Author Archives: iain_emsley

I am a developer in the Janet web team as well as occasionally working on some Open Source projects. The views expressed on this blog are mine alone and are not to be taken as a position or comment by Janet.

Never ending death of the book

Devin Coldewey has an intriguing post over on Crunchgear regarding the Google Books project. Google have digitised some books. Just one or two. Like many other people, I find the project useful for finding information and books I’d never come across or lost somewhere. Sometimes I’ll buy the book, sometimes I just need a bit […]

Creating bibliographic resources from web pages

Given the increasingly digital nature of research, including not only websites but blogs, forums, wikis, the (in my view), beloved moleskin is becoming increasingly outdated. I’ve just finished writing my first book and had the joy of using moleskin notebooks to note down urls and make notes. I like moleskins a lot but pen 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 […]

Finding a space for NoSQL

ReadWriteWeb have a post on NoSQL (again?) by Audrey Watters which is a brief overview of the area.  The original post points the Heroku blog, where Adam Wiggins outlines the uses of NoSQL. I’m not an expert by any means but use Redis on a daily basis with the Rediska PHP library. I remember having […]

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: maintenance, and Dickens

It seems to be maintenance season again. Still carry on with the accounts systems and doing some work to those systems for most of the week. It is a slow job but I would rather spend time getting it right rather than rush something ut and spend the next year patching it because we rushed […]

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 […]