IRC log for #koha, 2005-05-24

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Time Nick Message
12:28 shedges kados: "Free and Open Source ILS" is an interesting suggestion
12:29 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 (as least it seems that way to me)
12:30 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 the last two get abbreviated, of course (FOSS and FLOSS)
12:34 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 (even in the "Land of the Free")
12:38 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 biab
12:42 (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 Kados around?
21:18 (as in, awake?)
21:19 chris i think hes off watching star wars
21:19 Nick chuckle.
21:19 OK
21:19 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 and tons and tons of work
21:25 we are doing our second nz public library koha tho
21:25 so thats all good
21:26 Nick fantastic.
21:28 Where?
21:28 chris its rangitikei district council, kinda the next district north from HLT
21:29 its in the early stages yet, still trying to get the data out of their old system
21:29 (always the hardest bit)
21:29 Nick what is it?
21:29 something ugly?
21:29 chris old dynix
21:29 pick based
21:30 so its proving to be a little tricky, im sure we will get there though
21:30 Nick Ooooooo.
21:30 MV databases.
21:30 Always fun.
21:30 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 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 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 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/To[…]ses/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 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 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 for anything other than the day to day running of the library stuff
21:43 so i think it will involve some monkeying around, which wasnt unexpected
21:43 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 http://computing-dictionary.th[…]tionary.com/Dynix
21:45 that sounds like it
21:47 http://64.233.187.104/search?q[…]=1&client=firefox
21:49 maybe we can jsut let olwen loose on it
21:49 Nick Universe'll have a modern toolset for it.
21:49 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 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[…]his-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 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 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 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 Random thought: could you attach a Z39.50 server to it instead?
21:54 chris theres a question
21:54 i think the answer is
21:54 "Pay someone money"
21:54 :)
21:54 Genji http://www.linuxplanet.com/lin[…]t/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 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 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 ... 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 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 if it is dynix, it is probably something proprietary-ish underneath.
22:00 Chris, there is a reasonable sized (but not necessarily cheap) set of Pick speakers out on the net.
22:00 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 (as in, anyone I know?)
22:01 chris (she knows pick pick .. not this new fangled universe)
22:01 :)
22:01 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 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 Big Blue still offers the "personal edition" of universe.
22:04 chris cool
22:04 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 what are you up to these days anyway?
22:05 Nick Runs on redhat.
22:05 Work.  school.  sleep. repeat.
22:05 chris alien oughta sort that out
22:05 :)
22:05 must be nearly finished school?
22:05 Nick about a year to go for second degree.
22:06 chris nod
22:06 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 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 dunno how mature that is yet.
22:16 http://www.maverick-dbms.org/links.html has links to other options.
22:17 good luck with that.
22:17 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 maybe not.
22:19 catch y'all later.
02:07 hdl hi
02:07 indradg hdl, hi
03:07 Sylvain hi
03:12 hdl paul
03:13 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 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 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 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 well we were bug squashing iirc
11:41 are there any major bugs left?
11:41 owen You were bug squashing and I was watching ;)
11:41 kados :-)
11:42 I've got a sample of chris's plucene stuff running
11:42 http://search.athenscounty.lib[…]ery=cryptonomicon
11:42 it's really slow unfortunately
11:43 it's just a 'basic' title index
11:43 with no optimization
11:43 and nothing fancy
11:44 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 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 because we get the whole list at once
11:45 as well as the 'title' for instance
11:45 so it's easy to order by title or author
11:46 the problem I'm working on now is optimizing this indexer
11:46 so the searches will run fast (like Google fast)
11:46 (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.

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