practice and perfect

whoever said practice makes perfect is a jerk. it may make you slightly better than terrible, you're lucky when someone shows up and whoops ya. and that reminds of a singularly decent quote

"Go ahead and do your best - don't think for an instance that you're doing very well, doing much right, or worth noting, really though - go ahead and do your best, it's worth it." -Stein Kretsinger

walking the walk go the adventurers - 1600 miles of coast line from Florida to New York. http://beachwalkproject.com

Viva le Jihad - Sicily 1943

From recent work on bluespader.org surfaces this moment in history - garnered straight from the 26th Infantry log files. It is worth mentioning only as a counterpoint to current relationship status between americans and arabs at a political level. Clearly times have changed

27 July 1943

This was the 17th day of the campaign.

At 0020 hours the radio operator for headquarters listened to the message tapped out, grinned and then handed it to a runner. The runner looked at the message, also smiled, and then took it to the Staff, still up and about in the small black operations tent. Captain Dreier looked at the message, nodded his thanks to the runner and dismissed him. Next to get the news was the Colonel, who announced the news to all the officers.

The 4th Tabor would be attached to the 1st Infantry Division, and would operate on the left flank of the Division, wearing French helmets and American fatigues.

Translated, that meant a regiment of Moroccans called Goums, composed of 4 companies, would augment the division effort. These Moroccan warriors with their pigtails and brown burnous’ were not entirely new to us, either in this war or World War I. In the great summer offensives launched by the Allies in 1918, the 1st Division had operated with the First Moroccan Division on its flank. And in this war, during the Ousseltia Valley campaign, these deadly raiders had spread death and terror among the German and Italian units on the djebela guarding the road to Kairouan. The Axis troops knew that these Goumiers had a reputation for not taking any prisoners, and for delighting in fighting at very close quarters – preferable with knives. Now they were to work with us, and the chances were that the Italians and Germans would know it double-quick time the Goumiers were around. No wonder the officers grinned. They knew the short fierce raids that the Goumiers liked to launch. And they knew the incessant guard duty it entailed to ward off such sudden blows; it was bound to affect morale.

Wiki spreadsheets, city budgets, wikicalc vs jot.com vs editgrid.com

The next wave of wiki's is out, and hallelujah, they don't (all / totally) suck. Here to say editgrid.com is fantastic.

Meet the contenders:

Let me spare you the details to start out with (besides, everything listed alphabetically puts editgrid in first anyhow)

editgrid.com: comin' at ya live from Hong Kong, this bad boy has it all. There's really not a good reason in my mind to review the other commercial piece (jot.com) except to trash it and save you the reader some troubles. EditGrid is amazing, uploaded an xls file with a couple thousand rows. Formatting - retained! Multiple tables in a spreadsheet? No Problem! EditGrid has it all. This is a straight up killer ap. Posted the entire city of Charlottesville line-item budget and voila! Up in a few minutes. Not surprisingly this cite is getting hit hard at the mooment, expect some delays while their netadmins deal with the reality of being excellent.

Jot.com (now google's love child, and prolly soon to move towards non-suck is a nice application that bites bytes). It's being revamped right now, this "lucky" author got to check it out pre-google, so there's no telling what the new release will do, check back in a few months, it's google, and it's bound to get better with some resources. So far however.... nothin' werked, as they say. Cut'n'Paste your spreadsheet and watch your computer crash and burn. No format retention and formulas don't work. This thing sucks


wikicalc : Dan Brinklin worked his way in to the geek hall of fame with visicalc almost 20 years ago. His new spreadsheet wikicalc is open source gpl, and so it gets some big points for that. Indeed with a decent server this may be a killer ap. It also has some decent cut'n'paste features, however it flakes out pretty hard on a serious data load. On the plus side it retains some formulas and can do formatting - WAY BETTER THAN JOT.COM and free open source! Even its alpha release is more inspiring than the jot.com crud.

wikicalc, jotspot, charlottesville city budget

Wikicalc deserves some props for being a groovy open source spreadsheet wiki that's very decent for it's price, and works through some crucial bits of excel, so as to retain basic formulas and such.

With jot.com going to google.com last week there's another bunch of kids in the same playgroundsure to bring good attention to the arena where more transparent business practices can be developed, standardized, and optimized. Their product is sleek AJAX based and with calendar and location parsing technology built in this is one another slick development for the google folks.

And so that brings it around to the c-village 'hood skool. - charlottesville.jot.com - starting out with some of the non-general stuff, and working towards the line item morsels.

Carnegie Mellon Technology in the Arts

had a great time. Greeted at the entrance of CMU by a talking computer that seemed to recognize my lostness - "Do you need directions" came the metallic max headromesque voice.... I wasn't sure how advanced this computer was and assumed it was referring to direction in the sense of a few meters, as opposed to some greater direction in life....Anyhow, i responded yes about the time a friendly human concierge arrived to get me to the first meeting of the day. Not sure whether the human was controlled by the computer or whether it was of higher elegance... anyhow....

And as it happened the first meeting "Funding Technology Projects" was right down the hall. Met with Mr. Mackie of the Andrew Mellon Foundation - he is the head of Research in Technology Funding. He emphasized open source "if you're looking to spend on proprietary software look elsewhere" (http://www.mellon.org/research_it.html) and also emphasized use of open standards (The Mellon Foundation (along with MIT and others) funded dSpace, which is something we already ascribe to through Greenstone). **** If we're interested in collaborating on a school bus full of digitization equipment this would be the guy to talk to. they are playing with huge sums of money and we should really try to start something with them "if we fund you once we'll probably fund you again" -- in other words they like long term relationships.

Although initially slated to speak on Joomla's content management system (marshallrotc.org Virginia Verified Voting) when I got to looking at the schedule two other presenters wanted to cover Joomla and so I shifted my focus to Greenstone and IBM's analysis of wikipedia showing the underlying stability of the wiki format. Also met with Ellen Arnold, who invited me to be a grant reviewer for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). I suspect this is a bit like being invited into the book of the month club, anyhow, I was earnestly flattered and accepted.


Otherwise enjoyed Pittsburgh a fair bit. Solid steel town, and affordable housing - imagine paying under 70K for a *solid* brick house? Went up Washington hill for the view, ate a hoagie, and went to a comic book convention across the street from my lodging. Very glad to be back, however must admit Pittsburgh is a most impressive and down to earth city. I also studied some of the requirements for funding in Pennsylvania, and would be glad to pass on some of that to the folks in Carlisle if they're not already well aware. The Bayer Foundation seemed very interested when I was talking about library->library services.

sketch-up google earth

'nuf said. great software, fun and easy for architecture, stage, gis, and connected neatly to google earth. more on the projects @ http://www.rockbridgebusiness.com

Monetizing library records marc, usmarc, marcxml, marc 97 etc with Koha and the Liblime Enhancement

OK - started this a few months ago, and really not totally convinced Koha is gonna do what I need - neverthless it's worth a look if all you've got are a bunch of Marc Records. Greenstone.org's product, however, handles marc and a gajillion other formats....

The Enhanced Koha LibLime style is an amazing piece of code, picking up where the left of the geeksquads in dev land leave off - integrating a functional and user-friendly Amazon.com row into the matrix let's users "buy it now" from amazon while browsing through the collection in Koha gives libraries looking to justify digitizing their collections added incentive.

Getting Koha running can be a bit of work, depending on your operating system. IndexData does most of their work on Debian based systems (think Ubuntu) - and if you're running anything else it may take a few tries to get the whole thing running.

For a better understanding of the install process they have created a wiki and decent documentation.