Time Nick Message 12:28 shedges kados: "Free and Open Source ILS" is an interesting suggestion 12:29 shedges as soon as you put the word "open" close to the word "free," it's easier to think of "freedom" instead of "free" beer. 12:30 shedges (as least it seems that way to me) 12:30 shedges I wonder how this would play in the UK? 12:33 slef AFAIK, the preferred expressions are "Free Software" "Free and Open Source Software" and "Free/Libre and Open Source Software" 12:33 slef the last two get abbreviated, of course (FOSS and FLOSS) 12:34 slef free on its own is ambiguous. There's no denying it. I'm always amazed how ambiguous I'm told it is in the US, though. 12:37 shedges kados is right -- here it is instantly confusing to talk about a business dealing with "free" software. 12:38 shedges (even in the "Land of the Free") 12:38 shedges I think we can thank Bill Gates and the dot.com exuberance of the 90's for that. 12:42 slef It's a fun way to split UK and US, if Bill Gates is responsible for confusion on that term there, and that spin-off from the Microsoft-backed club is responsible for confusion on "open source" here, isn't it? 12:42 shedges hehe 12:42 slef anyway, time to go make tapas 12:42 slef biab 12:42 slef (when I will try to switch all my mailing list memberships to my new email address) 21:17 chris heya nick 21:18 Nick heyho 21:18 Nick Kados around? 21:18 Nick (as in, awake?) 21:19 chris i think hes off watching star wars 21:19 Nick chuckle. 21:19 Nick OK 21:19 Nick Am assuming Paul's asleep. 21:21 chris hmm probably, i think its early morning there 21:24 Nick What's up in your half of the globe? 21:25 chris hmm, winter .. although its been pretty mild so far 21:25 chris and tons and tons of work 21:25 chris we are doing our second nz public library koha tho 21:25 chris so thats all good 21:26 Nick fantastic. 21:28 Nick Where? 21:28 chris its rangitikei district council, kinda the next district north from HLT 21:29 chris its in the early stages yet, still trying to get the data out of their old system 21:29 chris (always the hardest bit) 21:29 Nick what is it? 21:29 Nick something ugly? 21:29 chris old dynix 21:29 chris pick based 21:30 chris so its proving to be a little tricky, im sure we will get there though 21:30 Nick Ooooooo. 21:30 Nick MV databases. 21:30 Nick Always fun. 21:30 Nick Fond coursework memories on them. 21:30 chris and once we have somethng to show and the library is happy im sure they will do a press release 21:31 Nick so it is is actually Pick? 21:31 chris i dont know what it actually is :) 21:31 Nick or a descendant (hoping for your sake something not THAT old) 21:31 chris descendent 21:31 Nick whew 21:31 chris recall is its query language 21:32 chris so i think we just have to come to grips with that 21:32 Nick ...vision of Kapito holding punchcards up to light. 21:32 chris heh 21:32 Nick Going to be missing the idea that one row/col position is one piece of data I bet. 21:32 chris yeah 21:33 Nick Wonder if anyone's put together something to vacuum it out to XML or something. 21:33 chris doesnt appear to be 21:33 Nick (if only to get more tools to use on it). 21:34 chris out to anything text based and id be happy 21:34 Nick That bad? 21:34 chris perl is great for munging text 21:34 chris its just the lack of documentation that you get with proprietary systems 21:34 Nick there may (heavens don't hold me to this) java something or other that'll talk to it odbc like 21:35 Nick er, jdbc like. 21:35 chris ie, you have to guess how it stores the data, cos the vendor (even if they still supported this product) wont tell ya 21:36 Nick http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Databases/Pick/Vendors/ 21:36 chris im sure we will work it out tho, even if we resort to using its reporting features and just running lots of reports till we get the data we need 21:36 Nick ouchies. 21:37 chris otoh i think we can get the patron data out easily 21:37 Nick http://kennethhunt.com/archives/000551.html 21:39 Nick You don't feel like learning the funky Basic-like thing that probably came with it? 21:39 si chris, do you have odbc access to the database? 21:39 chris i dont think so 21:40 chris its running on some form of unix, i think sco in fact 21:40 Nick Betcha IBM might have something. 21:40 chris but i havent been at the commandline yet 21:40 Nick They ended up owning some of the old Pick flavored stuff. 21:40 chris yeah 21:40 Nick UniData/Universe as I recall. 21:40 chris as i said, im confident we can get it out 21:40 si if they support any kind of thirdparty report writer, then you can probably get ODBC 21:40 Nick ...I think they even have a "personal version" download of one of them. 21:40 chris it just doesnt have a nice "export to MARC" 21:41 si which might be a way of getting all the data out 21:41 chris si: the manual pretty much says "pay ameritech money" 21:42 chris for anything other than the day to day running of the library stuff 21:43 chris so i think it will involve some monkeying around, which wasnt unexpected 21:43 chris we had to monkey around for HLT too 21:43 Nick http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/307/ ... actually an article. 21:44 chris it may actually be built on universe 21:45 chris http://computing-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Dynix 21:45 chris that sounds like it 21:47 chris http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:-ZkfH8teomsJ:lists.webjunction.org/wjlists/web4lib/1997-July/010789.html+dynix+universe&hl=en&start=1&client=firefox 21:49 chris maybe we can jsut let olwen loose on it 21:49 Nick Universe'll have a modern toolset for it. 21:49 Nick or, at least, the possibility of getting one. 21:50 chris getting that on their old sco box would be the fun job 21:50 chris oh for a universe_dump utility like mysqldump :) 21:50 Nick (one of my fav things about a certain 3 ltr company, no matter HOW old it is, if they own it, there Is A Price Point to get service) 21:51 Genji hmm.. mention of Koha in india, in a Blog. http://sankarshan.blogspot.com/2005/01/this-and-that.html 21:51 Nick Chris: 21:51 chris ahh thats indradg's blog 21:52 Nick it's internal format should have a "findable" set of reserved characters marking out what's going on. 21:52 Nick and some sort of definition file somewhere. 21:52 chris i think 21:53 Nick if you were feeling brave, you might (emphasis might) just be able to extract that out.... 21:53 Nick MV/Pick-land stuff orig. thought of itself as an OS, and (supposedly) had a file like notion. 21:53 chris ahh right 21:53 chris strings and perl u reckon :) 21:54 Nick there's actually an opensource MV DB out there. Maverick I think it is called. 21:54 Nick Random thought: could you attach a Z39.50 server to it instead? 21:54 chris theres a question 21:54 chris i think the answer is 21:54 chris "Pay someone money" 21:54 chris :) 21:54 Genji http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/4408/1/ contains a report on Koha in Nelsonvile.... 21:55 Nick (equally old technology! wheee!) just, you know, query your way out of it over the network and pray you don't blow up the Sco box. 21:55 chris yeah 21:55 chris im sure we'll get it out 21:55 Nick Betcha there's a z39 for it somewheres.... 21:55 chris ill let you know how we get on 21:55 Nick if the ugly road must be taken, I'm sure I'll hear the screams from up here.... 21:55 Nick hehehe 21:55 Genji how can someone blow up a box? 21:56 Nick Asking for more I/O than it can handle. 21:56 Nick ... in this instance. 21:56 Genji ohhhh.... frying the bus? 21:56 Nick nah. 21:56 chris probably just make it not responsive until the load drops 21:56 Genji ahh... 21:56 chris not a nice look if you are tryig to issue books or something :) 21:57 Genji software issue, not hardware issue. 21:57 Nick or it crashes the os, and it don't come back after reboot (unhappy memories there...) 21:57 Genji computer not fast enough to run software. software not inteligent enough to throttle requests. 21:57 Genji something like that? 21:57 Nick I suspect Chris et al will ask to have it freed up entirely to them, if it is reeaaallly reallly old. 21:58 chris or even worse, computer not fast enough to allow software to throttle requests 21:58 Nick or: software just cranky. 21:58 Genji eewwww.... what we talking about here? a 386? 21:58 chris yeah, ill only be doing it well outside library hours 21:58 Nick with old stuff, one never knows what maintenance may or mayn't have been done, either. 21:59 Nick if it is dynix, it is probably something proprietary-ish underneath. 22:00 Nick Chris, there is a reasonable sized (but not necessarily cheap) set of Pick speakers out on the net. 22:00 Nick if push came to shove. 22:00 chris yeah, we have a captive pick expert we can call on too 22:01 Nick (financial community here liked it for a long time, and they have Lotsa Money...) 22:01 chris well not captive, but one we could persuade to help us out 22:01 Nick Who's the expert? 22:01 Nick (as in, anyone I know?) 22:01 chris (she knows pick pick .. not this new fangled universe) 22:01 chris :) 22:01 chris olwen, she did a lot of work on the original koha 22:02 Nick Nod. depending on age, it may have a pick pick emulation mode. 22:03 Nick The "bigger" versions dealt with the total lack of standards by supporting each others variants after a point. Thereby netting legacy transition business. 22:03 Genji eh, just looking at a Pick database/os website. Old...... 22:03 Nick You're in luck. 22:04 Nick Big Blue still offers the "personal edition" of universe. 22:04 chris cool 22:04 chris maybe i can run up a copy of it, and get there data in that 22:04 Nick http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/u2/universe/ 22:04 chris then i can break it with no fear 22:04 Nick Nod. 22:04 chris thanks nick 22:05 chris what are you up to these days anyway? 22:05 Nick Runs on redhat. 22:05 Nick Work. school. sleep. repeat. 22:05 chris alien oughta sort that out 22:05 chris :) 22:05 chris must be nearly finished school? 22:05 Nick about a year to go for second degree. 22:06 chris nod 22:06 chris what degrees did you do again? 22:07 Nick Engineering version of CS, working on Master's in same. 22:07 chris ahh cool 22:07 Nick equally useful: online docs for Universe. 22:09 Nick also, if you poke around, IBM's got a deeply useful whitepaper on the Nested Relational idea, come to think of it. 22:12 chris cool 22:15 Nick http://www.maverick-dbms.org is the open source one. 22:15 Nick dunno how mature that is yet. 22:16 Nick http://www.maverick-dbms.org/links.html has links to other options. 22:17 Nick good luck with that. 22:17 Nick and be careful you don't get protested 22:17 chris thanks 22:17 Nick some consider a running MVDMBS an endangered species. 22:17 chris :) 22:18 Nick (visions of zodiacs buzzing around a server...!) 22:18 Nick maybe not. 22:19 Nick catch y'all later. 02:07 hdl hi 02:07 indradg hdl, hi 03:07 Sylvain hi 03:12 hdl paul 03:13 hdl paul_away 11:02 kados owen: any more ideas why the catalogers can't delete barcodes? I thought it was related to the missing item number but if they are still having problems it can't be that (since it's fixed -- unless it isn't) 11:04 owen Maybe I'm misunderstanding their problem, but it doesn't even sound like they're making it to the items screen. 11:04 owen Sounds like that form isn't working. 11:04 kados but it's working for everyone else? ... just not them? 11:05 owen It works fine for me. I've tried it here, I've tried it from The Plains. 11:09 owen I don't suppose anyone besides 'cataloging' has seen the problem firsthand 11:09 kados not that I know of 11:29 shedges the item(s) they can't delete was still missing an itemnumber in the MARC record 11:30 shedges I think the fixitemno script just wasn't catching all instances of missing item numbers 11:30 kados could be 11:31 owen If that's what's going on, then their description of the problem threw me completely off. 11:31 shedges yeah, it was the old missing itemnumber problem 11:31 owen So they weren't having a problem with the barcode form at all. It was pulling up the item record just fine? 11:32 shedges right, but they couldn't edit or delete the item because the 952u tag (itemnumber) was missing in marc_subfield_table 11:33 kados I thought your script fixes that problem ... or maybe it's not getting all of them? 11:33 shedges not getting all of them, I suspect 11:33 kados I can take a look 11:35 owen kados, was there something left over from Friday that we were going to discuss? 11:41 kados hmmm 11:41 kados well we were bug squashing iirc 11:41 kados are there any major bugs left? 11:41 owen You were bug squashing and I was watching ;) 11:41 kados :-) 11:42 kados I've got a sample of chris's plucene stuff running 11:42 kados http://search.athenscounty.lib.oh.us/cgi-bin/koha/plucene/search.cgi?query=cryptonomicon 11:42 kados it's really slow unfortunately 11:43 kados it's just a 'basic' title index 11:43 kados with no optimization 11:43 kados and nothing fancy 11:44 kados for instance, if you search for something with 1000 results you'll get all 1000 back at the same time ;-) 11:44 owen Handling paged search results is always a pain... 11:44 owen Just look at Koha's member search for an example of that! 11:45 kados yep ... the good news is that with plucene it's a snap to reorder stuff 11:45 kados because we get the whole list at once 11:45 kados as well as the 'title' for instance 11:45 kados so it's easy to order by title or author 11:46 kados the problem I'm working on now is optimizing this indexer 11:46 kados so the searches will run fast (like Google fast) 11:46 kados (that's the goal anyway) 11:54 shaun hi owen and kados, you might like to know that my design for the website is reaching proof of concept stage - I should have something functional and attractive by tomorrow evening.