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 giving a presentation on Learning Object Repositories tomorrow as part of Faculty Technology Days. I’ve been madly whipping up a whiz bang Keynote presentation for it, and it’s pretty much done. It’s written in a newbie “what is a learning object” perspective, and builds from there.
I’ve posted it online here (pdf) and here (mov). The PDF version needs some tweaking (lines are white on a white background. It looks awesome on screen, but I switched the background to white for PDF and print, and lines don’t show up. Use your imagination for now…)
Wow. I’ve been saying that a LOT lately. King just posted a teaser of his latest piece of CAREO wizardry. One of the major problems with setting up a repository is in the difficult process of configuring it after the install. (The install is pretty painless, and could largely be automated, but the config and management can be a pain).
He’s come up with a way to integrate repository management into an interface based on the MacOSX System Preferences application, so it can be managed like any other part of the system software. Except that it’s web based, so it can run from any machine!
The server that was providing DNS for www.sciq.ca is apparently sitting in a moving van somewhere. The company that was providing the service decided to move offices, without providing a backup DNS server offsite first (like, say, the U of C, or any affiliated company).
As a result, SciQ is currently offline. It IS hosted on the same box as CAREO, so it is technically still running, but the www.sciq.ca address goes into the void at the moment. I’m working on tweaking the SciQ theme so that it doesn’t look for stuff on that domain (server-relative links are better, instead of the current absolute links).
Just surfed to the XStreamDB website to check the docs, and noticed that it’s been revved to 3.0. There are installers for Windows, Linux, and MacOSX. I’m downloading now.
Looks like they’ve got some neat new features, but I’m not really sure what’s different from 2.2 (the version I tried before).
Thanks to