So it's been a while since I've posted. I've been busy of late. Recently my dog Veronica tore her ACL. She needs to be kenneled if she's not laying on a pillow with someone nearby holding her leash to make sure she doesn't try something stupid.  Like running for a door. Or jumping onto a couch. Not being allowed on the couches may be the most traumatic part for her of the whole experience so far. (Actually, doing her business on a leash probably is the worse for her. The other day she actually went behind some bushes in order to do so...)

As for us, it's surprisingly exhausting sitting next to a dog for most of a night.

I figured somehow that at least it would get me time to do some writing and work on some projects, but so far that's failed to happen.  I've managed to start several though ;).

Squarespace 5 to Squarespace 6

One is that I use Squarespace for this site, in part to lend some indirect support to the TWiT network and in part because I don't want to deal with patching any more software than I already do :).  Squarespace just recently underwent a major version upgrade.

I've been playing around with their new system as I was intending to migrate this site over, but I can't quite get the hang of it.  Images are the biggest issue, which didn't import as nicely as I'd like.  (Thumbnails did, but not the originals...) I think at this point I'll keep learning the new system, but I'm delaying the rollover.  Hopefully I can go to it before Christmas, but I'm not counting on it at this point.

Halloween

Colleen and I are working on decorations and our costumes, although it's mostly in the planning stages at the moment. She's found this stuff called Glowire that's pretty cool.  Essentially a wire that will glow with a neonish light.  We'll be going as a cyberpunk couple, cobbling together some wires and spare parts to make jacks.  We need to get cracking on assembling the pieces to that.  I'll post pics when we get done. It's also leading me to read up more on the history of punk.

Which leads me too...

Reading

I've been reading a weird mix of stuff lately and some of it in fits and spurts. Books near me right now are a mostly read copy of Melville's Pierre, a book on bacon, I Am Legend, The Rough Guide to Punk,  George R. R. Martin's The Sandkings, The Brewmaster's Table, a history of underwear, and few more I can't quite see from here.  That doesn't count some of the electronic books I have, including the very cool Oral LIterature of Africa, which was successfully unglued.

TV & Movies

Been watching a whole bunch of movies I've been meaning to see for a while.  Recently knocked off the list was Cannonball Run.  Right now I'm working my way through Battlestar Galactica show (the new but not so new anymore show) which is rather addicting.

And finally...

Git Happy

I've started a few projects on github.  One, modifying the Barcode Scanner app for the Android to read the Library's version of Codabar was pretty easy as most of the Codabar code was already present.  Uncommenting a few lines was all it took to get it working.  I have also commented out some of the other formats and added a check digit algorithm. Without the algorithm it would return with junk just a little too frequently.  Trade-off is now it is slow and doesn't work well in low light. I might experiment with replacing it with something less taxing, like checking the barcode is 14 digits and starts with 2 or a 3. I''m also hoping to make it so it can work with the existing app side-by-side, but need to do a little more research there.

A few months ago I put a simple demonstration of using NFC normalization with perl and MARC records and some examples of pulling information out of Voyager and putting in into Unicode databases, called voy2unicode.  It needs some more examples, but it is a good base for now.

Speaking of MARC, I've contributed some records to two MARC code4lib repositories on github: MARCthulhu and MARC Records  MARCthulhu was directly inspired by Simon Spiro as a repository of really horrible records, both for testing and just some examples of how bad it can get. I created MARC Records as it seemed like there were some useful edge cases to test for that might be only moderately mangled records.  So far both repositories are pretty slim, but maybe I'll be able to promote them at this year's Code4Lib.

Well, that's about enough for now.

Still, I've been watching more and more of Revision3. First started with Ben Heck's show, but now I've been watching Hak5 and also their quick tips called HakTip.  (I'll probably try to catch some episodes of Scam School soon as well, but that's a bit of an aside.).

If you're a fan of Security Now over at the TwiT network, I can highly recommend watching some of the Hak5 episodes.  Great info on security.  I've been watching some of their old episodes on encryption techniques and the inner workings of SSL.

There's also excellent amount of material on linux.  The episodes are a real welcome change from some of the more boring tech video podcasts consisting of one guy talking into a camera with some screen capture software.

Currently I'm working through the Linux 101 HakTIp episodes.  Mostly it is material I already know, but they're pretty short and a useful reminder of some things I'd forgotten with just enough new stuff to keep watching episodes. If you've always wanted to get better on the command line, they're a great place to start.

I know Ed was hoping it might even lead to part-time and contract work where someone might set up a short-term need and a programmer with a lot of library knowledge could fill it.  Say, adapt Evergreen so it interacts with some digital library software that it doesn't currently work with.  I haven't seen many of those yet, but hopefully we'll see those become more common. It would make earning a little extra money consulting far easier. 

Last weekend Colleen and V competed in the local Obedience/Rally competition.  They did very well, earning three ribbons.  All V needs to do is to get one more and she has her first title for Obedience!

Sorry for the delay (and the uncropped image, wanted ). 

I might be shifting Fun Photo Friday to be every two weeks since I haven't been able to actually get my act together.  However, part of my motivation for this was to both keep the blog lively and also encourage me to take more photos and actually organize them.

Many, many pictures on my phone are of my dog looking up a tree.  Her favorite sport is to chase a squirrel up a tree and sit there.  And sit there. And sit....

And once in a blue moon she'll get excited enough to let out a yip.  Once someone else was panicked she'd hurt herself and we had to explain that's her "I'm going to eat you" squeal/yip.

They also have a mechanism for adding books to a "wishlist" that will give them an indication of works that people want and what right-holders they should track down.

This is a brilliant way to deal with some of those really important and hard to find out of print books.  For example, I've wishlisted a very good biography by Greg Rickmann of Philip K. Dick called To the High Tower.  It's a work that I stumbled across that's sought out by a small circle of Philip K Dick fans. 

It's not clear if there's enough demand for another printing, but unglue.it offers a chance that it could be made easily available again while also giving the author further profit he's not going to see of this long-since sold out book otherwise.  I have had the good fortune to read it due to the fact I work at a major library that has a ton of access of books, but I know many a sci-fi fan that doesn't have the resources I do.

I also must admit that I'm interested to see if this model works.  I've thought about trying to do a small hobby side business of making value-added public domain works and perhaps doing something similar to unglue.it with near-orphaned copyright works.  However, tracking down right-holders has proved troublesome enough that it's remained in my large bucket o' ideas I'd like to do someday.  I'm hoping unglue.it takes off enough that it'll create a infrastructure that might make it easier to do projects of this nature.

Here's what I'm pledging to:

Digging through some of my older photos and found this picture I took of the moon.  Given the timestamp I suspect that Colleen and I were walking the couple of blocks to our local voting place last November.

On another note, I'm going to be playing with my format for these posts.  I might only post every two weeks.  It turns out most of my archived photos are of my dog looking at things.  That might be more exciting to me than others.

I'm also trying to take more pictures, but I'm still not much of a photographer.  I'll also try to get some of the photos I took in Salt Lake City.  I just don't want any one "theme" to dominate too long.