Over 30 years ago I led a team at the UC Berkeley Libraries to use HyperCard to create a library orientation guide. This project, which we did not know at the time, formed the foundation of our web design work to follow in the early 1990s. What saddens me is that 30 years on I don’t […]
Software
Only Good Enough to be Dangerous
I feel like I didn’t really reach adulthood until I became a commercial river guide. There are a few reasons for this opinion. One is that you probably don’t really become an adult until you are responsible for the health and well-being of someone else. As a guide and more importantly as a trip leader, that […]
Where Your Favorite Programming Language Ranks
Every programmer knows that any time you want to start a religious war just ask everyone’s favorite programming language and why. This will almost certainly touch off an ever-more-heated exchange as to why one’s particular choice should be every thinking person’s obvious selection. It may even devolve so far as to include name calling. But hey, […]
Ambitious “Hydra-in-a-Box” Effort Funded by IMLS
Those who have been paying attention to the cutting edge of digital libraries no doubt know about the Hydra project headed up by Stanford. Hydra is a digital repository system that is built using Ruby and is designed to accept the full range of digital object types that a large research library must manage. Built on […]
Challenging the Open Source Religious Viewpoint
I’ve been involved with open source software projects since at least the 1990s. I even saved a Unix application from certain death that I still use today. But that doesn’t mean I’m all rosy-eyed about all open source software projects. They are not all created equal. To be clear, there are “open source” projects that […]