iNODE

Mentioned the other day that I was working on adding a “send this call number to your cell phone” capability to our Voyager OPAC (mitigating the “find a scrap of paper” problem). I was heading down the JavaScript path (based on a email exchange I had with Kevin Gilbertson of Wake Forest) when I got a tip that Joel Shields, Library Portal Specialist at the Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC), had developed similar functionality for their Aladin system (also a Voyager catalog).

Emailed Joel and got a quick reply: while his code was not yet in production, he’d be more than happy to share it with me. That was really nice of him but to my mind even nicer was the fact that he coded his solution in PHP—meaning I could sidestep all the browser-specific issues that accompany (plague?) javascript development.

Following Joel’s well-documented instructions, I had the feature up and running within the hour. I made a few modifications to the logic for parsing out the call number then added the new capability to our OPAC with a “Send Call Number to  Phone (beta) label.

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Getting started on a project where I’ll try to add a “send this item’s location to my cellphone” link in our OPAC (a 21st century analog to the little box of index cards and stubby pencils that sat near card catalogs in the last century). Thanks to Kevin Gilbertson, Web & Digital Projects Librarian down at Wake Forest University for sharing some javascript and a few insights with me.  His Voyager OPAC is worth the visit.

Anyway, as part of the project, I’m gathering in a list of SMS gateways for various cell carriers (send a short email to the address and it becomes a text message on the recipient’s phone).   They’re posted here for my future reference and just in case this info would help another reader.

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Brian Krebs, writing in his Security Fix column for the Washington Post, had this to say this morning:

Unknown hackers broke into George Mason University’s e-mail system and sent students a forged message from the school’s provost early this morning stating that Election Day had been moved to Nov. 5.

The messaged, dated 1:16 a.m., Nov. 4, with the subject line : Election Day Update, read:

To the Mason Community:

Please note that election day has been moved to November 5th. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Peter N. Stearns
Provost

Seven hours later, students, faculty and staff received another message, this time from the real GMU provost, who blamed the e-mail hoax on a compromise of the school’s e-mail system.

How the story became that Mason’s email server was hacked when the trail of the message headers showed clearly that it came in through the mail slot like any other message is not what you’d expect to read in a security column.

Here are excerpts from the header:

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