Category Archives: projects

Weeknotes: Open Correspondence

I’ve been talking with Rufus Pollock about moving the Open Correspondence web site as we’ve had the occasional snafu with bringing the site back up after maintenance. I’m pleased to say that we managed the move last night and the site is back up, DNS moved and so on. The one thing that really surprised […]

Making Milton sparql

I’ve been going over some ideas that have been bubbling in my mind for a while about using RDF to load in further details about a test in question. I’ve gone back to an old Milton file, the Areopagitica,  that I created for another project but never really used. Essentially its part of the Burke […]

Installing Xapian into Open Correspondence and next steps

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, […]

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 […]

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including not only websites but blogs, forums, wikis, the (in my view), beloved moleskin is becoming increasingly outdated.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 […]

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: 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: Redis, PHP, mail and SOAP

I’ve spent some time writing a queueing library using Redis as a backend. I started with the notion that it would need to be a FIFO queue but didn’t want to only use the in-built parts of PHP as a stack using array_pop or array_push. Whilst it might be faster, it doesn’t allow for queue […]