My New Job in April

From the beginning of April I will be working part-time at the TU Delft Library as an ICT Consultant. Looking forward to doing some interesting things there…

Problems with OS X Leopard, Apache and symbolic links

I just can’t get symbolic links in the ~/Sites/ folder to some working files in the ~/Documents/ folder  working under Apache. The error message in the log file is: “Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible”It has been bugging me since after dinner, and it is now 3o minutes into the witching hour, and man, is it starting to piss me off.I have slogged through all the options for enabling FollowSymLinks in the various *conf files, and ensuring it isn’t a ‘Allow from all’ missing somewhere. There is deeper mojo at work, and I suspect some kind of default users/permissions security setting. But what?If this was Ubuntu I would have been happily working for hours in stead of fighting the system. Grumble, grumble. But then the power supply on my Linux box blows up. Grumble. Grumble. At least I am not the only one with the problem, here, here and here are posts that I found with a similar issue. The ACL thing has however not helped me, removing all ACLs in site did not make a difference to me. So I am still without a solution. Bugger.Oh Lazyweb I beseech thee, come to my rescue! 

One for those who like words

A poetry slam in the the Bowery Poetry Club in New York poking fun at spellcheckers and the importance of proofreading. (via)

This reminded me of the Anguish Languish as revealed to me in school by our library teacher Louise Steytler. She gave me a photocopy of ‘Ladle Rat Rotten Hut’ which I still have. I love rollicking language.

Useful and visually appealing 3D navigation

Most gimmicky navigation ideas don’t appeal to me, as they don’t seem to add anything to the normal way of navigating around a pile of links to information. But this one grabbed my attention.

It is a 3D view of their site, by WHITEvoid from Berlin, Germany. The navigation works for me, because you always feel like you know where you are, and what else there is to see. You never seem to get lost as easily as with other sites. Worth a look, an application to aspire to.

SKOS support for ICONCLASS

One of the items on my TO-DO list (since early 2007 or thereabouts)  has been to add SKOS output support to our ICONCLASS server. This idea was first mentioned in meetings with the STITCH project as they are also interested in ICONCLASS.

Now after many other diversions and projects clamouring for attention, I am happy to report that there is now SKOS support. It is in testing mode, I am still ironing out the wrinkles, but it is functional and in my opinion already quite useful. The endpoint is not public at this point in time, we have to figure out how to make sure our poor little server does not expire under load, and how to fund these efforts. I am not getting paid to work on ICONCLASS my time is ‘stolen’ from other projects because we are avid users ourselves.

That being said, if you are interested in kicking the tyres please let me know and I can forward some details.

PicLens support for Arkyves

I am delighted to report that I have added PicLens support to Arkyves in several places.

This means that we can now browse the contents of whole books or collections, or each search result in a spectacular visual way. Many thanks  to the people at PicLens for making and sharing this fabulous tool.