A few quick items to help bring things up to date:
Netbook Experiment
Had an idea the other day that instead of purchasing regular size notebooks for staff loaners (machines people use when attending a conference or making a presentation), I should see if a netbook would meet the need (costs and weighs much less). After reading nice things about the MSI Wind, I ordered a couple U-100 models (1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB RAM, wireless b/g/n, and 160GB hard drive) for approximately $450 each.
Well another reason I went with the MSI Wind is this chart from Boing Boing:
The chart is quite correct. Putting OSX on the MSI Wind is almost trivial.
Federated Search Update
Working through a proposed contract from Deep Web Technologies. When signed and the service is underway, I’m hoping we can build “boutique” federated search engines for our various research portals.
Unlike MetaLib, 360 Search, and other federated search products, Deep Web prices their product with a matrix that includes: search pages (e.g., boxes where a user types something in) and sources (e.g., Something as small as an individual e-journal can count as a source or a system as large as ProQuest). This flexibility in configuration is exactly what we need for our application.
My goal is something like this: A librarian who manages a particular portal can go to the departmental faculty and say “let’s talk about the 9 or 10 resources you’d like for me to combine into a federated search service for you.” We then put that search box on the portal and good things follow:
- By working with the faculty to identify and build the search system, we give the librarian a useful “carrot” with which to attract faculty interaction.
- We end up delivering a product that our target audience (researchers) will actually use and value.
- It will help drive users to our portal(s) which gives the librarian an incentive to keep it fresh and informative.
More on this as it develops over the coming months.
If you’re not familiar with Deep Web’s search software, I’ll suggest you take a look at Biznar (a business topics search service) or Scitopia (a search portal for the libraries of twenty Science and Technology societies and more).  My ultimate goal is to figure out why Mason should send me out to visit the Deep Web Tech home office (in Santa Fe).
Fix it Till It Breaks [latest update in a continuing series]
The other day I received a copy of Drive Genius 2 from Other World Computing (buy a drive and it comes at a really reduced price), so I thought, “Hey, why not take my main machine that’s running really well and test out the Drive Genius defrag utility.”
Went to get some lunch while it worked and when I got back it was waiting for a restart command.   I didn’t expect to see a huge difference but you never know…
Hit restart…got the grey screen…then the spinning daisy and apple silhouette …then about 45 seconds in the multilingual kernel panic message began rolling down the screen.  Holding down the option key, I was able to attempt a boot off a Leopard install disk but even that ended in a kernel panic. Who ever heard of a degrag killing a motherboard?
From a second machine I checked the serial number at Apple’s site and found the MacPro was still under warranty.   Took out my drives and add-on memory, put in a empty (new) boot drive and schlepped the big tuna (it must weigh 50+ pounds) over to the Apple Store in the local mall.  The “genius” took it in the back and returned about ten minutes later.
Turns out the machine was OK. It wouldn’t boot off the DVD I was using because I had upgraded the video from the stock ATI card to an Nvidia GeForce 8800GT. My 10.5.0 install disk didn’t have a driver for that card (they appear on 10.5.4 disks or later).  Booting from a new 10.5.6 disk it came right up.  Brought it back to the office, inserted and repartitioned my defragged trashed drive, put the memory back in place and restored from a week-old SuperDuper! image file. Back in business.
Yes, I should have thought of the video driver problem. Perhaps if Apple were to publish “Hardware release” numbers like Sun does with Solaris revs I would have thought about it. Of course, you don’t go with a Mac because of great enterprise-level support.
We’re in the process of planning a new library for George Mason University, adding if I remember correctly, roughly 150,000 square feet to our existing main library building. At present, it seems the ribbon cutting will occur sometime in 2014.
Say you need a quick graph for a presentation you’re doing. You have a couple of options: use the graphing function built into your presentation software or fire up Excel or Numbers or Calc and build your graph then cut and paste it into your presentation. Either way you face the tedious task of entering the quantitative data needed to build the graph. Then there’s the headache of labeling each axis and scaling and getting the ‘tic’ marks right and on and on. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a graphic tool and just draw the damn thing? Yes, and that’s why there’s OmniGraphSketcher.