Spent most of the morning just cleaning up the code and removing all extraneous code and then started to think about hold status information

Getting the status of an item that is placed on hold required a that I write a new web service. I have called it hold_status.pl and you just pass it the item id and it will return the home location. If the status is Hold in the home location then the item is available. We could have a number of states but I have decided to simplicity to just go with Available and Unavailable.

Basically cat itemnum | selitem -iB -om

The next piece is to debug the account piece. The fines section is working but the my account area is giving some incorrect data.

Here is a first look at the new Overdrive audio book page that will be launched on Jan 5th 2009

We have just purchased the review component of LibraryThing for Libraries. I thought it would be a great addition to the catalog. One of the features is the ability to write our own review and add it to the collection. I thought great, but was sure that it will be ignored by patrons. As you can see I was wrong, so far we have 58 reviews. I cannot think of a better product that engages the patron and gives them a  sense of ownership.

Fear paralyzes and puts us in a confused, stagnate, vegetative state. It is the battle cry of the unchanging “We can’t do this because this might happen” If you think about it it you have two options, it might happen or it might not. Action have consequences and you cannot protect yourself from the unknown because inaction also has consequences. By doing nothing you have made a choice and it may have far greater repercussions that actually doing something. There is no safe way to immunize yourself from change. Or is there? Curiosity has the ability to reduce fear and amplify innovation. It is the question of the young and young at heart “But why?” As children this is our external voice but as adults it needs to be internalized and the possibilities explored. A failure to do this leaves us in the landscape of our imaginations where we can conjure all sorts of reasons to do nothing. When reason leaves all that is left are the monsters.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I have had a chance to code on this project. Over the last day and a half I have managed to beat my head against the brick wall of renewals and holds but these two pieces are now working. I have made some other changes. The most important I guess is how to harvest the data off the Sirsi Unicorn system. Tim and I had gone back and forth on cat key vs item key. When we both stepped away from it for a couple of days and looked at what we were trying to do it made sense to use the cat key. I have rewritten the patron_bib.pl code to extract the data using the cat key and have it now importing correctly. There was some additional clean up work with the author and title field that I have fixed. The code that allows you to place a hold basically takes a look to see if that item is available at your location and if it is then it is placed on hold and if not it then gets it from the next available location. I have not gone so far to check to see if it available at Main and then pull it from that location but it is a logical step to take in the future. There is some status information that is not showing up on the hold field and I think this is probably the next thing I am going to tackle.

Here I have made some changes. Instead of a transparent gif I am using a transparent png. The quality is better and the voice is fun.

So I have drawn the character and am just starting to play with anime studio. The goal is to add a mouth and a little dialog.

This is a brief video showing how I start developing a character for a animation. It describes the  process I generally follow.

Here is the studio setup I used to shoot the video.

Today I added reviews to our catalog and these are steps. First I would just like to say thanks to librarything for making this product available and Sonya for her help getting this configured.

cd /s/sirsi/Unicorn/Webcat/Pages_deliv/Elib_revC

cp  4_module_hitlist.h ../../Pages_custom/Elib_revC

cd ../../Pages_custom/Elib_revC

vi 4_module_hitlist.h

I added the following code to the bottom of the file.

<script src=”http://www.librarything.com/forlibraries/widget.js?id=184-3972210427″ type=”text/javascript”></script>

I then added

<div class=”ltfl_reviews”></div>

I placed this under the title, just do a search for biblio  and I placed the code after the </strong> tag on the title.

I then went and added reviews  to the detail screen and this is in the file viewtop.h. All you need to do is add

<div class=”ltfl_reviews”></div> and everything should work.

See

Here is a cheap way to build your own boom microphone stand. All I used was a paint roller and pipe insulation and a wire tie.

It cost about $8 and took about half an hour to build. You can attach the roller to a pole.