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, […]
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. […]
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 […]
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including not only websites but blogs, forums, wikis, the (in my view), beloved moleskin is becoming increasingly outdated.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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
It seems to be have been a week of frantic completion and refactoring. The first half was spent frantically converting html pages into PDFs using Verypdf’s HTMLtools server product. All in all the manual is very helpful and the test server could be set up quickly. It might have helped the other end if I’d […]
I’ve been trying to play catch up this week at work. One of the projects that I’ve been working on is the temporary storage of information. For one reason or another, one of the workers has decided to occasionally throw a fit and not do its job properly (on top of a connection that appears […]
