Code

My Presentation Material for the EZProxy Virtual Users Group Meeting. Using Javascript, UserAgent detection, and CSS I made a simple mobile interface.

One sure fire way to get in trouble on the net these days is to use plaintext instead of SSH.  We've all learned that with Firesheep someone in Starbucks can assume your identity on Facebook while you drink an over priced coffee.

Officially ported the IAScraper to GitHub.  Soon to be ported to Python.  Yup, GitHub and Python, I'm really getting out of my comfort zone.

One day my work email suddenly didn't work on my phone.  Despite grumbling under my breath and swearing a lot to myself I managed to fix the problem, it wasn't pretty but thankfully things work better now then before. Basically I got skunked by a patch to Exchange 2010 SP1. It was a Bell Samsung branded Android 2.2 device.

 Nothing is more alarming then being told an expensive product you are paying for is being used too much and therefore is no longer available.  This trail of logic befuddles me...

(user/journal details have been obfusticated)

Designing for mobile devices is prickly.  Just think of all the devices that fall under that category: BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile (suddenly), iPad (maybe?!).  It becomes a real hassle to make sure your pages render properly (or at least legibly) in all of these environments.  My goal was to make a dead simple mobile friendly display.

A presentation for the Fall 2010 WYNO ARCL Conference.

Getting your off-campus users to connect to content can be tricky. There is a whole host of things that need to be setup and tested.  The setup is mostly easy, but I find the real kicker is in the testing.   URL redirects can really spoil a user's experience.

IE 7 is paranoid.  Yup, but judging by how long IE 6 lasted there is going to be another few years before we can safely forget about IE 7.  Recently I had a mysterious security error while looking at a DSpace installation with an IE 7 browser. 

There is something very nice about liberating your data.  For instance take predictable html structure, and xpath, and you get a nice way to screen scrape.  I've been working on creating a mobile version of an OPAC for a little while and I came across some premade solutions from other Libraries but each one seemed to be missing a few pieces of information that I want in my mobile display.  So I got the great idea to screen scrape and evaluate the results with XPath.