Author Archives: Josh
Modrupal: A library for Drupal mobile web services
To enable sharing of Logo programs on mobile devices, I needed to setup a social website. But there are a ton of things I didn’t want to deal with: User authentication and management, content management, support for a simple remote … Continue reading
Building a site around LOGO programs
The next phase of the mobile LOGO interpreter is adding the ability to share your LOGO programs with other users. I’ve been looking for a pre-built social networking platform that lets you easily build sites around different objects. The thing … Continue reading
Parsing LOGO
This weekend I added variables and arguments to the LOGO interpreter for mobile phones I’m working on. This was much more difficult than I was anticipating. Originally, I wrote the interpreter parser using the CUP LALR parser generator for Java. … Continue reading
New project for the new year
This is my last semester at the School of Information at umich. I’m only taking a few courses, and no longer working on a thesis, so I have some extra time for my passions. One of those passions is educational … Continue reading
Why trees are important
Trees the data structures that is. We’re covering them right now in SI 503, the search and retrieval foundation course at SI. Throughout the semester, we’ve heard grumblings from the library and archive folk about how this isn’t really relevant … Continue reading
One Laptop Per Child screenshots
Boing Boing has links to screenshots of Sugar, the desktop interface for the One Laptop Per Child project. It uses wireless ad-hoc networking to build several “views” that allow users to interact with other users on the network. It’s a … Continue reading
C-SPAN introduces new copyright policy
C-SPAN has changed their copyright for most of their videos to a creative commons type license. You can read about the change in the C-SPAN press release. At the bottom of their main page, there is a link to their … Continue reading
OpenCongress puts a new face on thomas.loc.gov
I often find myself trudging through thomas.loc.gov trying to keep up on civil liberties related legislation. It’s a great resource, but not the most friendly. The people behind Democracy the Internet media player have created OpenCongress, which is somewhat similar … Continue reading
Blackboard, Microsoft and Wikipedia
I don’t usually write about elearning environments, but there’s something fishy happening right now in the elearning world. Blackboard was recently awarded a broad patent covering a lot of elearning tech., most of it with prior art. Tim O’Reilly has … Continue reading
Distributed Storage and Libraries
A recent post on distributed file systems got me thinking about their use in academic environments. Found via Slashdot, the article was about Cleversafe, a distributed file system licensed under the GPL. Libraries would be a perfect environment for distributed … Continue reading