March 2007


I’ve come to the realization that I’m slowly beginning an affair behind my Common Law Wife’s back. I refer of course to PHP (As she is known around the way, it is a recursive acronym for PHP Hyper Puertorriqueño). I’ve been with her for about 5 years or so, and she’s been pretty good to me. We’ve had good times together, but I’ve been distracted lately by her cousin, Ruby. She’s been seducing me with her favorite drink, Rails. Ruby on Rails is a fantastic thing, its a red color liquor that seems to be a mix between Kool-Aid and Everclear. I’m not sure what to do, I’ve been pressured lately by friends, to dump PHP for Ruby on Rails (trust me, Ruby is always better on Rails). However, PHP was with me when my relationship with tickle (my pet name for TCL - can’t reveal her full name because she is in the witness protection program) ended.

If you have an advice for a man conflicted, please leave a comment below.

Allows editing of Marc records, and more useful to me, the exporting of records into MarcXML.

Source – Terry Reese, Oregon State University MarcEdit

Applying the following XSLT to the XML output, the records can be prepped for Solr.

Source – Andrew Nagy, Villanova University: MarcXML2Solr.

Code4lib – Wrap up (not gonna go crazy and rewrite the wheel) visit the code4lib site and read everyone elses blogs!

Solr - covered in detail during the pre-conference. High powered search interface for Lucene.

Villanova’s Web Portal – They were essentially building an “ILS Independent Search Tool” based on Solr. He informed us that he has approximately 500k records in his development system, and returns search results in about 0.1 seconds. Solr also has facet features, however they do decrease performance.

NCSU Site Search – Really a “mash up” of several components. Currently using, Nutch, Swish-E and Web Services into their catalog. I will be following this model shortly. Nutch is an indexing and searching interface to Lucene (isn’t everything), while Swish-e is a similar yet significantly less powerful tool. It is a Perl application which allows spidering and indexing of pages. We currently use it, but I’m very unhappy with it.

Just my synopsis of projects I plan on following up on.


P1050178.jpg

Originally uploaded by antonioG4.
Now, I’m not blaming this guy, but when your flight is delayed and you see this, it pretty much makes you wonder what an “Air Traffic Controller” delay is. Someone is going to have to convince me that the controllers are doing something other than having a coffee or lunch break.

Return trip from Atlanta (code4lib 2007)


1. Intranet Home Page

Originally uploaded by nengard.
From the Jenkins Law Library in Philadelphia. Staff manage and add information for their site with this in house built intranet.