I have been working at a snail’s pace on some geolocation queries on some locations which are associated with Charles Dickens. Using Python’s NLTK library, I managed to extract around 60 distinct locations from his novel, Bleak House. A bit of human editing has tidied this up for me but it looks useful. Having popped […]
It has been a while since I’ve written a weeknote. Must get back into the habit. Open Correspondence Development on the Open Correspondence project has been slow to stalled for a while. I have been doing bits and pieces but sitting down with Mark McGillivray of Cottage Labs and the Open Knowledge Foundation, brought some […]
I went to the Drupal ScienceCamp for the weekend to learn more about Drupal and also how one runs a DrupalCamp, since we are thinking of doing one in Oxford. Having come across on the Friday and met some people, the weekend really started on the Saturday, run by some of the team behind the […]
Our team have started on Scrum to move forward with our projects. So far, so staggering steps but, hey, we are new to it. We will learn by falling / failing and then learning from where we went wrong and fixing it. One of the things that I have been looking at, partially because, as […]
A recent work project has been working with messaging queues and exploring how they work. One of the issues has been how to get systems running different systems to talk to each other. One system uses ActiveMQ and another runs RabbitMQ which has led to some interest in how to effectively bridge the systems into […]
A major project has been exploring the creation of a collaborative space using Drupal 7. Somebody else has taken this over whilst I concentrate on other parts of our system and integration but I thought I would post about the Persistent URL (PURL) creation. Fortunately Drupal 7 comes with a fair few options which the […]
As a side project, I’ve been looking at Media Uploads in Drupal 7. I am interested in using Media as a sort of asset management system at a machine level with web services allowing for the ingestion and listing of files. Anyhow as a side experiment, I wanted to take the idea of a video […]
Forbes Magazine, via Hacker news, has an article by Trevor Butterworth, ‘As The Age Of The Physical Book Retreats, The Cult Of The Physical Book Advances‘, which perhaps re-states where we are with publishing and bookselling. The physical book is enjoying a bit of renaissance in the sense that it appers to be viewed as […]
We are in the middle of the dead days, as Marcus Sedgwick describes them in one of sequences. It seems like a time for soem reflection, partially based on an intepretation of Steve Poland’s What startup to Build? post on Techcrunch. This is not to say that I an necessarily thinking of building a startup […]
I’ve been reading some of Alistair Horne’s tweets marked #pubnow on Twitter, following some of Richard Charkin’s comments in his talk. One of his tweets is that financial publishers are transforming themselves into an information platform, following another that academic publishers are joining together to create platforms. It seems that there is some confusion, if […]
