago, in discussing the business case for open source library …


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