April 2005

There were 26 posts published in April 2005 (this is page 2 of 3).

Permanency on the Web

A couple things I’ve seen recently on Google have given me pause to think. Both of the items in question exist because of the fact that my parents moved recently.

First, Google has a feature that lets you do a reverse lookup on phone numbers. My parents’ phone number still leads to their old address, even though the move happened eight months ago now.

Similarly, Google maps does not know that the neighborhood they live in now (it was newly built) even exists! Putting the street address into any online mapping service, not just Google, dumps you into the middle of the closest town, with not even an error message that the address couldn’t be found.

I can’t find any sort of policy that states how often these things get updated. And I’m sure these aren’t the only examples of such inaccurate data on the web. It’s all well and good to do an excellent job of putting traditionally print data online, but what if it never gets updated? A new phone book is sent out every year. I’ll be interested to see if the online equivalents do the same.

Hidden Peanuts 2.1

I’ve just done a bit of an update on the site! I had an assignment to do for my Information Architecture class, and the redesign fit it perfectly (The switch to WordPress 1.5 a bit back was actually part of the same assignment).

No huge changes. I eliminated the ARG category listing, since I almost never post anything under it, and anything that does get put there fits under Gaming just as well. I also added in some links in the upper right, including my resume. I tweaked the existing theme a bit as well, probably nothing too noticable.

I think I’m finally almost 100% satisfied with the way the site is set up!

Flame Shields to Full!

I’m on my way to bed, but just ran across an article:

Primitivist OR Luddite AND Librarian

It’s rather… inflammatory to say the least.

Here’s the ending line:

“Perhaps it is time to throw the computers and the tech-savvy librarians out of our libraries.”

I’m not sure quite what to make of it yet, except to say that I obviously disagree. Still being in school, I’m probably not qualified to respond to many of the points anyway. So here’s some good responses from others wiser than I that I agree with 100%:

From Greg

From Steven

P.S. – I’ve updated my Permalink structure to something more logical. If you’ve got any links to entries saved, you’ll probably have to update them. Sorry! But now it’s a much clearer system I think.

Who Knew?

Yesterday I learned that the Library of Congress recommends for Dewey placement:

Pirates are filed under True Crime.

Lewis and Clark are filed under Travel (next to books like guides to hotels in the Western states).

Jybe redux

I had a nice brief e-mail exchange with one of the folks at Jybe the other day about some webmail issues. Brian seems like a genuinely good person, and I just wanted to toss another link their way. It’s an interesting little piece of co-browsing software, and I look forward to seeing where it goes.

Hope they can handle the thundering hordes of HP readers!

Will Work For Food

Why is the job picture so different between LIS professors and practicing librarians?

Professors always tell me that jobs are plentiful and easy to come by. People I meet in the field almost universally tell me it could take a while before I find anything.

It’s sort of demoralizing.

For more, see LISnews.com

Apologies for lack of posts recently, end of semester rush is upon me.

Printability in Blogs

Walt Crawford’s newest issue of Cites & Insights is out! It contains a well-executed article about printability of blogs, or rather the lack thereof.

Of course, the whole issue is worth reading, not just this article.

But I’m very happy to see that Hidden Peanuts made the A-List of printable blogs! But as he says, that doesn’t account for content. 🙂 I thank WordPress more than anything I’ve done; there’s been no conscious effort on my part to make HP any more or less printable.

That’s why I like the article so much. It’s something I’d never even thought about before, but now strikes me as an issue worth considering. I don’t imagine that many readers would be interested in printing out what I have to say, for any of Crawford’s three reasons, but of course other blogs lend themselves to that much more ably.

After reading the piece, I checked out HP in print preview out of curiosity. Interestingly, I get slightly different results between browsers. If an image straddles a page break, Firefox just cuts the image in half – one part on page 1, the rest on page 2. IE is a little more intelligent, and bumps the whole image to the second page. I gotta give Microsoft the edge in this department.

Webcasting

At the end of last year Fox started airing a ‘reality’ show called My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss.

The Premise: On the surface, a clone of The Apprentice.
The Catch: The boss doing the firing, and everyone else besides the contestants, is an actor. The whole thing is a setup.

The boss and company then proceed to mess with the contestants hilariously. My favorite challenge was the paintball one: Each team must try to protect one of their members from a paintball attack from the boss, while accomplishing everyday office tasks.

Unfortunately, it was cancelled after just five of the ten episodes aired.

Thankfully, Fox put episodes 6-10 online! They’ve been up for about a month now it appears, but somehow I’d missed the anouncement.

First Battlestar Galactica, now this. I’m crossing my fingers that studios are finally catching on to the possibilities of online TV show distribution.

ColdFusion

I need to take a moment to sing the praises of Macromedia’s ColdFusion.

Before you yell at me, yes I’m sure there are better and/or more efficient ways to do database-driven web sites. PHP, ASP, etc. But ColdFusion is simple. The basic code is almost human readable, and anyone who knows a bit of HTML can pick it up quickly.

For the scale of what I’m doing (a class project), CF gets the job done and does it well. I’ll save hours!

RSS full text

You might notice that I’ve upped my RSS feed to show full text of the entries. Sorry about the delay, I assumed it was already so.