iNODE

I was poking around the web earlier today, doing a bit of research in preparation for my work on a consortial task force looking into “next generation library systems.” I launched my favorite desktop search application (DevonAgent) and it began pulling up the usual suspects:

• Rochester’s XC project (well-funded administrative infrastructure now in place but still no visible there there),
• open source projects like LibraryFind and VuFind that do offer give-it-a-try prototypes
• and vendor [envisioned|announced|delivered|supported] products like Endeca, Primo and Encore.

Then I hit this link which stopped me cold:

Link

I’m now working up a grant request to see if perhaps NAPA will fund some ideas I have kicking around…

I’m always interested in e-readers, e-books and the idea that one of these days I’ll have an easy way to read books without carrying a lot of them around. So yesterday’s unveiling of the Kindle device from Amazon is an important marker along the evolutionary trail of these things. No question about it, it seems to
come closest to what I envision a reader capable of doing and the future could be bright.

So why am I hoping it ends up in the digital equivalent of the remainder bin? I really don’t want to see this sort of DRM become the template for future devices.

John Gruber’s post on Daring Fireball nails it:

So the Kindle proposition is this: You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion. That’s no way to build a library.

I went to the dspace.org website this afternoon to check on something and was surprised but happy to see a story about VuFind on the opening page

I quickly hit the “live example” link in the text—eager to see another VuFind installation. Imagine my surprise when the link took me right to the very instance of VuFind we run here in the Digital Programs and Systems office.

Small world, isn’t it?

As root (or prepend the command string with ’sudo’) enter this command in a terminal window and you’ll be free of the translucent menubar “upgrade” introduced in Leopard (10.5). To reverse it and return to the see-thru bar, just put a 0 in place of the “1″ on the end of the string. If you want the sort of gray menubar found in 10.4, use .63 instead of 1 on the end of the line.

defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables' -dict 'CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE' 1

You’ll have to reboot to see the change.

Perhaps you’ve never seen a letter from the RIAA. What exactly do they say when their use of P2P software reveals the IP address of another P2P user–one on a campus network?

To give you a better sense of the tone (no pun intended), here’s one of the four notes I received yesterday. These aren’t DMCA-based “takedown” notices (we have a finely-tuned process in place for insuring compliance with those requests). No, this letter is an example of the RIAA reaching for something different and it’s surely no accident that the DMCA isn’t referenced:

Read more »

You can not administer a 10.4 (Tiger) server with the Admin Tools that ship with 10.5 (Leopard) server. This is really annoying (and not the way it has worked in the past).

Only solution, use screen sharing or ARD from your Leopard desktop to run Server Admin on an Tiger machine. Well, I suppose upgrading the server from 10.4 to 10.5 is another option but for some machines I’m not rushing down that path…and it may well be possible to run two versions of the server admin tools on the same client machine (but I don’t want to do that if I don’t have to).

I am upgrading one server so we can test whether or not it’s true that Leopard server adds LDAP support to QuickTime Streaming Server. Will report back in a week or so.

Google indexes everything, right?

Of course, if you’re running a web-based security camera system, you’d be sure to block access to your cameras, wouldn’t you? Well, not everyone does.

Search this in Google (with SafeSearch turned off) and you’ll get back plenty of security cameras (those made by Axis):

http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:%22jpg/image.jpg%3Fr%3D%22

Now Michael Zoellner has created a really interesting mashup…a Mac OS X screensaver that pulls these images in from around the web. I’d like to see him take the IP address and resolve it back to some Geo data so we could see where these images come from but that’s a project for another day.

http://i.document.m05.de/?p=418