15 Oct 2014
Last week, I participated in the second AMIA AV Hack Day and paired up with NCSU libriarian/developer Jason Ronallo, CNN archivist/engineer Nicholas Zoss, and CNN archivist/engineer/manager Jay Brown. Building on Ronallo’s work with WebVTT and video scrolling thumbnails, we created a Ruby gem that exports thumbnail images, thumbnail sprite image, and a WebVTT metadata file with synced media fragment URLs to thumbnails within the sprite. This could allow for the integration of video thumbnail creation...
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13 Oct 2014
Last week, I attended the Association of Moving Image Archivists annual conference, held this year in Savannah, GA. And y’all, I continue to be impressed with all of the open source projects and contributions happening in the field!! I am so pleased to see it grow in significance every year (along with my knowledge and capabilities of wrangling these projects). Here is a round-up of the technologies discussed during the conference and links to more...
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28 Sep 2014
Last week, I was in converesation with some peers in the moving image archiving, preservation, conservation, (et al…) field and we were discussing ways to improve and empower the roles that women in the field have. One of the things that came up was it’d be interesting to see the breakdown over time of the people presenting at the annual Association of Moving Image Archivists conference and whether it was appropriately stacked in terms of...
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25 Sep 2014
Why won’t Octopress just upload my images?!?!?!?!?!?!, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the source. I’ve been using Git for a while and I feel like I have a good grasp on it. I’ve also been using Octopress for a while, integrated into Github pages, and I feel like I have a good grasp on it, too. Rake tasks, right? I’ve WRITTEN rake tasks before! I got this! But for some reason,...
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25 Sep 2014
I came up with an idea to make a spoof/parody of the recently launched Oyster, a company that purports to be the “Netflix of books,” allowing rentable access to digital books. This hit a sore spot among the librarians I know (and as a former librarian, I know many), because one of the biggest struggles in the field is increasing awareness in the capabilities of the modern library. Most libraries HAVE eBook access, plenty of...
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18 Sep 2014
To follow up my last blog about blogging (meta), here is the blog post I originally intended to write. I’m pushing it up the queue over the other 13 pending posts. Flatiron School was hard. It was one of the toughest, enduring challenges I’ve ever done in my life, and also the most rewarding. I got completely comfortable working from 8am to 10pm every day, excited to write code and build stuff and make things...
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18 Sep 2014
When I started at the Flatiron School in June, I told myself I was going to blog about my feelings and what I was learning every week. EVERY week. Then, when I graduated and inevitably had not written a single blog post about how it was going, I said I was gonna write a big ol’ jumbo blog post about the whole twelve weeks and everything I learned and how amazing it was. Anyway, I...
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08 Sep 2014
Basically, I have a history of taking jokes too far. See also: Tattoos of Avi’s face. So when I was exploring Mozilla’s Popcorn.js and missing my Flatiron peers, I coded up a small app that would help me learn how to use Popcorn.js aaaaaaaand also troll my friends. At Flatiron, we used a shared playlist system called Sonos. Everyone could add tracks from online music collections like Spotify, Hype Machine, or Songza. Near the last...
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23 Jul 2014
Videogrep is a Python-based application that searches through a video file using its subtitles track and can cut video clips based on its search criteria. Videogrep is SUPER easy to use… as long as ffmpeg is installed properly. If not, prepare for some configuring and installing. I used videogrep to search through one of my favorite movies, Terrorvision, to find every time a character refers to something as “The Pleasure (noun).” Hint: it happens more...
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16 Jul 2014
When walking to and from class every day at the bottom of Manhattan, I’ve noticed plates of text on the ground with a date and name of a famous person. I didn’t realize what these signs were about until I was walking out of the southmost Bowling Green stop and saw the initial plaque on the ground: After that, everything clicked! They are commemorating every ticker-tape parade held on Broadway, starting with the first to...
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16 Jul 2014
Forms are hard! Forms are confusing in real life as well as on (or behind) the web. One problem with building web forms in Rails for me was that there are too many options! There are three distinct ways to create forms. And it’s also hard to tell which options are optional and which ones are required. Additionally, the syntax isn’t always the same, so it can be hard to remember three different ways to...
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16 Jul 2014
Component fails, the redundant N +1 configuration, the vulnerability of the system in the form provided. Part (s), one independent backup component at least. During normal operation, the active ingredients as the resistance standby backup system, or not to participate in the following way, passive / active. During failover, the drop in the system (the system availability, block) to restore transparency place during failover, but it depends on the particular solution. This activity - the...
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01 Jul 2014
5.times { blog }
I wrote a few blog posts about the minor trials and tribulations of launching a Twitter bot that mimics a user’s speaking patterns, based on a cool gem. Here they are, rounded up.
The Bots Are Coming! Twitter Bots!
Twitter Bots 2: Authorizing the Bot
Twitter Bots 3: Keeping Your Bot Alive
Twitter Bots 4: MAD SCIENCE
Twitter Bots 5: Scheduling Tweets With Cron
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30 Jun 2014
Cron is a software utility that is used to schedule actions in time. It’s great for handling reoccuring tasks. Twitter bots use a Cron statement to generate a tweet regularly. Cron tasks are super useful, but the syntax can be a little confusing and hard to remember. The default bot tweets once a day, which is represented by ` 0 0 * * * ` I changed my bot to tweet once an hour, which...
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29 Jun 2014
My twitter bot was born on the same day as my BFF (bot-ferverent friend) Athena’s bot. In fact, we live together and were both working on our bots on the same night in different places because I was still at Flatiron and she was at home, and we didn’t realize until our bots were nearly launched that we had both been working on the same project (and probably could have finished more quickly, as I...
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