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November 2009
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Blacklight 2.4 release

It’s strange to do a release without creating a download package, but Blacklight 2.4 is available in github here: http://github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight/tree/v2.4.0. You can read the release notes at http://projectblacklight.org/?p=129 and make sure you also admire our new logo and style scheme at http://projectblacklight.org.

Dear Ruby,

Listen, we need to talk. I’ve been seeing someone else. Yes, it’s python. I know I said I didn’t like python, but I never really gave it a chance before, and now that I have there’s an undeniable attraction.

Of course I’m still attracted to you! With your integrated testing frameworks, hipster cache, and glossy web 2.0 mystique, how could I not be? But there are some areas where you just aren’t giving me what I need. How many times have we talked about linked data? I’ve told you how much I want to try it, but every time I mention that you try to get me to have a three-way with java, and I’ve told you before that’s just not my scene. I had the same conversation with python, and it was so easy, it just sort of happened. I don’t think I can let that go.

It isn’t as if you haven’t been playing the field too. Aside from your ongoing thing with java, every time I go to a ruby event these days it actually ends up being about erlang or maya. I know you have an adventurous streak, and that’s one of the things I love about you, but most of the time I just want to be able to get my work done. Python is going to help me do that. I hope you understand.

No, I’m not breaking up with you! We have so many great projects we’re working on together, and there’s so much we’ve planned to do together that I would never want to give up on. I just wanted to tell you about this python thing before you heard about it somewhere else, and let you know there’s room in my heart for both of you.

singing the praises of monit

I run a server here at UVA that hosts many of the projectblacklight.org services, and its tomcat has been cutting out on us every once in awhile, which means our jira, hudson, and solr services all die. Our users have been really good about letting me know when things are down, and I have nagios monitoring in place, and usually I get things restarted pretty quickly, but now I have an even better solution.

I recently installed monit on that server and I have it watching httpd and tomcat. Today, while I was biking home, tomcat cut out at 5:01 pm. At 5:02 monit restarted it for me and ran all its checks to ensure that everything came back up properly. By the time I got home and checked my email, everything was fixed with no intervention from me. I’m pretty happy.

Thanks, monit!

From: “monit”
Date: September 28, 2009 5:01:05 PM EDT
To: “eos8d”
Subject: monit alert — Does not exist tomcat

Does not exist Service tomcat

Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:01:05 -0400
Action: restart
Host: polaris.lib.Virginia.EDU
Description: ‘tomcat’ process is not running

Your faithful employee,
monit

From: “monit”
Date: September 28, 2009 5:02:36 PM EDT
To: “eos8d”
Subject: monit alert — Exists tomcat

Exists Service tomcat

Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:02:36 -0400
Action: alert
Host: polaris.lib.Virginia.EDU
Description: ‘tomcat’ process is running with pid 11582

Your faithful employee,
monit

Writing tomtom ov2 files in ruby

I’m about to take a long car trip, and I finally broke down and bought a GPS for my car. I got a tomtom, and for the most part I’m very happy with it. I especially love the ability to download “points of interest” files, like the 50 best barbeque joints in the country, but I’ve been frustrated that there aren’t more of these. In fact, it seems like most of the POI files I could find were for large chain restaurants. It’s possible to create your own POI, but it’s a little painstaking, adding one point at a time via a GUI editor. I knew there had to be a way to script this.

I just wrote a little script to take KML files from google maps and turn them into the proprietary ov2 format. Once you have the ov2 file you just copy it over to your tomtom (drag and drop it onto the “USA and Canada” folder). The script is called kml2ov2.rb and it’s available at my github repository, here: http://github.com/bess/gis_masher

Blacklight 2.1 release

The 2.1 release is out the door and ready for download. You can download it here and view the release notes here.

Highlights of this release include:

  • Several bug fixes
  • More robust testing for the plugin (tests for the plugin no longer rely on an external solr index)
  • Better adherence to W3C accessibility guidelines
  • Savable search history
  • APA/MLA citations
  • OpenSearch support
  • Fielded search