NTS:: #! setup

CrunchBang is my favourite Linux distro, and I have it running on my fileserver, which is running on a paltry 256Mb of RAM.

I discovered after poking around how to shutdown OpenBox properly, without the whole sudo shutdown problem (I found it would hang, and power-off). This script allows me to power-off once downloads are complete, using auto-shutdown, together with DownThemAll.

#/bin/bash
#
let wait_time=$1*60
echo "will shutdown in $1 minutes"
sleep $wait_time
gdm-control --shutdown && openbox --exit
exit 0

One of the things I've got going nicely is DropBox, which normally works well under Nautilus, so not really so good on OpenBox. DropBox works well following the instructions on the OpenBox wiki.

NTS: SMP8635

There seems to be plenty of software out there to build a firmware - there's various places to look, but I think there's a complete picture between them:

http://b-rad.cc/wdlxtv/
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=1001&sid=112&lang=en
http://www.networkedmediatank.com/download/firmware/nmt/gpl/gpl.htm
http://wiki.opentvix.com/Sigma_Tools
http://www.wdtvc.com/downloads/
http://download.opentvix.com/

I've asked MagicTV NZ (aka HookTech), and they're in contact with Hong Kong, and hopefully trying to get the code from PixelMagic. It would be nice if there were media player abilities on this box:
... but I'm worried I'll brick the box in the process (and fall out of favour in the process!).

Slippery slope for linked data

I've been wondering for a while how to create a platform that used linked data natively.

There are plenty of platform building options which understand ordinary relational databases, but, for my requirements, there's nothing like Yii with a linked-data backend.

Anyway, I'd really like to see an OpenURL resolver re-use the data by making the requests it's given available as linked open data, in much the same way as SFX exposes it's data for other purposes, such as the bX service.

I also hope I can see a time when publishers, or a body representing them (CrossRef)will make the metadata for the articles they produce freely available, like Nature Publishing... hell, a lot of them expose their content to Google, so why not maximise their exposure via other means?

CrossRef Labs - worth a look!

If you work in the "information space", then it's nice to know that CrossRef have some developmental services, but there's one, (okay, two), in particular that I really like the look of:

1. Metadata Search complete with an OpenSearch plugin. This is not, of course a complete "search": "Instead, CrossRef Metadata Search is focused on allowing researchers to lookup citations using only terms that might appear in the bibliographic metadata of the item they are searching for."
2. an undocumented aspect which I discovered which is a more RESTful service providing the metadata for a given DOI. This is of the form: http://api.labs.crossref.org/{DOI}.xml

txtckr stage 1

Well, I've just committed a batch of updates to txtckr, which has finally moved beyond a mix of php & pseudo-php to a stage where I run it on a laptop without any errors (with the included very simple test).

It's almost at the stage of adding the finishing touches to the name handling, where the various openurl name parts get humpty-dumptied again. It's just skeleton coding at this stage, but hopefully a pretty sound basis for what's to come!

Google Co-op: EBSCO Connect search

There's been a bit of talk about EBSCO Connect content appearing on Google, and while it's not the sort of thing that thrills me necessarily, I found it was easy enough to create yet another Google Custom search, which would allow the retrieval of EBSCO connect material only.

There appears to be quite a bit of content there - give the search a go, and leave a response if you feel that way inclined...

Dealing with humans' (names)

Recently I hit a slight snag on a fairly common problem... dealing with names. This is a problematic area, given that everyone has one, and trying to build in what we know about names into software is actually a bit of a slog!

What I'm doing is trying to parse names, (mainly author names), for txtckr, so that one of the output display formats could be a reference, (APA, for example). To do this, I also need to untangle the "rft.au" information which is delivered through OpenURL, and I'm trying to build in some "forgiveness" to allow for people/companies that don't follow spec's properly!

Things to consider:

• with a full name, is it supplied first-name(s) last-name/surname, and if so, where does the surname begin? This is fine for a fair number of relatively simple names, but what about surnames which aren't, such as "van der Weerden"?
• if you're going to receive name fragments, how do you build these sensibly into software, so you can give permutations of the name, e.g. Pasley, Tom == Pasley, T. == Tom Pasley == T. Pasley?

No doubt I'm not the first person to tackle this problem, and I'm probably over-thinking things slightly, but I'm open to tips about projects that/from anyone else who's tackled this problem...