Author Archives: ghw

yet more snow

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We had a significant snowfall on Thursday, causing the university to cancel classes for the afternoon. As luck would have it, I had already driven in to work. Meanwhile, the snow had piled up outside, making the drive home tricky. The temperature has not risen above freezing in several days, and those places that do not get any sun, like the alley behind our apartment building, are now covered in about six inches of solid ice. It still looks pretty, though. Heidi has posted some more pictures of KC snow, this time from just a block or two away from the apartment. The second and fourth pictures are of a giant needle, thread, and button that commemorate the fact that this part of town was “the garment district” back in the day.

library catalogues and the model of amazon.com

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As I’m doing a little bibliography building, I’m thinking that it would be nice if library catalogues could incorporate some of the functions of Amazon.com. For example, the “Customers who shopped for X also shopped for Y” feature demonstrates connections between books that otherwise might go unmarked by the usual uses of metadata. In general, being able to track user behavior and share it with other users (while protecting the privacy of individuals) would lead to a variety of useful functions. It would also be great if you could build a wish list in order to make suggestions for books the library should purchase, and to help the catalogue make recommendations to you and notify you when new books of interest to you arrive.

templates for bibliographic database schemas?

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Here is a question asked in the face of way too many Google hits: if I want to create an online, collaboratively built, bibliographic database (mySQL and PHP), do I have to come up with the schema myself, or are there something like “plug-and-play” templates out there much in the way that there are for CSS and HTML?

mt-whitelist

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Has it ever occurred to anyone to develop an “MT-Whitelist” as a different approach to comment spam than Jay Allen’s excellent MT-Blacklist? As the name suggests, MT-Whitelist would only allow approved URLs to be posted in the comments section of your blog. You could begin with a starter batch of okey-doke URLs and then, with each comment using a new URL, you could choose to add new ones to your list (or not). Given the relatively limited number of different commenters the vast majority of blogs attract, this might be a pretty simple answer to the comment spam problem.

(Yes, it’s Friday night, and I’m at home writing about comment spam solutions. But I can be wild and crazy, too: I just got home from a shopping spree at the book store. My life is a nonstop party.)

this just in…

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…George Williams is not Keith Richards, according to sources close to the professor / amateur-musician / former-hack-music journalist. These sources assert that several key pieces of evidence support this claim.

Williams Richards
American British
Born in the ’60s Born in the ’40s
Hones his guitar playing skills by listening to Rolling Stones CDs while working out on an elliptical trainer. Honed his guitar playing skills by playing Rolling Stones songs after shooting heroin and drinking massive quantities of whiskey.
Says “ow” a lot when trying to learn the surprisingly difficult guitar parts to “Beast of Burden” Not known to say “ow.”
Thousandaire Multi-millionaire
Has taught graduate seminar on print culture and literature in eighteenth-century Britain. Data unavailable.