org-mode agenda
I’ve been using emacs’ org-mode to handle project and task tracking. There are a number of views in the agenda mode that weren’t clear to me what they did until I had to go back and see everything I’ve been doing for the last year:
‘a’ Agenda for current week or day
Week view of your (active) TODOs. With some options you can see archived and hiddent events and TODOs. The default brings in any TODO that has an active timestamp or is scheduled. After you bring it up you can then change the view to include everything from the last month, year, or arbitrary date. This is the view you need if you want to see completed tasks in an archive; using the ‘Log-All’ function when you have the view up along with adding the archive option if you are using an archive file.
‘L’ timeline
Timeline view of all date tagged items in the current org-mode buffer. Strangely, this view doesn’t respond to any of the agenda options, except for viewing things in logged format. You’d think it could give you an overview but it doesn’t.
‘t’ List of all TODOs
This is the list of active TODOs. A tasklist, which is configurable with a number of options to sort and surface the particular ones to the top.
Authorized Access Points
I’ve been using RDA for original cataloging since October 2012 at MPOW. With authority records things have been great. There is a lot more flexibility to add and not add things. One hangup is the transition period where records need to be evaluated. Some weirdnesses I’ve encountered have been titles of nobility see: 100 1# Vitzthum, Wolfgang, $c Graf.
Other issues include media types for streaming media. Actually digital files in general are handled poorly. Everything needs a carrier. What exactly is the carrier for a file that is sitting on filesystem in the cloud?
338 ## other $2 rdacarrier
or perhaps if it is published:
338 ## online resource $2 rdacarrier
The file characteristics get handled elsewhere; not a terribly horrible thing, but not exactly intuitive.
More thoughts later.
Found in my ALA Cataloging Rules for Author and Title Entries
I can’t imagine a day when librarians had to correspond by typewritten letter when they needed a cataloging rule answer.
Textarea’s Firefox (Windows 7) & Safari (OS X Lion)
I was looking into using org-mode in emacs (I am a vi user, though I had started as an emacs users in college). But I came across a really amazing Stack Overflow question and answer on using Emacs’ org-mode, Markdown, and a Firefox plugin It’s All Text. The idea of being to edit a textarea in my editor of choice was obvious in hindsight, so I went ahead and started using the plugin, instead calling vim, and modifying relevant ftdetect and ftplugins to handle the hosts that I would be editing in.
So for example, I edit a Confluence wiki for project tracking and documentation. My ftdetect then for the confluencewiki.vim syntax is:
" confluence filetype file
au BufRead,BufNewFile *.cfl,*.confluence set filetype=confluencewiki
au BufRead,BufNewFile wiki.duke.edu.*.txt set filetype=confluencewiki
Using the plugin pulls the text out of the textarea, adds it to a vim buffer and then lets me edit it; while monitoring the file to update the control in the webpage. Pretty awesome
Of course after using it for half a day on Windows at MPOW, I have to do it on my Macbook Air, where I use Safari. I know there are reasons to not use Safari, but my big reason for using it is that I remain consistent with all the Fluid site specific browsers I use for a number of important sites, Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook. Of course Safari’s extension mechanism isn’t as well used as Firefox’s but it seems like that the textarea editing with an external editor itch isn’t limited: thus Quick Cursor which basically acts as a sophisticated copy and paste clipboard into any control that accepts text in OS X. I got the impression that the operating system used to have some other mechanism to achieve something similar, but for whatever reason that has been deprecated
gvim to Markdown Preview
I use a couple simple mappings in my vimrc to preview markdown documents in my
browser. It isn’t as cool as something like Marked for Mac OS X but it gets
the job done on the workstation.
This uses a Python installation of markdown just installed using:
pip install python-markdown
The vimrc includes:
nmap md :%!markdown %
nmap p :w!:!start /min cmd /c markdown -x tables % > "C:\temp\temp.html"
&& "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"
"file://C:/temp/temp.html"
imap p :w!:!start /min cmd /c markdown -x tables % > "C:\temp\temp.html"
&& "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"
"file://C:/temp/temp.html"
Longest Cutter Ever
I always wanted to know what the longest cutter was in the LC Shelf List. This one might be close to being the champ http://lccn.loc.gov/2010034284:
LCSH of the Week: Wizard rock music
Was surprised in the LCSH from the week of March 18, 2009:
(C) 150 Wizard rock music [May Subd Geog] [sp2009001416]
450 UF Wrock music
550 BT Rock music
