The Doofer Call

PhD: tick

2013-03-05T23:03:00.003Z

I had my PhD viva today. The last time I had a viva, 21 years ago, I believe I went in a touch intoxicated. That experiment in controlling nerves was not a success. I see it as a sign of how...

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The Mystery Trend

2012-11-16T08:15:00.000Z

This is a little case study of digging into our web stats a bit to understand a recent trend. Doing this sort of digging is pretty addictive and can, of course, throw up some interesting...

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IWM and the Google Cultural Institute

2012-10-11T11:06:00.005+01:00

Just a very quick one. Yesterday Google launched the new historical part of what they now call the Cultural Institute*, consisting of object records and media plus a number of exhibits assembled...

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Mobile thinking

2012-09-19T22:38:00.001+01:00

(well, pontificating.) So, how to go mobile? Don’t ask me, every time we go around this one all the same questions come out. One site or multiple? One URL or more? (these are not the same...

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Solr replication "invalid version" error

2012-07-13T10:59:00.002+01:00

A quick one for googlers: I had this error in my catalina log when trying to replicate a Solr index: invalid version expected 2 but 10 or the data in not in 'javabin' format I first saw it when I...

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What would a European Cultural Commons be?

2012-06-20T21:56:00.001+01:00

The motion: “This house believes that all content in the European Cultural Commons should be freely available for reuse” Last week’s, um, Uxford Onion debate at the Europeana plenary in...

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A memorial post

2012-06-09T12:49:00.002+01:00

On Wednesday my great uncle Raoul died, a couple of months shy of his hundredth birthday. It wasn't unexpected really, but still sad. Though I didn't see him nearly enough, he was a lovely man and...

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Off you go, my lovelies: embedding film and sound from IWM

2012-05-17T14:16:00.001+01:00

On Tuesday we made a few changes to the website, one of which we've been working towards for a long time: freeing up our streaming media so that you - and you and you and you - can use it...

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Installing Windows 8 Consumer Preview as a virtual machine

2012-03-03T14:19:00.002Z

Windows 8 Consumer Preview is out. By all accounts the new OS is a radical departure from the Windows UX paradigm of the last 2 decades and it's quite possibly going to be a very important OS, not...

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Solr to Google Earth

2012-01-25T21:36:00.017Z

This is a basic how-to you can probably find done better elsewhere, but since I didn't find all the bits in one place myself I thought I may as well put this up. The task: show query results from...

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Three years with Spinal Muscular Atrophy III: one parent’s take

2011-12-22T00:00:00.023Z

Since people reading this post are probably not regular readers of ths blog (who is?), a quick word of warning: I don't do concise. I could have split it into multiple posts but that's just cheating,...

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New IWM websites pt.III: the, um, website

2011-11-07T21:25:00.010Z

So, as on the evening before we switch our new website over from beta to fully live status I finally get round to the website part of this series of blog posts. In part 1 we did brand, e-commerce and...

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New IWM websites pt.II: Collections and licensing

2011-11-02T22:13:00.006Z

This is the second post about our "big bang" and the things we launched on October 4th. In the first post I talked about the new brand, e-commerce, and hosting. Here I'll talk a bit about collections...

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On [that] day, 4th October 2011... pt 1

2011-10-25T23:06:00.006+01:00

Tuesday October 4th was a big one for the Imperial War Museum. We in the New Media department had been working towards it for well over a year, but several other parts of IWM also had first-night...

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SOAPhar, so good

2011-10-21T13:16:00.006+01:00

All of a sudden video and sound on our new beta site, streamed from our DAMS, stopped working this week. We embed these using a (currently) private oEmbed service which gets its data from a SOAP...

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Flash 10.2 on Android phones with ARM: partial success

2011-10-16T11:38:00.005+01:00

Imagine my disappointment and annoyance and slight feeling of miss-selling* when I discovered that my otherwise lovely new Android phone (a Samsung Galaxy Ace / S5830) couldn't install Adobe...

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Europeana's Data Exchange Agreement: more than just a licensing change

2011-09-23T23:19:00.010+01:00

The announcement yesterday that the Europeana Foundation had officially adopted the new Europeana Data Exchange Agreement may have passed you by, but it seems to me to be a vital moment in...

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Back to the start

2011-07-09T12:26:00.011+01:00

I've been reading a hell of a lot of documents around Europeana lately as I write the case study for my thesis. And I mean a hell of a lot, many scores of them, including all sorts of work plans,...

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The LOD-LAM star system....

2011-06-25T10:53:00.004+01:00

....is not in a galaxy far far away, although I believe it came out of San Francisco so that may not be too much of a stretch. The recent LOD-LAM workshop there on the question of Linked Open Data in...

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Hack4Europe London, by your oEmbedded reporter

2011-06-09T22:18:00.021+01:00

I spent today at the London edition of Hack4Europe, held at the British Library. It was co-hosted by the BL, Culture Grid/Collections Trust and Europeana, and it one of 4 such hackdays around Europe...

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What are they building in there?

2011-04-29T12:19:00.022+01:00

I started this weeks ago and have decided I should just get it out there rather than finish it! That's the main lesson I've mis-learned from agile, although I've mis-learned lots more besides. The...

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links wot caught my eye #6

2011-03-02T14:17:00.012Z

Transcribing handwritten documents. A very useful compilation of projects using digitised handwritten documents, including some fine examples of how transcription has been done and of technology you...

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links wot caught my eye #5

2011-03-01T22:41:00.011Z

Digital linguistics, API news and some conferences New insights into the 1641 Irish Rebellion revealed (AHRC) and more (Past Horizons) A nice example of what digital analysis of texts now makes...

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links wot caught my eye, #4 of n

2011-02-23T11:14:00.005Z

Augmented Reality Field Trips & the 150th Anniversary of the U.S. Civil War - ReadWriteWeb. For us, the start of the First World War is the big looming anniversary, but in the US the Civil War is...

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links wot...#3 of n

2011-02-18T19:03:00.006Z

OK not a lot in this one but I may as well get it out there. Whither social search? O'Reilly Radar is getting together with Bing to cover the future of search, which they promise to cover much more...

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