As an aid to getting over the first (and hopefully last) seasonal cold, I’ve been implementing Xapian as a search engine, using the Python bindings. I did look at Solr as an alternative but the set up costs outweighed the fact that Xapian is already installed on the server as part of Python. Unlike OpenMilton, …
Tag Archives: open_correspondence
Weeknotes: Open correspondence
A quiet week as I’ve been having a few days off but I’ve been working on some of the tickets for Open Correspondence. The urls have changed to /letters/view/<author>/<correspondent>/<letter id> in an attempt to make them more user friendly and also to allow the user to define smaller or larger collections by altering the url. …
Weeknotes: Ubuntu, messaging and Open Correspondence
It has been a while since the last weeknotes. I’ve finally made the move to Linux, or at least dual booting, by installing Ubuntu so I’m currently learning a little the OS and getting a development environment set up for it. I’ve nearly finsihed the ongoing accounts project at work. The framework is up and …
Weeknotes: Talks, Open Correspondence, XMPP
I gave a talk at the Oxford Geek Nights about Open Correspondence and letters. At some point I really ought to learn how to give talks. Anyhow Russell Davies was the main speakers and he showed how you could make physical objects from data derived from social networks. (He has a marvellously sane post about …
BBC’s use of Semantic Web technology in World Cup
Just caught this story on ReadWrite Web about the BBC website’s use of semantic web technology during the World Cup. Jem Rayfield explains more on the BBC Internet blog about the use of technology. I’ve still got a fair amount of reading to do but this is the sort of project that makes me rethink …
Weeknotes: documentation, prototyping and cats
I’ve spent most of the week either trying to persuade colleagues that rewrites are needed to existing services. I’ve also finally managed to get the initial promise of working from home so hopefully I’ll be able to get the rewrite started on the “quiet” days away from the office. (Although the cat can drive me …
Weeknotes: All quiet on the accounting front
It’s been a week of relative frustration with priorities suddenly being shifted and the infrastructure road map looking more and more unclear. The soap server is largely debugged and ready for more extensive testing on the server and the back end has now been rewritten to capture more data. I cannot help feeling that it …
Weeknotes: PHP, SOAP, and Open Letters
It has been a fairly quiet week with the boss away. I’ve managed to complete a service to upload details from spreadsheets sent via email. I’ve also managed to complete a SOAP service in PHP to listen for status updates and just doing the final tests to it now. Once its up it can be …
Weeknotes: Data, service buses and trac
I’ve succumbed and I’ve got a microslot at the next Oxford Geek Nights where I’m talking about the Open Correspondence website. I’ve downloaded the rest of the Gutenberg copies of the Dickens letters but just need an evening to make some headway with transforming them. I spent a fair amout of this week trying to …
Weeknotes: Pylons, Python and printing
I’ve been doing some more work to the Open Correspondence website (which is now functional thanks to Rufus Pollock’s help). In part I’ve been cleaning up the urls for the data controller (which is still coming along) and trying to tie the views in together. Being happier with Apache and PHP I spent some time …