Sometimes the most sophisticated deployment strategies and infrastructure models can unfortunatly not be shifted into the real life, so one has to go back a few decades and use tools from that time and mix them with current ones. In a former post I described a cool solution for building a static HTML website and putting it into a Docker image.
Web-scraping is ugly, but sometimes it may become necessary, because services don’t expose an API to retrieve data. Basically web-scraping is a mechanism to programatically open a website and grab the contents in order to using it for own purposes. The mission In one of our sites, we are using the HTML output of a not-that-hip-anymore-database allegro.
Technology fails – at least sometimes. This is particularly true for a modern distributed research infrastructure, such as DARIAH-DE. For the operation of this infrastructure, we have implemented a monitoring solution with Icinga. This enables us to be informed about problems and react quickly.
Looking for platforms to start prototyping the Atom text editor or its superior platform Electron passed our way at the Research and Development Department recently. For feasibility studies we sometimes test new frameworks and when we can use web technologies to start coding, there is quite a good chance for a seamless connection between data structures, algorithms and the front end.
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ChemSpidey lives! Even in the face of Karen James’ heavy irony I am still amazed that someone like me with very little programming experience was able to pull together something that actually worked effectively in a live demo. As long as you’re not actively scared of trying to put things together it is becoming relatively straightforward to build tools that do useful things.
Yesterday, along with Chris Thorpe and Ian Mulvany I was involved in what I imagine might be the first of a series of demos of Wave as it could apply to scientists and researchers more generally. You can see the backup video I made in case we had no network on Viddler.
…is that someone needs to make money out of them. It was inevitable at some point that Friendfeed would take a route that lead it towards mass adoption and away from the needs of the (rather small) community of researchers that have found a niche that works well for them.
My aim is to email this to all the email addresses that I can find on the relevant sites over the next week or so, but feel free to diffuse more widely if you feel it is appropriate. Dear Developer(s) I am writing to ask your support in undertaking a critical analysis of the growing number of tools being developed that broadly fall into the category of social networking or collaborative tools for scientists.
Written on the train on the way from Barcelona to Grenoble. This life really is a lot less exotic than it sounds…  The workshop that I’ve reported on over the past few days was both positive and inspiring. There is a real sense that the ideas of Open Access and Open Data are becoming mainstream.