Arriving Somewhere

So the buzz is starting to build about George Mason’s citation tool Zotero. It is an extension for Firefox that is meant to replace desktop programs like RefWorks and Endnotes. And its free. And its open source. For those who read a lot of journals this will be fantastic thing.

Del.icio.us is fine for maintaining and sharing web bookmarks but is pretty simplistic when it comes to bookmarking journal articles. [my del.icio.us account]

I tried Connotea while working on a group project this summer for school. It’s pretty and the ability to share with a group was nice but it is remarkably underpowered as a citation tool. [my connotea account]

Recently I began using CiteULike. While the colors are a bit harsh the functionality far outstrips anything similar that I’ve seen. It isn’t perfect in its ability to automagically retrieve citation info BUT it is so flexible that I am willing to overlook that. For now, anyways. The ability to upload PDFs is kind of nice as well. [my citeulike account]

I’m enjoying CiteULike right now, but Zotero sure does look good. I can’t wait for the beta.

If you’re a techy, you might appreciate Wally’s post about getting started creating add-ons. Of course, you’ll need Zotero too.

Well, so much for getting any work done tonight. Or reading that report. The first disc of season 2.5 of Battlestar Galactica arrived in the mail from Netflix today… must… resist… urge to watch entire disc…

Pew Internet Research has released their report “The Future of the Internet II“. I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, but from the short description it certainly looks interesting.

While its probably not a major point, I think we are already seeing signs that:

by 2020…
Tech “refuseniks” will emerge as a cultural group characterized by their choice to live off the network. Some will do this as a benign way to limit information overload, while others will commit acts of violence and terror against technology-inspired change.

Could the slowing growth in broadband adoption be a signal of this? As exciting as technology is, I need to remember that not everyone has the same inclination to use technology as I do.

Daniel at OneBigLibrary.net provides us with some amusing metaphors comparing metadata types to music. Hilarious. MARC == western tonal ? RDF == twelve tone ?

Read it for yourself: Troll baiting with poorly thought out metadata metaphors

I’m wondering where Frank Zappa would fit into this.

Argh! I was ready to pull out all of my hair after the frustrating experience that was installing Apache, MySQL and PHP this past week. What an incredible pain! I first tried to get it all running on Ubuntu-Linux, but after several hours of trying to get MySQL server to start I gave up and decided to move back over to windows. Apache gave me some problems on Windows, after messing with it for a while I uninstalled Apache 2.2 and went with Apache 2.0 which magically worked! Why, I don’t know. But at least I can finally get down to business.

I discovered this fabulous site: UNIX Tutorial for Beginners which is exactly that. It starts at the beginning and is precisely what I needed.

AND the author makes the tutorial available to be copied, modified and presented as described in the Creative Commons Deed. Yay for sharing!

Technorati tags: unix

Warning: Unix humor ahead.

A number of years after failing miserably at being a Computer Science major, I am giving programming another go. I’ve been writing HTML/CSS for a few years now so I’m going to take the next step and learn PHP. Okay, so it’s basically a scripting language and not a big time, all-around language like Java or C++, but it will help me learn to do what I want – which is create dynamic web sites.

If you know me, you’ll be wondering how I found the time to do this with work and school and baby. Simple, it’s called Independent Study. Design a course that meets YOUR interests, get a faculty member to advise you and bingo! you’ve gotten around the lack of interesting classes being offered. Of course, Independent Study is not a simple thing or else everyone would be doing it. My objectives for the semester are quite ambitious but I am excited about them and I have a cool prof.

In a nutshell, what I’m going to try and accomplish:

• Learn PHP (and some MySQL and Apache)
• Review some lit about exploratory searching, faceted classifications, categorized overviews, etc.
• Implement a categorized overview to the search results of a website in PHP
• Conduct a pilot usability study on it
• Write about the study and submit the paper to JCDL!

Phew. I’m tired just thinking about how much work I have to do!

Technorati tags: graduate school, library science, PHP, exploratory searching