My small contribution to the day was a lunchtime presentation on using Linux for back office stuff like web servers, mail servers, networking, etc. It’s a very general overview of the popular projects and tools out there for Linux. It’s mainly intended as a starting place for people looking to install a new service on a Linux platform. The slides from my talk are below.

Recommended Online Drupal Resources

The Librarian in Black shares her collection of resources. It’s got some great links for people trying to wrap their heads around Drupal.

Is Dreamweaver being beaten by Drupal?

This article on oreilly.com doesn’t really answer the question posed in its title, but it does a pretty good job of contrasting static and dynamic websites. It gets a little technical, but provides a lot of food for thought.

more drupal, if you can stand it

Amanda Etches-Johnson wraps up her series on Drupal. Be sure to check out her earlier posts as well. It’s a great way to learn about what libraries can do with Drupal.

A n00b goes camping – Drupal Camp at Darien Library

DrupalCon was held in D.C. last week, but libraryland recently held its own Drupal event. Darien Library in Connecticut held a Drupal unconference. I watched a live stream on the web and it was a very cool event. Cindi Trainor attended in person and posted a very in-depth writeup over at ALA TechSource. She makes a great point that Drupal can be used for almost anything and is only limited by the expertise found in libraries.

Drupal Taxonomy Tutorial

This popped up in Cindi Trainor’s FriendFeed (FriendFeed is a great way to keep up with what others are bookmarking and sharing). Anyway, taxonomies are one of the more difficult concepts to grasp in Drupal. So it’s nice to have a tutorial like this that steps you through the process.

Service Providers For Libraries

This was posted on the Libraries Drupal Groups site. It’s a nice roundup of companies providing Drupal-related services for libraries. Providers like these make Drupal available to libraries even if they don’t have in-house support.

Software System’s Fans Gather to Talk Code

Even the NY Times has picked up on Drupal’s popularity. This article gives some good examples of companies and groups using this CMS for their websites.

Oh, if you are near Cincinnati there is a Drupal Users Group here that formed a few months ago. The group is shaping up nicely and is great for newbies and gurus. Meetings are at 6:30pm on the 1st Wednesday of each month at the Public Library’s main branch.

The post is based on Aaron Swartz’s rant against OCLC and WorldCat.  It is, however, a valid rant.  Libraries have tolerated OCLC’s “less than open” practices because there wasn’t much alternative.  Now that open alternatives such as Open Library and ‡biblios.net are growing, it will be interesting to see what happens.  With the growing popularity of open source in libraries, having open records and open cataloging will be very important.

The Virginia Physics “Flexbook” project is a collaborative effort of the Secretaries of Education and Technology and the Department of Education that seeks to elevate the quality of physics instruction across the Commonwealth. Participating educators will create and compile supplemental materials relating to 21st century physics in an open–source format that can be used to strengthen existing physics content.

The concept of open source textbooks is very cool.  Open source and education are a natural match.  I know there are other free textbooks out there, but I really like the level of collaboration Virginia trying to achieve here.  The finished materials will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share–Alike license.

It will be interesting to see if the term “flexbook” catches on.  I like it.

Find out more on the Virginia Secretary of Technology’s website.

There have been rumors for a while that Google is working on its own Linux Distribution.  Some expect Google to release it to world some day and others think it is just an internal project intended for Google employees.  This past week Google finally released its operating system – and it’s a browser.  This makes total sense because most of Google’s applications and services are either totally or partially web-based.  Google Docs, Maps, Calendar, and Gmail are the applications and Chrome is the OS.  Sure the apps will run on other browsers, but you can bet that Chrome will be optimized to run Google’s services at peak efficiency.  Chrome even has a built-in task manager (as do all operating systems) to manage the many processes one may have open.  Another OS-like feature in Chrome allows you easily create desktop shortcuts of your web apps.

Chrome is no-where near as feature rich or extensible as Firefox currently is and so far it only runs on Windows.  I’m willing to bet, however, that Chrome will be a viable alternative browser (OS?) in the next couple of years.  Word is that Google is also preparing a version of Chrome for future versions of its Android platform for mobile devices.

Web working isn’t for everyone, but it’s definitely for me.  Having my entire office in my bag and online in “the cloud” has given me a lot of flexibility and freedom.  The staff in our office have embraced it as well.  Everyone is connected via instant messaging which means they can see when I’m available and reach me whenever they need something.

Over the past year, I’ve had to adjust some of the ways I work and and develop some new habits.  I now avoid paper unless it’s completely necessary, schedule tasks based on where I am on a particular day, and rely more heavily on free/online software.  Zen Habits recently posted 12 New Rules of Working You Should Embrace Today and I can definitely relate to most of them.  Rule #4 focuses on working outside the office, but I think many of the rules apply to web working in one way or another.

I was recently invited to guest blog about Ultra Low-Cost PCs like the Asus Eee PC.  The post is up now.

Vertical Partitioning

Partitioning vertically is a database optimizing technique where tables with many columns are split into multiple, smaller tables.  Without partitioning, even normalized tables may be a mix of frequently and infrequently accessed columns.  This makes it difficult to keep things loaded in memory and can affect overall performance.

By splitting the table in two, you can have a table of frequently accessed columns and a table of less frequently accessed columns.  The tables can be merged together dynamically when needed, but most of the time you will just need the table with the frequently accessed data.  This approach also gives you the option of using different table types (storage engines) for each of the tables.  Of course, it’s probably easiest to implement vertical partitioning at the beginning of your project instead of coming back and making changes to the database structure later.

Horizontal Partitioning

Partitioning horizontally is a similar concept except that the table is split by rows rather than columns.  This works well when certain rows are accessed more frequently than others.  Depending on the size of the database, having a table of more frequently accessed rows can really speed things up.

The events registration system I created at MPOW can potentially benefit from this.  We have over 10,000 registrations in the system, but most of those are for past events that we rarely need to access.  Having a table of 100-200 registrations for upcoming events and a separate table for the thousands of past event registrations would probably provide a noticeable performance increase.

Query Cache

MySQL has a query cache that it uses to increase performance.  If a particular query has already been run on the database, MySQL can return the cached result instead of having to parse it, optimize it, etc.  I was already familiar with the query cache and we use it MPOW.  However, I learned a couple of new tidbits from Jay:

• “Any modification to any table involved in the SELECT invalidates the stored result.”  I guess I already knew this.  What’s cool, however, is that partitioning your tables properly can reduce this.  Making a change to a table containing upcoming event registrations would not affect the cache for the table containing past event registrations.
• Don’t use InnoDB tables when there are more than 5000 rows and you’re doing full table scans.  It’s slooooow.  Use MyISAM table types instead.
• If you are doing a SELECT on tables that change frequently, there is no point in storing the result in cache because it will soon be invalid.  Use SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE to prevent MySQL from storing highly dynamic results and filling up the cache.
• MEMORY table types are fast and good for data that can be thrown away or re-computed again.

ANSI vs. Theta Coding Style

Jay put two different versions of a SELECT statement up on the screen and asked the group which style they used.  One style used INNER JOINs (ANSI style) and the other used WHERE and AND clauses (Theta style or comma style).  I think most of the room (including me) raised our hands for the latter.  Jay made some good points about ANSI being easier to read and more portable.  I need to force myself to try ANSI and get used to it.  Theta style, however, is very natural for me and I suspect it will be hard for me to change.

The slides from Jay’s talk (including part 2) are up on his website.

Drupal is also becoming a popular choice for libraries and now the New York Public Library is joining the party.  Josh Greenberg recently posted on NYPL Labs that they are in the process of moving their site to Drupal.  It’s not only an informative post about Drupal, but also a cool look at the process that NYPL is going through to rebuild their site in a CMS.  Looks like it will be a good fit for them.

I gotta say that having a “behind the scenes” blog is an awesome idea.  It can give the public more of a connection to the library while also keeping the rest of the staff informed.

Now I dislike DRM just as much as the next person. In fact, I probably dislike it more than most people. I understand that it makes content unnecessarily difficult to access and leaves out people without access to certain software or hardware. But the sad truth is that libraries don’t really have much choice. DRM is put in place by the vendors and if libraries boycotted those companies they wouldn’t have much digital content to offer their users.

We’ve seen the retail sector start to move away from DRM with vendors offering unprotected music and such. We are also starting to see library vendors offer DRM-free content. So we are hopefully seeing the beginnings of a trend away from locked-down content. There’s still a long way to go and it’s not going to happen over night. Baby steps.

So while I appreciate all that the Free Software Foundation does, demanding that libraries drop DRM now is just not feasible. Our users want popular, digital content and libraries need to provide it if they want to stay relevant. Should users complain to libraries about DRM? Sure. Should libraries complain to their vendors about it? Definitely. Boycotting digital content, however, is just not an option.

[slideshare id=336883&doc=drupal-1207333458969455-9&w=425]

Update: The slides can also be found on SlideShare.

Getting Results with Google (Support Staff Symposium)
April 17th
SWON Libraries – Dayton, Ohio

Panel Discussion and Wrap-Up
April 28th
TechConnections Conference – Columbus, Ohio

Mobile Devices in Libraries (OLC Boot Camp)
April 29th
Ohio Library Council – Columbus, Ohio

Getting Results with Google
May 13th
CO-ASIST – Columbus, Ohio