http://timesync.gmu.edu/wordpress The weblog of Digital Programs and Systems at George Mason University Libraries Tue, 17 Nov 2009 01:10:08 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Poking around Amazon's Mechanical Turk today, I found this "HIT" (Human Intelligence Task) available to webworkers. The author/publisher is offering $4.00 if you request the book from your library (which I guess they hope will trigger a wave of purchases). I don't know why it surprised ... http://timesync.gmu.edu/wordpress/?p=988 Earlier today a tweet from Dan Cohen pointed me to an interesting service offered by NC State: http://twitter.ncsu.edu/ They were nice enough to offer a link to their Zend-framework based PHP code on the site so I spent a few minutes today building a Mason tweet aggregator. It still needs a ... http://timesync.gmu.edu/wordpress/?p=986 This week I've been staring at a collection of just over 29,000 PDFs. Image-only copies of thousands of documents created with "..the software that came with the scanner." My task? Figuring out the right tools and workflow to get these PDFs through an OCR process so we can unlock ... http://timesync.gmu.edu/wordpress/?p=965 I've long thought that if you wanted the fastest browser experience on a Mac, you went with the nightly Webkit build from http://nightly.webkit.org/. So I was surprised today when I happened on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark site and put several browsers through their paces. One caveat, this test is measuring ... http://timesync.gmu.edu/wordpress/?p=964 I like to fix things till they break. Today's post is a cautionary tale for that admittedly small niche of sysadmins running OSX server on XServes upgraded in place from Leopard to Snow Leopard... For the past few weeks I've been tweaking the JSP interface of our MARS system and doing ... http://timesync.gmu.edu/wordpress/?p=956 Got an iPhone 3GS the other day (clearly I'm behind the mobile curve but then I hate talking on the phone so it took me a while to "get it"). Anyway, after just a few days with the thing, I realize I need to begin tweaking some of the ... http://timesync.gmu.edu/wordpress/?p=952