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 […]
Author Archives: iain_emsley
The book is dead, long live the book?
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 […]
New year, new directions?
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 […]
Minor musings on publishing
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 […]
Using Tesseract with Python for OCR
Following several conversations with Alex Butterworth over pots of tea in the crypt of St Mary’s Church in Oxford, I’ve been having a look at Python and its bindings with the Tesseract library. A quick Google search brought me to this post by Roy on building an HTTP service using Tornado. I am fairly new […]
Beginning APC with Drupal
I’ve been looking at performance in PHP as a side project. I decided to install it on Snow Leopard, having already set up PEAR and PECL. Using pecl install apc, I downloaded APC which appeared to be fine. However when I ran some scripts, I got the error: Fatal error: Unknown: apc_fcntl_unlock failed: in Unknown […]
Working on the Panton Principles for Open Literature and Humanities
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 […]
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 […]