Category: Tools

Code4Lib Virtual Lightning Talks: Notes

Terry Brady – File Analyzer and Metadata Harvester

  • purpose: assemble collection of tasks into a simple user interface
  • modular code: hopefully easy to add/modify
  • File Analyzer: scans file system and performs actions on files, can also import file to edit records
  • Want to know if looks interesting/useful

Misty De Meo – Human Rights Thesaurus: Transitioning a legacy thesaurus to SKOS/RDF

  • legacy thesaurus did not do any validation of spelling, syntax, etc.
  • sublime highlighting for the particular format
  • ruby script to parse errors in data
  • Vocabulary Management Tool: iqvoc.net
  • Slides

Roy Tennant – Under the Hood of Hadoop Processing at OCLC Research

For background see Adventures in Hadoop

  • (the slides had a lot of the info, so I’ll try to get the link)
  • can track jobs, and monitor nodes in web interface

Kate Kosturski – How I Taught Myself Drupal In a Weekend (And You Can Too!)

[gigya src=”http://prezi.com/embed/_rwaqn0g9o3m/?bgcolor=ffffff&lock_to_path=0&autoplay=0&autohide_ctrls=0&features=undefined&disabled_features=undefined” width=”500″]

  • Have no fear: “you can’t break Drupal”
  • a lot of modules and themes to choose from, especially a WYSIWYG editor
  • Quick and Dirty Solution: Drupal Gardens – can at least get you more comfortable with it
  • Live site

Thanks to Peter Murray for organizing!

Access 2012 Day 1: Ignite Talk – Social Feed Manager

To collect social media data (especially Twitter), researchers are doing this manually (possibly by proxy).

 

Some paid options to collect the data:

  • DataSift
  • Gnip
  • Topsy

Friendly, but not cheap, and more than what we need. Still need tools to collect, process, etc.

What researchers ask for:

  • specific users, keywords
  • historic time periods
  • basic values: user, date, text, counts
  • delimited files to import

We can do this free with APIs.

Built Social Feed Manager with features

  • Users by Item Count with temporal graphs
  • Details on user
  • can export to CSV files
  • hashtag queries by 10 minutes
  • search function with 1000

Free on github

  • python/django
  • user timelines, filter, sample, search
  • simple display with export for user timelines

Leaves out:

  • historical tweets
  • tweets beyond last 3200

By @dchud

More notes on the Access 2012 live blog.

Going Google at Ryerson University: Sync’ing Work Back to Usual

I have found some things on the Going Google site a little incomplete, so I thought I’d supplement it with a blog post.

Set up your Google Token

This is really easy. Just sign into the Apps tab, click on Activate Google Token, and hit Activate. One important note,

you will not be able to see your Google Token again after activating it the first time (and you close the window).

So, write it down in a secure place in case you ever want to sync your accounts with anything else.

Sync Apple Devices

So which method you choose depends on what you want to sync. Both will sync mail and calendar, but for:

  • Notes use Gmail option
  • Contacts use Exchange option (follow the instructions on the Going Google site)

I personally only read and reply to emails on mobile devices, so I chose the Gmail option so that I could sync Notes. Google provides instructions on using this method (it’s essentially the same process), and here are the details you need:

Name: your name
Address: full email address
Password: Google Token
Description: account display name on your device

Multiple Calendars

To sync multiple calendars, you can still do that using the Gmail option, but to change which calendars you want sync’ed:

  • sign into your Gmail account using a browser
  • then visit Google Sync for Apple to choose which calendars you want sync’ed

Getting Calendar in Thunderbird

UPDATE: If you’re having issues, it provides less integration into Thunderbird, but try ‘Google Calendar Tab’ which opens GCal like it would in a browser minus Settings/Labs.

I warn you now. Google Calendar in Thunderbird still has a number of issues. If you’re on a MAC, I suggest using Google Calendar in iCal instead. I prefer having everything in one client, so I’m willing to live with and report bugs when necessary, but who knows, I may change my mind.

Step 1: Install Lightning

The Lightning add-on page actually gives the newest stable version of the add-on (for Thunderbird 16), but the newest official release of Thunderbird is 15, so head over to the Versions list and find Lightning 1.7. Install it according to the instructions (using the Install Add-on from File option in the Add-ons settings).

Step 2: Install Provider for Google Calendar Add-on

This step is actually optional depending on what method you want to use. Google Calendar now supports using CalDAV in Thunderbird, but it’s marked as experimental.

Just search for Google Calendar in the Add-ons tab and install from there.

Step 3: Add your Calendar

If you chose to install the Provider for GCal add-on:

  1. Open your Google Calendar
  2. Click on the Settings link located in the box at the right of the page.
  3. Click on the calendar you want to use with Thunderbird Lightning or Sunbird.
  4. Copy the link from either of the two XML buttons shown at the bottom.
  5. In Thunderbird: File > New > Calendar > On the Network > Google Calendar
  6. For Location, paste the link, but change http:// to https://

For more information, visit the Provider wiki page.

If you chose not to install the add-on, follow the instructions from Google.

Testing Needed

So, I’m going to be using Thunderbird, and hopefully it’ll work out, but there are one or two things I wish it had already (like popup reminders for events others created). It is supposed to work better than through CalDAV. I’ve heard iCal has pretty good integration though so I might still switch to that if I’m unhappy with GCal in Thunderbird.