Tag: email

Code4Lib Day 3: Lightning Talks

Mark Matienzo – Wielding the Whip: Affect, Archives, & Ontological Fusion

  • need to talk about emotion – a lot of things going on in my life
  • inspired by Archives by Emotion
  • why do we not acknowledge that archives are based on emotion, stories
  • facebook ‘like’ is not an emotion
  • losing connections to materials and history when not thinking about the platform and how that effects our stories
  • can we write stories about our collections?
  • should be using existing linked data to make those narratives
  • let’s build this
  • Slides
  • Full Write-up

Jason Casden and Cory Lown – My #HuntLibrary

  • student engagement platform
  • how do students use the space?
  • what do they choose to document? – using instagram
  • student-drive archival selection
  • making use, harvesting social media
  • Implemention:
  • moderated, responsive
  • use for public display, can interactive, including larger public display
  • inspired by kitten war: built image battle
  • calculate popularity score
  • also about preservation, collect images
  • go.ncsu.edu/MyHunt

Steven Anderson – JavaScript Streaming Clientside Checksumming w/ HTML5 file upload

Will Hicks – Metadata Entry Beyond Usability

  • think back to volunteering to donate blood, etc. what value did it give you?
  • ~300 individuals creating metadata
  • stats have bumped up with a new interface
  • but 10% of the stuff is hidden
  • “usable” forms are great, but little “ownership” and lack of domain expertise
  • what if we applied the ideas used in social media?
  • invite with openID, personalize projects, badges, stats, visualization, etc.

Kelly Lucas – Drupal OPAC Recipe

  • the poor man’s Blacklight or Vufind with Solr backend
  • process:
    • MARC record dump into Solr using SolrMARC
    • install search API, Search API Solr, Facet API, Sarnia and Views from Drupal.org
    • configure Sarnia + FacetAPI (boosts, enable facets)
    • create a view, add some fields, create an exposed filter (full text search box)
    • slap some facets to the side of the page
  • issues: new/updated records requires direct connection to ILS
  • Slides

Karen Coyle – Nerd Poetry

  • cowboy poetry – told around the camp fire

Mark Redar – Django Dublin Core App

  • plugin app
  • on Github
  • RecordExpress – lightweight, easy to use esp. for those not familiar with XML

James Stuart – Taming Email

  •  a really big problem
  • part of your job
  • here’s how to tame email
  • don’t organize: organizing your email is like alphabetizing your recycling
  • mailstrom.co
  • turn keyboard shortcuts on
  • shortcutFoo
  • don’t be distracting
  • bookmark
  • Also take a look at Making Thunderbird More Gmail-y

No Break! Have a Cute Animal Anyway

white ermine
Have a Cute White Ermine

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.

code4lib Cool Tool Day

So inspired by the ASIS&T Cool Tool Day, I thought it’d be neat to do one of these since there weren’t many volunteers to do lightning talks/presentations at the code4lib Toronto meetup this time around. Our attendance was a little… paltry, but we had some great presentations! Here are my notes from the session.

Presented by @waharnum

soapUI

  • working with REST based web services
  • testing automation tool for web services
  • best for building with other API
  • autogenerate stubs using WSDL
  • interface between internal systems
  • good for documenting web services, code style with examples
  • normally, mostly used for unit testing

Trello

  • virtual card based whiteboard
  • flexible for planning based
  • collaborative
  • great usability/UI
  • even has mobile apps

Mustache Templates

  • maintaining HTML email templates
  • also works as a crazy text editor for nerds

XSL Transforms plugin in Firefox

  • local reporting
  • anything XSLT with just a few security restrictions
  • e.g. SVN reporting

Presented by @adr

ShowOff

  • cross platform presentation
  • push from laptop to another computer

Sidenote: Other Presentation Tools

Presented by @ruebot

VIM Plugins

  • pathogen – linking for VIM plugins to automatically load VIM plugins
  • nerdtree – pull files quickly by displaying directory/tree

Presented by Pomax

Thimble HTML/CSS Live Web editor

  • teach anyone (kids, adults) HTML and CSS
  • use existing projects to make it fun!

FlickrFindr

  • easy inline flickr search of CC images
  • attribution in alt text

Presented by me

F.lux

  • monitor hue changer, supposedly to help people sleep better by telling your body what time of day it is

That’s it! Hope to do another one of these or lightning talks next time.

Ryerson Going Google with Google Apps: The Run Down

UPDATE: See my more recent blog post if you’re looking for my supplement materials (to the Ryerson Google site) on sync’ing Google Apps.

I attended a session to address concerns with privacy and security concerns in adopting Google apps at the university. Half of the session was actually a general how to protect your own information and your responsibilities as a user. I’ll focus more on the project itself than the second half since there’s a ton of resources about protecting your information already out there.

Google Apps

For the implementation, Sada Systems will be dealing with the actual implementation and migration. Roll out will be done in stages starting with the first four, and the rest will have to go through the evaluation process first.

  • mail
  • calendar
  • docs/drive
  • contact
  • chat
  • mobile
  • sites
  • app engine
  • plus
  • video

Options

  • Faculty and students will have an opt-in option for mail.
  • Staff, however, will be migrated (i.e. not optional).
  • Everyone will be moved to calendar in order to be rid of Groupwise (yay!).
  • Everyone will still keep their @ryerson.ca so there is no change in the email address itself.

Timeline & Next Steps

In a nutshell, there is none, and that’s because the legal agreement hasn’t actually been signed yet.

Once it does get signed, then alpha testing will be done with the CCS group (central IT) and then beta testing with a larger community group. They’re still hoping for a fall rollout though.

Legal Concerns

Most privacy and security concerns revolved around lawful access and warrantless searches with storing data in the US. It was explained that basically, it doesn’t make a difference. Canada has similar legislation and the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (with many countries) is a binding agreement to share information under lawful access or warrantless searches, which means the same thing will happen if your data is stored in any of the countries part of the agreement.

Privacy & Data Protection

To alleviate some concerns, the organizing group assured everyone that a Privacy Impact Assessment is done using the international standard, Privacy in Design and ensures that there are no breaches to:

Additionally,

  • all incoming mail goes through the university servers first
  • not opting in means that email stays on the university servers
  • opting in means the emails are then sent and stored on Google servers
  • students emails will not be visible in the global (internal?) address list
  • minimum identifying information (username, name) is used for authentication
  • drives/docs is private by default
  • calendars display only free/busy by default (as in Groupwise right now)

As I mentioned, in the second half of the presentation, we were all reminded that most email/information/data breaches are due to users, not email systems or hardware, and that email is not secure (although they’re looking into encryption for sensitive information). We got the usual spiel on our responsibilities not to include sensitive information in emails, having secure passwords, being careful of phishing, making sure websites use https, etc.

We’ll see how quickly they get things going, but I’m sure many staff will be happy to get rid of Groupwise (which likes to crash at least a couple of times a week and cancels shut down) at the very least.

For more updates, there is a dedicated blog for project updates.