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On Sunday, October 30 I went to the Octoberfest 350 race at Hagerstown Speedway in Maryland. While this is the first time I made it to Hagerstown Speedway this year, having visited Potomac Speedway earlier this year, it is my second race in the state of Maryland for 2005. For those who have never been to Hagerstown it is a rather nice facility with a large gravel parking lot and nice stands. The speedway is a “true 1/2 mile” dirt track with a good amount of banking Really the only thing that is needed to make this track a really nice track is some paint on the rusted guardrails (esp. on the front stretch). Read the rest of this entry »

Friday night someone in the LUG/IP IRC channel mentioned they had a problem with man pages displaying single quotes and other special characters on man pages in Red Hat based systems. I looked on my Fedora Core 2 system and noticed I had a similar problem with funny characters showing up in my man pages. It appears the problem was with en_US.UTF-8 encoding of characters. I discovered this out by reading a question and answer on the RedHat Install FAQ. However, I didn’t exactly follow the instructions found in the FAQ. Instead I just added “LC_ALL=C” to the beginning of /etc/sysconfig/i18n (without the quotes). My complete /etc/sysconfig/i18n looks like:


$ cat /etc/sysconfig/i18n
LC_ALL=C
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en"
SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"


I just saw the call for proposals for Educause. Educause will be held in Dallas on October 9-12, 2006. Educause 2006 is “focused on the theme “Spurring Innovation and Marshalling Resources,” the diverse program offers a variety of ways to gather information, engage with peers in the higher education IT community, and hear from leading figures in the field—including preconference seminars; track sessions; poster sessions; small group meetings; and corporate exhibits, presentations, and workshops.” Proposals must be submitted by January 23, 2006.

The ASIST Annual Meeting 2006 Call for Papers is out. The conference takes place November 3-9, 2006 in Austin Texas. This is one conference I’d really like to present at. Hopefully I can come up with a good proposal idea. The important dates are:

January 21, 2006: Proposals due for contributed papers, technical sessions and panels, and pre-conference sessions
February 25, 2006: Proposals due for contributed posters/short papers
March 31, 2006: Authors/proposers notified of acceptance
April 27, 2006: Final versions due for conference proceedings

Less then a month ago I have never heard of S5. For those who have never heard of it, it is “A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System. S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript.”

Why am I bringing this up? Because I am all of sudden seeing it everywhere. I saw a few OSS related presentations at local user groups using it. I also seen a number of presentations using it at Access and Netspeed. It seems like a good concept and I think I will try to use it during my next presentation. Besides, all the cool kids are doing it! One thing I did notice though is that you may really want to only use S5 on your own computer or make sure you can check (and tweak) the browser on the presentation computer before hand. I say this because I saw a few examples of people having problems with using S5 on computers belonging to other people. In most cases it appeared from afar that the problem was related to Firefox extensions that didn’t play well with S5, but that is only my speculation.

Today and yesterday there were sessions where each of the projects worked on during hackfest presented their results. Unfortunately I didn’t make it to hackfest so it was interesting to see the projects worked on and get a little overview about how Hackfest works. The first thing that became clear is that it was just not all “propeller heads” that participated. The second thing that became apparent is that this seems like a good thing in many respects. For example, one group was able to do a literature review on online tutorials. In another example is that someone helped a project by providing editorial assistance/review where needed. Having some non-propeller heads in a project may also be useful because it seems possible that the non-techie public services librarian could have a better understanding of what is more useful for an end user and what can be done to make a project more user-friendly. I hope that I can get to Access 2006 and participate in the Hackfest.

On Saturday, October 15 I went to the Dirt Track World Championship at KC Raceway in Chillicothe, Ohio. This was my first time at the track and the first track in Ohio this year for me. I have now been to four tracks in Ohio: Eldora, Raceway 7, Sharon, and now KC. All four are real nice dirt tracks. The DTWC is a $50,000 to win dirt late model race and is arguably the second biggest race of the year behind the World 100 at Eldora for the dirt late models. There are a few others that are up there with the DTWC for second, but the DTWC was really the first race to offer a really huge purse in 1981 when it was $30,000 to win. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been at Access 2005 since Monday afternoon. I missed the hackfest on Sunday and the Monday morning sessions. However, I really enjoyed all of the sessions I was able to attend so far. Ross Singer from Georgia Tech was doing some interesting things with Firefox extensions, however, as he brought out, only a small minority of students/patrons will actually install these things. I’m finding that to be true with some of the Firefox Seach Plugins. While these things can be quite useful, it is sometimes hard to get patrons to install library-specific extensions and plugins. One specific thing that Ross mentioned they were using at Georgia Tech I want to look at is OpenSearch which uses Amazon’s A9 search. He has it searching Google, the library catalog and other sites at once. I think this same idea can work good if set up for local catalogs. If I could search, for instance, TCNJ, Rider, Mercer County, and the State Library catalog at once, I can find items I (and most TCNJ students/faculty) can drive and pick up in less then 30 minutes. This can be quite useful for “last minute” paper writing that students often end up doing.

Another idea I got was using spiders to crawl and index librarian-recommended websites and making our own searchable index of reviewed sites. I’m not quite sure how the site selection process would work, but I think it is worth looking into and may have potential.

I just found some interesting news in an ARDC Midget Press Release. The release talks about an opportunity for racers in other divisions to test drive a midget, but buried in the release is some much more interesting news to me. Not that being able to drive a midget wouldn’t be interesting, but since I have never raced I doubt I’m eligible. But I digress… The two pieces of interesting news were 1) That ARDC will have a home track next year and that track will be Susquehanna Speedway Park, and 2) even more interesting is that all races next year will be with no wings! This is great news as I really like non-wing midget racing. Read the rest of this entry »

I normally don’t repost articles/links from /. on my blog, but as a big supporter of open standards, I really enjoyed reading these reader responses about Open Debate About OpenDocument. I don’t have much to add, but all of the letters posted are very well thought out. The idea that it will cost more to convert to an Open Document format (and a free office suite) is about as absurd of an argument I ever heard. The only argument more absurd is Prendergast’s claim that going to an open format discourages competition. Huh? Since any software maker can use an open format, it encourages competition. I’d get into some of the crazy quotes Prendergast uses, like Mr Quinn saying “Microsoft keeps expanding into XML and metadata” and point out it should read “Microsoft keeps breaking various XML and metadata standards to lock us into their over-priced software.”