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Merry Christmas (or whatever holiday you chose to celebrate) and a Happy New Year!

Dan Chudnov is organizing an alternative gathering called ALT,CODE4LIB.DC for those in the Washington DC area who weren’t able to register for the 2009 Code4Lib conference in Providence, RI that sold out in approximately 21 hours. It sounds like a lot of fun, but since I’ll be at Code4Lib proper, and don’t live in the DC area, I’m going to miss out.

It is not really the most newsworthy story of the year, but I am taking over the role of theLibrary and Information Science subject bibliographer. Since we don’t have a Library and Information Science program, the budget is rather small to begin with and with the economy of New York State, it is further reduced. However, I am still excited about this, primarily because I should get a better understand of the process our bibliographers and acquisitions department goes through when decide what books and other resources to add to the collection. I think that experience will help me in my role as Head of Library Technology.

I just had a peer-reviewed article published in Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, Vol 3, No 2 (2008). The article is Delicious Subject Guides: Maintaining Subject Guides Using a Social Bookmarking Site. The article is based on a project I worked on with Heather Lea Mouliason while we both worked at the The College of New Jersey Library.

I didn’t view the PDF yet, but I am happy with the way the article came out. The editors were a pleasure to work with and they, along with the anonymous reviewers, made some really good suggestions that I feel improved the article. I am also really happy to have published in this journal because I feel the Innovations in Practice section is really useful, and also because it is an Open Access journal. I have written a lot lately, so it seems pretty odd that this is actually my first sole-authored peer-reviewed journal article that I have ever written. Maybe it seems odd that this is the first one because I’ve gone through the process with some conference proceedings papers that were peer-reviewed, thus the peer-review process was not totally new to me.

I don’t listen to flash videos or Youtube stuff much on my desktop, but ever since I upgraded from Ubuntu 8.4 to 8.10, I haven’t had good luck with the sound. Occasionally, I could get sound to work for a little bit by killing pulseaudio and starting it again, but that didn’t always work (and never did for Youtube videos). Well, I had to listen to a video for work, so I decided to actually try to fix it instead of turning on my MacBook Pro. Turns out the fix was pretty easy once I found out what to do. It was simply to remove the offending pulseaudio and replace it with esound as described here. I also checked out the thread on the Ubuntu Forums where Mattias Hellborg Arthursson (the owner of the blog that posted the solution) found the solution. I confirmed that my settings were appropriate, and Voila! it works! Not only can I watch and listen to work related videos, as a bonus I can here the music in Lisa Loebn videos posted on Youtube as well! Basically the commands I used where:


:~$ sudo killall pulseaudio
:~$ sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
:~$ sudo apt-get install esound esound-clients libao2
:~$ sudo rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio


That was it…. The other things posted in the Fourm were not necessary in my case.

I am happy to being able to report that the fifth issue of th eCode4Lib Journal has arrived. When this was discussed at the first Code4Lib conference in 2006, I never envisioned us having a journal that has had 58,316 hits in the first year of publication, or that we would even make it to a second year. Heck, I was skeptical we would ever make it to a first issue. I think it is pretty amazing what the editorial committee has been able to accomplish with no formal structure and absolutely no funding, While I am on the committee, I don’t deserver nearly as much credit as other committee members. Each issues coordinator editors for the bulk of the work, along with the people who have configured our WordPess-publishing platform – these people are the real heroes here. However, in a small bit if self-aggrandizing, I will say that I am pleased that after year one of the journal, the article Free and Open Source Options for Creating Database-Driven Subject Guides that I co-authored with Kathryn A. Frederick has been the most visited article.

Issue #5 has a lot of great articles including

• ‡biblios: An Open Source Cataloging Editor
• User-Centred Design and Agile Development: Rebuilding the Swedish National Union Catalogue
• Reaching Users Through Facebook: A Guide to Implementing Facebook Athenaeum
• Affinity Strings: Enterprise Data for Resource Recommendations
• Identifying FRBR Work-Level Data in MARC Bibliographic Records for Manifestations of Moving Images
• Rasmuson Library DVD Browser: Fun with Screen Scraping and Drupal
• Reviving Digital Projects
• Generating Metadata on a Shoestring sans Programmer, with Our Good Friend, Excel (or Any Spreadsheet)
• SPECIAL REPORT: Creating Conference Video
• COLUMN: We Love Open Source Software. No, You Can’t Have Our Code

Visit Code4Lib issue 5 to read all of these great articles along with Emily Lynema’s Editorial Introduction.

Ted Samson over at Infoworld had a post about a report from Forrester about Five PC power myths debunked. While there was considerable discussion int the comments section of his blog and on slashdot about whether or not they used the correct terminology for the units of measure, no one really challenged the premise. which was that “Energy Star estimates organizations can save from $25 to $75 per PC per year with PC power management” versuses leaving your computer on. I haven’t done the math, but lets assume this savings is correct and assume that we can save the midpoint ($50 per year) by having our employees turn the compute on their desk off on the way home for the evening and turn it back on when they arrive in the morning. With that in mind, lets go through the five myths:

1. Myth No. 1: The power used turning my PC on negates any benefits of turning it off. According to Samson, Forrester says that there is no way that a computer can draw enough energy to make the spike at boot save enough money to make it worth turning the PC off. Fair enough, that makes sense. However, if we figure out the savings per hour (at $50 a year, the savings per day is less than 14 cents – assuming it is spread out over the whole year and not only on workdays), I think we would probably find that turning a computer off for an hour or two would not be worth it money-wise, since we are talking about maybe a penny savings.
2. Myth No. 2: My screen saver is saving me energy. OK, what is this doing in an article or report for IT people. Does any IT person worth even a fraction of their salary believe a screen saver saves energy compared to a monitor being off? Maybe an office user might, but even that seems like a stretch. There may be some debate as to whether or not a screen saver saves your screen, but this is not the issue at hand. This alone as a myth buster makes this $270 report susceptible.
3. Myth No. 3: Turning my PC on and off will reduce its performance and useful life. According to Forrester this isn’t true with current machines, if it ever was. In the comments on the blog and on slashdot, some people disputed this. I really don’t know if this is true anymore or not. I suspect if you have a regular replacement schedule and you replace you PCs every 4 or 5 years, any effect on the useful life would be minimal. In other words, I’ll agree with the report here absent of any other information to the contrary,
4. Myth No. 4: I can’t run updates and patches for PCs in lower-power states. OK, here we are talking about automated maintenance. In theory, the report is correct that you can use things such as WOL (Wake on LAN) technology. However, many people I talk to report that they have had trouble with this technology, Assuming people are taking advantage of automated patching over night, I can see the argument for using WOL. However, if it is unreliable, and causes more than one problem per year per PC for automated patching, the IT staff time involved to fix it will far outweigh the savings realized by using WOL. In other words, this option needs to be throughly tested in each environment before rolling it out and may or may not lead to the $50 per year savings per machine depending on individual circumstances.
5. Myth No. 5: My PC users will not tolerate any downtime for power management. The report claims that “potential user complaints can be mitigated by communicating the positive financial and environmental benefits of PC power management.” Ha Ha! That is funny! I’m going to tell staff we may save14 cents per day but they have to wait around for their PC to start up in the morning, and they have to shut down the PC at night? OK, I can buy some employees liking the environmental factor, but even if the savings were triple, I am going to convince them that financially it is beneficially to save 45 ¢. Even an employee making the New York minimum wage ($7.15 per hour or about 12 cents a minute) with absolutely no costs for benefits (which by the way, is not possible legally because their are mandatory employer contributions), if it takes more than 4 minutes of staff time to start and stop a PC, it is a losing proposition financially.

So in summary, depending on the situation, you may save a very minimal amount per PC by using power savings features, but I doubt was you factor in staff time, possible wear and tear on the PC, and the time setting up features such as WOL would the savings amount to everything significant. At bast, it would just be shifting costs. This is one thing that the blog post doesn’t address, in many place of employment, electricity is not charged to individual departments, so any staff time devoted to making PCs or other tools more energy efficient is lost for the department. In other words, there is little incentive.

What are we to do then. Well, each place needs to evaluate what works best for their environment, but if you are expecting huge returns in energy savings by having employees turn on and off computers, I think you will be disappointed. My personal thoughts based on this report would be that it might be worth looking into turning PCs off over the weekend (and during vacations) but not to worry about it at other times. One reason why I say that is there are also some performance benefits to rebooting a PC once in awhile, especially if it is running Microsoft Windows , but I still am not sure that it would offer anything more than a negligible amount of savings. What could, however, offer some savings is purchasing and demanding from manufactures more energy efficient computers. In that case, even when people are using their computers businesses will see energy savings. Of course, if the energy efficiency is outweighed by the computers costing more than the savings, the point is moot.

BTW: Since this is an academic library-related blog, I would say I don’t see any financial advantage of turning PCs off in the public areas based on this study except if the library is going to be closed for more than a day. The savings of an average of $50 per year is based on computers being idle for 16 hours, Thus, if your open more than 8 hours a day, the savings would be less. Many academic libraries are open closer to 16 hours, which would cut the potential savings in half. In this case, it seems apparent that unless you have fully automated your shutdown and startup procedures, the cost savings would be quickly absorbed by the staff time required to walk around the building shutting computers down.

Today I wanted a PDF “print out” of an article I co-wrote for the Code4Lib Journal to put in a repository I am setting up for Binghamton University Libraries. While using the print to file function works great on Ubuntu, there was one problem. I didn’t want the comments in the print out. This is where Firebug came to the rescue. At Jonathan Brinley’s suggestion I installed the Firebug extension. I opened up the page I wanted to print and using the HTML view of Firebug, all I had to do was delete the <div> element for the comments, and hit print. I ended up with a nice PDF of the article for my repository.

Utah has finished the regular season on top of my polls on the strength of a undefeated season. They are followed by Boise State. Dropping out of my top ten is the previously undefeated Ball State who lost to Buffalo. I had both Oklahoma jump Texas. Although I would have ranked Texas higher than Oklahoma, the agreed upon method of deciding the team to go to the Big 12 championship, picked Texas, and Oklahoma took care of business in Missouri. Alabama dropped to 6th after losing to Florida who moved up to 5th. Reluctantly, with Ball State dropping outof the top 10, I picked Big 11 champion Penn State to round out the top 10.

1. Utah (12-0)
2. Boise State (12-0)
3. Oklahoma (12-1)
4. Texas (11-1)
5. Florida (12-1)
6. Alabama (12-1)
7. Southern Cal (11-1)
8. Texas Tech (11-1)
9. Cincinnati (11-2)
10. Penn State (11-1)

The results of the voting for the 22 “regular” presentations at Code4Lib 2009 have been announced. There are also three keynotes (Stefano Mazzocchi, Sebastian Hammer, and Ian Davis) along with lightning talks and pre-conferences. Code4Lib 2009, which will be held Monday February 23 (pre-conference) – Thursday February 26 at the Renaissance Providence (RI) Hotel is shaping up to be another great conference. Below are the 22 talks that were voted in, in alphabetical order. It is a shame that we didn’t have more room, because some of the talks that missed the cut were excellent topics. Hopefully the people that submitted them will still come to the conference and do lightning talks. I am happy to report that one of them, The Open Platform Strategy: what it means for library developers, is going to be presented by yours truly.

1. A modern open webservice-based GIS infrastructure
2. A new frontier – the Open Library Environment (OLE)
3. A New Platform for Open Data – Introducing ‡biblios.net Web Services
4. Blacklight as a unified discovery platform
5. Complete faceting
6. djatoka for dummies
7. Extending biblios, the open source web based metadata editor
8. Freebasing for Fun and Enhancement
9. FreeCite – An Open Source Free-Text Citation Parser
10. Great facets, like your relevance, but can I have links to Amazon and Google Book Search?
11. How Anarchivist Got His Groove Back 2: DVCS, Archival Description, and Workflow Integration
12. LibX 2.0
13. Like a can opener for your data silo: simple access through AtomPub and Jangle
14. LuSql: (Quickly and easily) Getting your data from your DBMS into Lucene
15. Open Up Your Repository With a SWORD!
16. RESTafarian-ism at the NLA
17. The Dashboard Initiative
18. The Open Platform Strategy: what it means for library developers
19. The Rising Sun: Making the most of Solr power
20. Visualizing Media Archives: A Case Study
21. What We Talk About When We Talk About FRBR
22. Why libraries should embrace Linked Data