Author: peter
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Harvesting and semantically tagging media releases from political websites using web services
Here’s the slides from another talk from VALA2012 where I talked about how we’ve been using OpenCalais at the Victorian Parliamentary Library to add tags and semantic data to one of our databases. You can also see the talk here or download a longer paper that goes with the talk. Harvesting and semantically tagging media releases from political…
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VALA 2012 Reference Desk Software
I was lucky enough to attend VALA2012 and also present a couple of papers. The first was about some Open Source software that we created at the Victorian Parliamentary Library in order to track reference requests. Its not quite finished, but as soon as its wrangled into a coherent jumble of code, I’ll be putting…
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Life and Literature Code Challenge Entry
Background The idea for this entry came from the amazing Japanese earthquake map written by Paul Nicholls in which the Japanese earthquakes are shown in a timeline on a google map. I thought it would be interesting to do something with the Biodiversity Heritage Library data for the Life and Literature Code Challenge. I figured that…
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Building a mobile app backend using MongoDB and Slim – a PHP REST framework
I’ve been toying around in my spare time with HTML5 and building a geographically enabled web app (possibly making it into a full blown mobile app down the track using PhoneGap or Appcelerator). Anyway, I started off with the back end. I chose MongoDB as the data store (a nosql database with really simple out of…
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jQuery and DB/Textworks
Below are my slides from a talk I gave to the Melbourne Inmagic User group on jQuery and DB/Textworks. Unfortunately all the web stuff is behind a firewall, so I can’t link to it, however, I’ll put the plugins I developed up on google code github. Inmagic user group meeting Melbourne june 2011 from Peter Neish
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Upgrading Debian 5 to 6
It’s never much fun upgrading major versions of operating systems and I always get slightly uncomfortable during the process. Knowing you have a good backup is always handy (thanks linode). In this case I was going from Debian 5 to 6 and as usual, the Debian folks have made it smooth sailing. This guide on…
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Creek near my house flooding in Melbourne
Sorry about the low light – it was pretty dark at the time.
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Hosting at Linode
I’ve started hosting all my personal sites at linode. I have root access to my own Virtual machine and I have installed Debian 5.0, lighttpd, mysql, and a bunch of Drupal and WordPress sites. I have found an incredible performance boost compared to shared hosting and it only costs slightly more. I’d highly recommend this…
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Attention span of a developer
I play around with a lot of technology and like installing and testing things, but I wonder if I am missing any great systems because of install fatigue – how long is too long to get a system installed, run through the configuration and get some test data in there and running? There is nothing…
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nswsphere streamed
There’s a lot of talk about the carbon footprint of attending conferences these days and on Friday I attended my first virtual conference. NSWsphere provided a live stream of the conference. The job they did was excellent (numerous cameras, direct mic etc.) and I was able to watch easily without getting frustrated. The second important…