Google Books Out-Of-Print Deal Blocked

Posted on by Joe Atzberger

The unique blanket license Google hoped to obtain for the digitization of out of print books has been blocked by a judge’s ruling according to NYTimes.

Unfortunately for content seekers, this means orphaned texts will still have to be negotiated piecemeal, meaning many lifetimes of haggling and non-responsiveness that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.  The existing copyright model has a lot of inertia, even against a powerhouse like Google.

In case it isn’t abundantly clear, the only thing holding this up is the legal side.  The technology, infrastructure, people, reasonable deal with publishers and authors’ groups, and consumer demand are all there.  The legal ducks-in-a-row are not.  Perhaps the best thing that could come out of this ruling is to make the out-of-print publishing conditions open to other players.

ClusterSSH – working with many servers at once

Posted on by Ben Shum

Often, we find ourselves repeating the same configuration steps to our servers again and again.  Consistency in these configuration steps can be essential and yet, many times we make mistakes or accidentally leave a step out moving from one server to the next.

ClusterSSH (cssh) has been a very handy tool for dealing with this.  Cssh allows you to open multiple terminal consoles to different servers.  Once the connections are made, you can send the same command to each console allowing for control of multiple servers simultaneously.  There is also the Mac OS X version of cssh called csshx that comes in handy for those of us who are Apple-fans.  No sight of a version for Windows so far…

Getting cssh on my Ubuntu workstation was very simple, just run sudo apt-get install clusterssh to install.  A handy trick with cssh is to utilize local configuration options to retain lists of servers and aliases for cssh targets.  For instance, one could easily configure a line for apache_servers with the pertinent IPs or hostnames for the servers you wanted to reach.

Create a file called .cssh-clusters within your home directory and add the following line example to it:

apache_servers  username@192.168.1.100  username@192.168.1.101  username@192.168.1.102

Once this file has been created, you can connect to the three servers using the alias with cssh apache_servers.  This makes repeated access to the same group of servers very flexible to setup and re-use.

Singing the praises of Jing

Posted on by Liz Rea

Jing. I am often in the situation where a member will call and be unable to describe their problem. This relates specifically to our ILS, Koha, as we often get reports of “it gave me this weird prompt” or “this item is messed up” but no specific details. Argh! Prior to the advent of Jing (and other screen capture tools) it was a lengthy process of teasing out the url of the page, the content of the message, which patron or item they were working with when they saw the problem. Now, we just ask them to fire up Jing and take a picture of the problem. Easy! Empowering! Time saving!

If you have users who have troubles with being specific when reporting problems, Jing lets them easily take and share screencaps with you so you are at least able to see what they saw. Aside, it makes your users feel good to be able to be more helpful when reporting problems.