.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

Recent books I’ve cataloged for librarything, originally uploaded by Raymond Yee.

I’m intrigued by the orders of magnitude difference in the popularity of the last several books I put into my LibraryThing catalog — from 1 (I’m the only one with that book) to 43 to 458 to 1658.

A training classroom in the MPC Library and Technology Center, originally uploaded by Raymond Yee.

This room MPC Library is the location for a workshop I ran on “remixing the library” on Friday, January 19.

Three ways to force Firefox extensions compatibility

scrapblog looks interesting. Like Tabblo, which I have played with. I put myself on the notification list for scrapblog.

I found getting namespaces to work with XSLT a bit tricky. Reading XML.com: Namespaces and XSLT Stylesheets helped.

Screencast: Drupal Mashup Machine Zacker.org: Is Drupal a good mashup platform?

I’m writing a chapter on online maps for my personal information remix book. One question I will answer in the chapter is how to build a Google Map or Yahoo map without any programming. To that end, I’m using Map Builder::Rapid mashup development tool for Google and Yahoo maps! to build a sample map: Personal Map – Some bookstores I like (Google map) and Some bookstores I like (Yahoo map).

I’ve been humbled by the amount of time and effort it has taken me to write a Python app to extract the entries on my Manila sites.  Maybe I’m not as great of a programmer as I think I am after all!  I’ve run into lots of little challenges so far and have kept detailed notes, but I’m not ready to explain the pieces yet.  I figure that I’ll do so when I unveil the whole package of code and release the tool to the public.

I’m teaching “Mixing and Remixing Information” once again Spring 2007. I’m also writing a book on the subject matter of the course. The book proposal that I had originally written follows a logic that does not account for the demands of teaching a 15 week course that meets twice a week. I now need to create myself a schedule which does reconcile the sometimes conflicting, but somtimes harmonious, demands of writing a book and teaching a course during an overlapping time frame.

One decision that I’m contemplating right now is whether to use Python in the course. I am definitely planning to use Python as the core language to illustrate my book, and therefore, it might make sense to use it also in my course. Last spring, I stayed away from Python because the primary textbook for the course (oreilly.com — Online Catalog: Flickr Hacks) used Perl and PHP. The students found PHP to their liking but, by and large, found Perl to be a bit confusing. I didn’t make a concerted effort to teach programming directly. This time around, I will probably push programming techniques more explicilty and use Python for those purposes. I would like to retain some PHP and perhaps introduce Ruby on Rails, but we’ll see.

Even though I’ve been back from my vacation almost two weeks now, I’m only now managing to get back to writing on my various weblogs. Though I can blame countless numbers of distractions, I will single out computer programming for particular admonition. In my ideal working framework, I would spend half my day programming and the other half writing. In the last weeks, whenever I start programming, I have found it tough to stop. Including today. My immediate programming task is to expand ManilaExporter, an application to export data out of a Manila site so that a user can migrate that information to other sources, such as another weblog. Though relatively straightforward in principle, I’ve continued to run into enough little practical barriers that suck me deeply into the nitty-gritty of programming. (For example, I’m trying to figure out how to indicate to the Python xmlrpclib that my Manila site is emitting ISO-8859-1 even though XML-RPC doesn’t allow for any indication of character encoding. I think that there may be a bug in the xmlrpclib module but it will take some work to track down whether it’s a bug or whether it’s just my misunderstanding of the library.)

So what next? How can I maintain the depth of focus needed to write software without losing sight of the broad vision I am pursuing? Certainly, writing about the details of programming and how it ties into the big picture is my chosen way forward.

Gartner: Web 2.0 to make waves in enterprise caught my attention because I hope that the “jazzing up the web” work I’m doing to help individuals and small groups of individuals will also be of value to the enterprise, enabling me to work for fun and for profit:

Technologies under the Web 2.0 umbrella predicted to have a high impact on businesses are AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML development techniques for enhancing the responsiveness and usability of Web applications), and mashups, the joining together of multiple online applications to create a new service). These are also expected to reach maturity in less than two years.

As I work on extracting information from my weblog for migration, I am working on properly dealing with time zones. Some months ago, I worked out how to use time zones correctly in Python, work that I’d like to come back to document. For now, I note the
libraries I’m using:

• python-dateutil – Labix
• pytz – World Timezone Definitions for Python (to get a set of time zone definitions)

mxDateTime – Date/time types for Python, which I have yet to use, seems worthwhile to explore.

Right now, I’m trying to figure out how to migrate all the data (my writings, my images) from the IU Technology Architecture Lodge, a weblog that I have run since March 2000. Although this transfer of data is not directly relevant to the setup of JazzUpTheWeb, doing so will move me towards maximal data flexibility for all of my websites. Once I have the script written, I will document my work and share the script.