Oh, thank heavens I'm not the only one who noticed the bug in WIRED. Go ahead, read the code and see if you can spot the problem. As a veteran of Atari BASIC, I frowned instantly.

The article, Why Veteran Visionaries Will Save the World (printed as "The Ages of Innovation"), is about chronological age and technology leadership.



Hands up if you spotted the bug.

My Perl script returns valid RSS for items added in the last 7 days at any given SunCat library. I need to make it cache results and use the cache, or else I can't share the URL without getting our database slammed by broken RSS aggregators querying once per minute. But I've got valid RSS, which is a good start.

Next parts of the project:

1. Get a scratch PAC working so we can monkey around with it.
2. Cache-ize the RSS script.
3. Add more useful information; currently it's only displaying an ISBN and an image.

Technorati tags: code4lib, perl, programming, libraries, RSS
 

This is extraordinary. In just one day, I appear to have been able to learn to program the PSC Falcon PT40 barcode scanner and write a program that gathers barcodes in the very peculiar format required by Horizon.

They've got a very good tutorial file, but I'm still surprised I caught on so quickly because I've never programmed like this before. It was all done in a GUI that looked like Visio, only every object had a properties sheet with various tabs.

I take it that what I did was some sort of object-oriented programming, only I'm used to having to learn a syntax and then type stuff in order to create a program. If anyone knows common terminology for this sort of programming, I'd like to learn what it is.

Anyway, tomorrow (if possible), I'm going out to a library to actually test this with real barcodes and real call numbers, and see if it can handle various peculiarities of input.

The best thing about this is that I can release my code under the GPL, once it's working well enough to not disgrace me, and other Horizon libraries will then be able to buy these scanners cheaply and load my program. They won't have to shell out for the official software package.