Re: [CODE4LIB] Wikis
We have used the fsckeditor for our gui editor with mediawiki for about 5 years now. It is added as a mediawiki extension. Certainly helps not making everyone learn wiki syntax as before. -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Nathan Tallman Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2012 9:05 AM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Wikis That's what I'm worried about with MediaWiki. The syntax used when creating and editing pages isn't intuitive and I'm afraid people won't want to use it. I was hoping someone would recommend a wiki with more of a WYSIWYG type of editing interface. Was also hoping to stick with FLOSS, but perhaps I should at least peak at Confluence. Thanks for the input, Nathan On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 8:50 AM, Nate Vack wrote: > If you're expecting "everyone" to create and edit pages, it will be > very hard to get widespread adoption with it. >
Re: [CODE4LIB] Trends with virtualization
I have seen the pendulum swing back and forth several times over the last 20 years between dumb terminals and complete PC's with their own set of apps each. Philosophically, the tension is between control and anarchy; cost is just brought in to justify your position. If you love control, then dumb terminals are what you want. Since this means things are centralized, it requires important hardware and backup systems to make sure it never goes down. I think of this as the "nuclear aircraft carrier mentality" - sinking a nuclear carrier would be such a catastrophe (to both sides) that you need umpteen other ships to protect it from ever happening. I am more of an anarchist: I have faith in people's innate ability to muddle through okay for themselves. It doesn't bother me so much that people make mistakes and do dumb things; I try to set things up to blunt that, but other people's mistakes really not my responsibility. I try to set things up more on the side of "boppo the clown" - the weighted blow-up figure that you can keep hitting forever and still have it come back without effort. So I love being able to snapshot VMs before doing anything new; no longer are you risking rebuilding the whole machine every time you update/install something new. VMs let me give people the leeway to shoot themselves in the foot without hurting others. This is a great confidence-builder for people; they will come up with new ways of doing things far more often when the penalties for mistakes are not so severe. The second thing I love about vms is that you can delete them. This is because you can afford to use them for just one or two things. In the old days (pre-2006) when everything was on bare metal, you bought a big machine (aircraft carrier) and put all the business processes on it until there were too many to ever have the server go down. In practical terms, security was non-existent, because no one could ever keep up with which task needed to do what after a while, and no one wanted to screw up some important process that everyone had forgotten needed rights to some files somewhere obscure. So the longer a server lasted, the more extra rights were left over from previous business processes that no one even quite remembered any more. But a VM you can delete when the main business process on it stops. You will have had some security creep unless you really named your groups well, but that all goes away when you kill the VM. I brought up the security aspect because it is an argument which can actually appeal to those worried about loss of control and proliferating VMs. (I realize I probably have had a sheltered life, but I have only once been in a place that had more groups than people, with the groups controlling file access named so everyone knew what the main business process was and what the sub-task was.) --Ian Richmond -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Genny Engel Sent: Monday, July 11, 2011 2:51 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Trends with virtualization I *had* the entire computer lab go down when the network failed once. That's when I switched it all to local desktops. The security was way easier to manage with a hosted desktop (I basically didn't have to manage it at all) but we weren't set up to offer any alternative when the network server hiccupped. It took me a lot of time to learn how to set up adequate security on an individual desktop, but once I got a good profile set up, I copied the image to all the other PCs and we were set. There weren't any equipment cost differences either way, as I recall. On moving things to the cloud, I'm still leery, especially after that Amazon thing a few months ago. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1379474/Web-chaos-Amazon-cloud-failure-crashes-major-websites-Playstation-Network-goes-AGAIN.html Genny Engel Internet Librarian Sonoma County Library gen...@sonoma.lib.ca.us www.sonomalibrary.org 707 545-0831 x581 -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Madrigal, Juan A Sent: Monday, July 11, 2011 8:21 AM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Trends with virtualization Its true what they say, history does repeat itself! I don't see how virtualization is much different from a dummy terminal connected to a mainframe. I'd hate to see an entire computer lab go down should the network fail. The only real promise is for making web development and server management easier. Vmware is looking to make thing easier with CloudFoundry http://cloudfoundry.org/ along with Activestate and Stackato http://www.activestate.com/cloud I definitely want to take those two out for a test run. Deployment looks dead simple. Juan Madrigal Web Developer Web and Emerging Technologies University of Miami Richter Library On 7/11/11 10:38 AM, "Nate Vac
Re: [CODE4LIB] ipsCA Certs
I think you are correct. I and another library went and got a re-issued cert from ipsCA, stuck it in ezproxy, and found that Firefox as well as opera gave a security warning. (Actually, Opera never did work with the old ipsCA cert either.) There is also correspondence between Mozilla and ipsCA, culminating in a note that Mozilla won't be activating the ipsCA cert, since they are past the deadline. I was interested from the language that there seemed to be a way of activating certs rather than just putting them in there; perhaps you are seeing "inactive" certs from ipsCA? -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Godmar Back Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 2:52 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] ipsCA Certs Hi, in my role as unpaid tech advisor for our local library, may I ask a question about the ipsCA issue? Is my understanding correct that ipsCA currently reissues certificates [1] signed with a root CA that is not yet in Mozilla products, due to IPS's delaying the necessary vetting process [2]? In other words, Mozilla users would see security warnings even if a reissued certificate was used? The reason I'm confused is that I, like David, saw a number of still valid certificates from "IPS Internet publishing Services s.l." already shipping with Firefox, alongside the now-expired certificate. But I suppose those certificates are for something else and the reissued certificates won't be signed using them? Thanks, - Godmar [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=529286 [1] http://certs.ipsca.com/Support/hierarchy-ipsca.asp On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 4:02 PM, John Wynstra wrote: > Out of curiosity, did anyone else using ipsCA certs receive notification > that due to the coming expiration of their root CA (December 29,2009), they > would need a reissued cert under a new root CA? > > I am uncertain as to how this new Root CA will become a part of the > browsers trusted roots without some type of user action including a software > upgrade, but the following library website instructions lead me to believe > that this is not going to be smooth. http://bit.ly/53Npel > > We are just about to go live with EZProxy in January with an ipsCA cert > issued a few months ago, and I am not about to do that if I have serious > browser support issue. > > > -- > <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> > John Wynstra > Library Information Systems Specialist > Rod Library > University of Northern Iowa > Cedar Falls, IA 50613 > wyns...@uni.edu > (319)273-6399 > <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> >
Re: [CODE4LIB] MySQL Stop Words
Mysql also skips any words fewer than 4 letters long unless you put in a special line in the config file. From: Code for Libraries [code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Genny Engel [gen...@sonoma.lib.ca.us] Sent: Friday, May 29, 2009 3:41 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] MySQL Stop Words Once I read a study where the document collection to be indexed was in a narrow technical field, and the goal was to present a search that quickly isolated ONLY the most relevant documents. To this end, they stopworded everything that didn't sufficiently distinguish one document from another. Their stopword list comprised some 30,000 terms! If your goal, on the other hand, is to maximize recall at some expense of precision, beware of MySQL full-text MATCH because it dynamically computes new stopwords. Note this little side note in section 11.8.1 of the manual: For very small tables, word distribution does not adequately reflect their semantic value, and this model may sometimes produce bizarre results. For example, although the word "MySQL" is present in every row of the articles table shown earlier, a search for the word produces no results [ ... ] The search result is empty because the word "MySQL" is present in at least 50% of the rows. As such, it is effectively treated as a stopword. For large data sets, this is the most desirable behavior: A natural language query should not return every second row from a 1GB table. For small data sets, it may be less desirable. Genny Engel Sonoma County Library gen...@sonoma.lib.ca.us 707 545-0831 x581 www.sonomalibrary.org >>> dclout...@co.marin.ca.us 05/29/09 11:26AM >>> In building a search function for some of our internal documents in PHP / MySQL, I took a look at the default list of MySQL English language stop words used in the natural language searching feature. The list is actually quite extensive, and goes well beyond the typical list of "to be" cognates, common prepositions, conjunctions, etc. It also includes a large number of keywords that librarians or academic users might want to search for. Here are a few examples: available appropriate course follow former novel There are quite a number of other stop words that I think are suspect. The full list of stop words is located here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/fulltext-stopwords.html I guess the point is that if you're building a library application that takes advantage of MySQL's fulltext searching features, you might want to customize you stop words list on your MySQL installation if you think your library users might want to search the word "novel". - David --- David Cloutman Electronic Services Librarian Marin County Free Library Email Disclaimer: http://www.co.marin.ca.us/nav/misc/EmailDisclaimer.cfm
Re: [CODE4LIB] Server names at libraries
It crosses my mind that most of server names mentioned so far are like modern art, where x artist is responding to y school neither of whom have ever been seen by anyone outside NYC. You have to be in the know for it to make sense. What about naming the server so that users would know what it did from the name? We used to have a library web server named libweb, which I always liked, as it sort of made sense to people. Now all our new ones are named after periodic elements. Not being a chemistry major, I still have to think twice which one is radon and which strontium etc. -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tim Spalding Sent: Friday, October 27, 2006 10:45 AM To: CODE4LIB@listserv.nd.edu Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Server names at libraries Our severs are all Greek gods-Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Athena. Zeus is the master, of course. I didn't decide on Athena's name, or I would have made it Artemis. For a storage server I inflicted LibraryThing's employees with the greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, a pronunciation disaster. (You'd think people would know from mnemonic, but even the dictionary tells people to pronounce that as if it started with n.) Mnemosyne had her revenge, however, since it's now completely broken.
