The, it appears indefatigable, James Harriman-Smith and I, amongst others, had been talking about porting the Panton Principles to Open Literature and Humanities uses. After a Skype call, we created a first draft which is now online on the Open Literature wiki: http://wiki.openliterature.net/Principles and on the Open Literature mailing list. One of the matters that […]
Author Archives: iain_emsley
Streaming MP3s with Node.js
In the midst of doing some research for work into some technologies that we’ve begun, or are thinking of, using, I’ve gone back to playing with Node.js . The ever useful Elegant Code blog has a quick guide to streaming files using Node that pretty much comes out to the box, or Github. Using some […]
The shameful jailing of our cultural heritage
Having had some fun and games restoring my laptop after the combination of Norton AntiVirus and Windows decided to lock up completely, I’ve just re-installed Ubuntu so apologies if you are waiting for anything from me. I’ve just come across this post from Philippe Agrain on his blog (originally linked from OKF’s Open Humanities mailing […]
Reflections on improving my programming skills
I’ve been thinking about programming this week. Perhaps this comes from the new started in our team this week and the energy boost that we’ve had from that. Might also come from the fact that I’m off to Drupalcon tomorrow morning. Either way… I caught a post on Hacker News about becoming a better programmer […]
The overrated ‘death’ of middleware
I like the High Scalability blog but a recent post on the death of middleware did leave me shaking my head. Although discussing the idea of Platform as a Service, the article argument argued that the traditional middleware layer is dead, replaced by items such as RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ. I can see the argument if […]
Thinking about texts and communities at Textcamp
Having gone to Textcamp yesterday, I started playing with Wordle and IBM’s Many Eyes at the suggestion of Dave Flanders of the JISC. As James Harriman-Smith, the organiser and Open Literature co-ordinator for the Open Knowledge Foundation, had suggested that this year is the anniversary of the manuscript of Alexander Pope‘s An Essay in Criticism, […]
Thoughts on DevOps
I’ve been reading a little about DevOps. I’ve come across it before but never really tried to explore it in detail. Until now. Why? Well it is increasingly clear that it will be helpful to our team and in part is something that I’ve moved towards in my last couple of jobs. At the previous […]
More autocompletion with Redis and Drupal
Last week I began working on an auto-complete function using Redis behind Drupal 7 to do some auto-completing functions. I needed to get some county data, and possibly other sorts, put into some forms so that it can be standardised. One of the issues that I’ve been trying to do is to make sure that […]
Auto-completing Drupal with Redis
I’ve been working on some functions for a forthcoming site at Janet and have been looking at the user functionality in some of our forms. In a reversal of roles, I’ve been trying to find ways of making it easier for users to complete the forms for various products and services which has taken me down […]
Weeknotes: Documents and data
The main project this week (apart from hte onging one of moving and virtualising servers) is to begin work on our technical documents. I’m trying to move them onto the web and make the useful, not only in terms of reading about them but also to make them linkable. I’m trying to get them out […]