I’m just going through some presentations on EOF, so I can help King with some work he’s doing on implementing a native XML database in CAREO.
A one-liner at the end of a WWDC2000 presentation on Advanced EOF says it all. “Work with EOF, not against it.” Thanks to Eric Noyau and Josh Fagans for the presentation!
For the current implementation of the connection from CAREO to the ALOHA Metadata Server, I use the XML-RPC API, and treat CAREO as a client application of the metadata server. Instead of using EOF to manage the records natively, I spun my own record management and caching solution (which works pretty well, but can’t hold a candle to some enterprise level caching being actively developed by a Large Company - so why don’t I just use that?)
I was emailed a virus over the weekend, and didn’t even know it was malicious. It was rendered harmless by the Perfect Virus Killing Machine.
I run MacOSX. Windows virii are ineffective. I’ve never had a virus infect any of my macs. Ever. Sure, I’ve received copies of Windows virii, which I dutifully delete so they don’t infect those on Lesser Systems, but they’ve never managed to do anything other than clog my inbox for a second or two.
The latest version of the LC website just went live. Mostly a restructuring of content, so it’s easier to find stuff without having to decipher which section it might be in. This is using more CSS to handle the layout (at least for the navigation portion), so we’ll see how the old, crappy Netscape 4.7 that is still the institutional standard here holds up (rumour has it we’re going to make the leap to Mozilla in September. Can’t WAIT to drop support for a browser crafted in 1996!)
I’m playing around with XQuery, and am finding it to be quite powerful. Still getting my head around the FLWR syntax, and what I can do with that, but initial pokings are quite promising. Thanks a LOT to Leif and Jim at Bluestream for guiding me through the first steps. Their XStreamDB is quite a nice XML database, and handles XQuery natively.
Anyway, here’s the query that has evolved from the first early steps. It pokes through the XML database for all documents that contain a element, and returns a set of elements describing some stuff I’ll need to display the item in a search result page.
I’m playing around with XStreamDB, and am really impressed with it so far. Relatively fast queries, doing stuff that would bring our current metadata database to its knees.
One thing I’m realizing is that I’m a complete dumb newbie when it comes to XQuery. Sure, I understand some of the concepts, but implementing the queries and the syntax etc… is a bit much right now. I’m working on that, to be sure, but there seems to be a big gaping hole on the ’net (and the bookstore) on decent, usable XQuery documentation.
Thanks to Apple, the Learning Commons was seeded with a shiney new TiBook for CAREO development. I’ve adopted it, replacing the older PB G4/400 that I had been using. What a difference. Wow. Really.
This thing has a speedy 1GHz G4, half a gig of RAM, 60GB hard drive, and a built in Superdrive (CD-R, DVD-R combo drive). Holy crap, that’s just plain nice. Before, I’d have to lug out a big, bulky external firewire CD-R drive to do my weekly backups (I use .Mac Backup every Friday morning to back up ~/Documents, Mail, Preferences, and a few other things). Now, I just insert the blank disk into the slot on the front of the machine… Nice. I just did a quick backup of some other stuff, and it struck me how elegant that really is.
I’ve just posted a document with instructions for installing your own instance of CAREO (including the ALOHA Metadata Server and CAREO Web Application).
This is a first shot, but the document has been around in some form for a while now (actually, it used to be several separate documents).
Anyway, if you’re looking to install your own copy of CAREO, take a look at these instructions.
Please let me know if there are any gaping holes, errors, omissions, etc…
Wow. Just checked on CAREO, and there are about a bajillion simultaneous users (hello Ohio State, and Wytheville, and LOTS of others…)
There isn’t smoke coming out of the CAREO server, but I can’t be long now… It’s running pretty much flat out at the moment (it’s only a lowly single 500MHz server - be gentle!)
We’re working on getting a shiny new box to move CAREO to, but in the meantime, please bear with any slowness… It’s just taking more hits than expected.
I’ve just hand rolled an RSS 2.0 feed for my presentations and publications. There is currently a whopping ONE entry, but that will hopefully be growing as I get a chance to write more about our work.
I’m just going through some presentations on EOF, so I can help King with some work he’s doing on implementing a native XML database in CAREO.
Thanks to