RepoHate

How academic libraries act like the Great Firewall of China

2010-03-30T05:19:00.001-07:00

They fucked you up, the library's had,
They do not mean to, but they do....

So, researchers continue to live in the wondrous magic bubble that they are damned well entitled to view journals - why should they pay? they've never had to before. They have as skewed a view as to what they version of the internet looks like, as many Chinese.

To them, the internet must appear like a bunch of broken links. To academics, it appears like the land of goddamn milk and honey, just reach out and read any journal they like, free of charge.

You want academics to put more content out there? Cut the subscriptions and pass the bill onto directly onto them. They want access to the 'Journal of pointless bullshit'? They can pay for it. Themselves. Alone. Out of their precious budget.

Libraries, grow some balls, you are the consumer and you hold the power. Publishers believe they have you over a barrel as you can't be seen to piss off your academics.

I say it's time to piss them off.

It's time to remind them that they are getting fucked over every time they publish.

"No, sorry, we can't archive your life's work. You repeatedly whored out your copyright to a publisher, just because you couldn't be bothered to change the contract. We do however have an excellent paper recycling policy that you could make use of."

Frankly, I'm tired hearing academics bitch and moan about what they are entitled to.

You aren't entitled to fuck-all - you signed it all away. Go cry at someone else.

Updating the dictionary

2009-06-12T04:50:00.000-07:00

Updating the dictionary to support the repository terms as they are used today

Devil's Dictionary Definitions:

DOId (pron. Doh-iyd)

State of wide-eyed euphoric ignorance in person(s) bedazzled by baroque identifier system (submitted by the tuxedo'd gentleman of the fens)

Duraspace (pron. Wat-ler-phauk)

What a system is prior to being useful. ("Is the system built yet, or is it just duraspaced?")

(Syn. - vapour, ethereal, nebulous, hot-air)

Persistent Identifier [Ed. note: existance of this is highly dubious]

Something librarians think is important, while the rest of the world couldn't give a toss as long as they can google it. If they can't google it, then it doesn't exist and it doesn't matter to them anymore.

Institutional Repository

"where research goes to die"

Harvesting

A mechanism to create multiple, incomplete copies of items, spread across the internet, in an apparent effort to make sure that when users search for something they find lots of useless links.

The actual aim is to make repository managers feel better about the tiny numbers of items they have by letting them see that everyone else has bugger all content as well.

Zentity (aka How to be able to use Open Office and still be tied to MS)

A really terribly closed system, which is "Open Source" in that you need to purchase a full MS server solution to host it and interact with it.

But, as noone gets fired for purchasing MS software like they should, this will likely have marketshare in the near future.

Agile development

This does not mean doing a waterfall method, but faster with more meetings and more milestones.

It also doesn't mean saying that you do pair-programming when you are the only developer.

A scrum is not another word for a meeting.

Agile development means being able to say "Fuck, I got it wrong" and changing the course of development to avoid a total waste of time and money to hit arbitrary and now, meaningless milestones.

Please, add your updated definitions to the bottom of this post!

The Cry of the Anarchic Librarian.

2009-02-27T06:50:00.000-08:00

Block me, and I will go around you.

Build a wall, and I will build a door.

Lock the door and I will break a window.

And if I don’t have have a leader to inspire me, I will lead.

If I don’t have a team that will support me, I will recruit a team from beyond the organizational boundaries - every policy has a loophole, every system has a hidden reward.

(Torn from "The PARTICIPATORY LIBRARIANSHIP Starter Kit blog: http://ptbed.org/blog/?p=692 - taken out of context on purpose to mean what I intend.)

Inspired by: From TopatoCo

The man who's gonna fix it all

2009-02-13T08:51:00.000-08:00

@enterprisey on twitter is the man for the task, oh no, wait, I think he's running the show anyway:

Something which makes my blood boil is developers arguing about programming languages. That's the beauty of BPEL: code gen into Java or C#!

Been asked to put up a web site for my daughter's Girl Guides. Now looking for J2EE/JSP/EJB/Oracle hosting with MQSeries and 5x9s uptime.

He's the man....

No, fuck it.

I can't do it.

Seriously, kill him.... stop the madness....

But he's funny....

Internet Explorer - the world wants compensation.

2009-01-28T03:41:00.000-08:00

Wbe developers - We spend time crafting wonderful, beautiful works, w3c compliant, accessible, and using the right tags for the right jobs.

Then we check it in IE5 or IE6 and spend the next couple of hours battling with IEs idiosyncracies and downright stupidity. So much time is wasted kowtowing to the myriad flaws and idiotic bullshit that IE flings upon us, forcing us to hack that which we know is right and correct into something that is somewhat correct, but with various workarounds and hacky solutions just to get it to look decent in Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer, I spit on you. I have added the hours you have recently cost me to this site: http://internetexplorerwastedmytime.appspot.com - people, please rally up and add your wasted hours! With just 6 people, the wasted money is up to $5k! Let's see how much Microsoft has really cost the world! (via per hourly rates)

(Oh, and this site is being developed on the move - a friend of mine is making it while he commutes to and from work on the bus using his shiny new 3G connected Dell mini 9! And yes, the site is ironically crap looking to boot!)

Principles behind the Repository Manifesto

2008-11-10T06:44:00.000-08:00

(based on http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html)

We follow these principles:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.

(We are not users of the systems we build, and shouldn't keep putting features in only we want. Which users care if it is OAIS compliant? And METS?)

Welcome changing requirements, even late in
development. Agile processes harness change for
the customer's competitive advantage.

(Go where the users are or want to be in terms of features, not where you think they should be. Users should be shielded from the underlying standards at ALL times.)

Deliver working software frequently, from a
couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a
preference to the shorter timescale.

(If you are not going to implement what you are designing and learn from it as you progress, then you have failed. Do not pass Go, hand in your library pass.)

Business people [USERS] and developers must work
together daily throughout the project.

Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.

(Don't just list projects you want doing and expect them to be done. Find people doing work the community finds compelling or interesting and fund them directly.)

The most efficient and effective method of
conveying information to and within a development
team is face-to-face conversation.

(More working meetings, fewer dissemination meetings. Discussion, not powerpoint.)

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

(No plan should get the go-ahead, without implementing the ideas or design alongside it.)

Agile processes promote sustainable development.
The sponsors, developers, and users should be able
to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

("Projects" lead to having concepts like 'final deadline' and 'wrapup meetings'. Repositories are, by their remit, continuous services, and DO NOT FIT the project paradigm.)

Continuous attention to technical excellence
and good design enhances agility.

(Can't simply work on architectual astronomy without trying to implement, can't simply code and build without a valid design choice. Not one or the other, but working on both simultaneously makes for a good service.)

Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount
of work not done--is essential.

(Re-use, re-use, re-use. We only need one good system, not 5. In all development, there is time for divergence and a time for convergence, and it's time we converged. Shame there's no good candidate to move to...)

The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly.

(No design is static and no implementation is static, only your current users are. Build and cater for the users you do have, and aim to please those you don't.)

Declaration of Independance of Metadata

2008-11-06T03:17:00.000-08:00

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that Metadata is essential to all Users, and that the Creation of Metadata endows certain inalienable Rights, that among these are the right to collect, the right to share and the pursuit of Happiness through the reuse of the Metadata.

That to secure these rights, Metadata Repositories are instituted among Servers, deriving their just powers from the consent of the Users, That whenever any Form of Repository becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Users to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Repositories, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness through Openness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Repositories long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that Users are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Repositories, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

So, OCLC... quit while you are ahead, before we get all July 4, 1776 on your ass.

Don't worry - I haven't been incarcerated...

2008-08-18T03:52:00.000-07:00

Great word that, 'incarcerated'...

But I digress, I have merely been so full of hate for repositories recently, that I didn't want to dignify them with an article. And also, I am a lazy fuck.

I want to open by telling you about a social observation of mine; it stems from that painful experience that we all know, the "gotta-look-happy-to-see-them-but-don't-know-how-to-behave-where-are-the-social-boundaries" moment when you meet an ex-boy/girlfriend. The forced smile, the "sure, I give a shit about your life right now" faked attitude, the sheer weirdness of touching them again by shaking their hand (rather than rutting with them), finally leading to too many repressed memories being dragged to the surface - "why the fuck was I with her" - being a prime component of these memories for some.

Now, being primed with that information, I want you to take a good look at the meeting between Ms. Fedora and Ms. DSpace....

It's amazing how ex-couples tend to lead similar lives after they split up.

(I was going to erm... 'find' some video proof for this, by using these shots, a 3D animation suite called blender and the song by Katy Perry "I kissed a girl (and I liked it)" but, when I found myself at 3.35am, adjusting the hair physics of Ms. Fedora while her avatar swung around a pole and bemoaning how I couldn't seem to get the lighting just right for this shot, I decided to call it a day. There are obsessive paths from which you can never return, after all.)

Do the math

2008-07-25T20:34:00.000-07:00

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

Code 411....

Code 416....

and finally,

Code 417 - end of night ;)

Mwuhahahahaah

2008-07-25T06:09:00.000-07:00

Repohater is in the Library of Congress, beeeyaches ;)

The fools let me in....

Web Architecture trumps repositories

2008-07-19T16:09:00.000-07:00

If research was posted on the web, using the fecking web architecture design that was laid down *years* ago, then repositories would never have happened. There is absolutely no need for them, apart from to make middle managers feel warm and fuzzy and occassionally, a little moist when the numbers of deposits pass some inconsequential milestone - 'omg, squee, I have 1000 items in my repository. That means that this university is doing some research!' Yeah, great. Whoopdee doo. There are some unreadable PDFs somewhere in a system. Oh, btw, don't lose the database if you are using DSpace, bye bye all data. Oh, and using Fedora? Sure, it's easy to get stuff, you know how to do RDF queries, right? Oh, sorry, it's not SPARQL, it's its own weird query language that does its own damn thing. Frontend for Fedora? Why would you want that? And EPrints? Everything you want to store is a document, right? Oh, and keep that db too!

In light of recent fluffyness...

2008-07-08T03:30:00.000-07:00

Due to boing-boing's campaign of cute catfights and puppies, I have decided to lay off the repohate for this one.

But there is still some distaste, loathing, a little terror and an urge to run from this next news item - it's the terror and the running really.

Now I call myself a geek - 'geek' being pronounced in the same way you might say 'badge of honour', 'a person of noble stature' and 'hung like a mule'.

But these... these guys are nerds... that's not to say that I think poorly of them. I think of them in the same way I might think of a person making large sculptures of cheese, going for a dominoes record, or doing something similarly autistic/time-consuming. I have admiration for them, but I wouldn't have them over for tea, smelling of cheese and eyeing up my dvd collection with their dominoes-obsessed gaze.

So let me present the nerdstorm (the nerd's collective noun) - ethernet networked Commodore64's, playing a homebuilt racing game 'NetRacer'....

It's all a matter of perspective...

2008-07-03T13:53:00.000-07:00

What repository managers think their repository architectures look like:

What the developers know repository architectures look like:

But without the satellite dish...

(Submitted by FourOhNine)

When a 402 goes bad...

2008-07-02T14:43:00.001-07:00

Be careful with your hookers people, Very Bad Things can happen...

Slacking? Here's some resources to help you out.

2008-07-02T03:16:00.000-07:00

Well, there's failblog, or a site about weird accident aftermaths, i can haz cheesburger is always worth a laugh, and orsinal for all your semi-autistic flash game needs.

As for comics? Ctrl-Alt-Del, xkcd, Penny Arcade, UserFriendly, and Indexed (v. cool).

Now, get back to work, you lazy sods.

Rejected HTTP status codes

2008-07-01T08:16:00.000-07:00

Code 220 - Privileged content

The server has found the content, but the user's IP is in a high poverty area, and as such, is unlikely to have paid tax. The server has determined therefore that you have not paid for content and are not eligible. This is mostly intended for governmental use (sponsored by BNP)

The 220 response MUST NOT include a message-body, and thus is always terminated by the first empty line after the header fields.

Code 456 - Sumerged content

The server has determined that the resource requested is currently stored in hardware that has been submerged in liquid, due to an air-conditioner failure, or a coffee-spill incident.

Getting developers happy with hookers

2008-07-01T08:05:00.001-07:00

Every funder is talking about trying to keep developers happy and focused, and yet they fail miserably with adding further buerocratic crap and silly rubbish.

You want to keep developer happy? Hire'em all hookers.

Preferably like this:

But knowing the amount JISC and others pay for things, the hookers'll end up like this:

HTTP Status code; Tale of Jimmy the hacker

2008-06-13T08:58:00.001-07:00

(Contributed image - by FourONine)

Suing Microsoft for loss of earnings

2008-06-12T08:43:00.000-07:00

Average % time wasted working round the red-headed, retarded step-child of the browser world, the one that get's all of the attention because it's "special" (as in needs):

20%

Yeah, that's a finger in the air guess-timation, but I think that it's pretty damn close. All the random CSS tweaking and hacks, all the hair pulled out over JScript (like normal Javascript, but more broken) and all the completely f*cked up errors, like IE6 not downloading PDFs properly without the server saying some magic words.

So, what's 20% of the wages you are paid or that you pay your development team? Coz I think there is a company that owes us big.

HTTP Status codes; Real life uses #4

2008-06-12T07:07:00.000-07:00

HTTP Status codes; Real life uses #3

2008-06-12T06:23:00.000-07:00

HTTP Status codes; Real life uses #2

2008-06-12T05:15:00.001-07:00

HTTP Status codes; Real life uses

2008-06-12T04:50:00.000-07:00

Friends don't let friends do OAIS

2008-06-10T01:39:00.000-07:00

Packaging up stuff...

Just stop it - seriously... stop it. It's not big and it's not clever and doesn't help anyone.

xkcd's "Duty Calls" and why repositories are broken

2008-06-09T08:20:00.000-07:00

http://xkcd.com/386/

Funny as hell, and you know why? Because it hits so close to home; we've all been tempted to feed a troll in our time, just to make sure that the world knew that they were f*cking wrong. F*ckers.

"Oh, no, I'm not like that" - wrong, you just haven't been pissed off enough yet to stay up until 2am to make sure that fecking 12 year old gets the virtual crap flamed out of him for being so goddamn dumb.

The sour truth of it is that this type of obsession built all the things online that we love. Wikipedia kicks ass and why? Wikipedia is built round the idea of people editing resources, and it's so simple to get stuck into - you open a thing, you edit a thing, job done.

Then it's the turn of the swarms of annoying, pedantic b*stards, who pick apart any entry for copyright, grammar and style - it's win-win, the content gets cleaned up, copyright issues get spotted and the pedants get their sexual thrill.

You want to preserve it? Just lock it. Again, job done.

And why can Wikipedia do this? Because it never makes the totally stupid claim that it is 100% correct all the time.

We - as a repo community - have got to start living in the real world when it comes down to copyright and fidelity. Institutional repositories need to start taking seriously the wealth of pedantic b*stards out there, and for f*ck's sake, make use of them. Add anonymous logged commenting, add problem flagging straight on the interface itself. Have people see that there is a problem with an item, rather than trying to hide it all away.

And we need to start turning down stuff for copyright reasons - "Sorry, your work doesn't count in the eyes of the University, because you signed your soul away to the devil and your copyright to Elsivier. Come back when you've got some work of your own to submit."

And you wanna know how to really get the party started? Keep a top score of real issues spotted per pedant and update it daily online, for all the world to see. Make up pointless heirarchies, based on levels of submissions. Just see how World of Warcrack-cocaine manages to make mundane tasks seem appealing.

Introduction

2008-06-09T05:09:00.000-07:00

Why?

Too few people are willing to write about the bad side of repositories - most of the people in the field are struggling to get by with what we have and tend to vent over a pint amongst fellow repo sufferers.

What are the rules for posting?

The #1 rule of repohate club is, that you must blog about repohate.
The #2 rule of repohate club is, code 303 #1

Basically, this is an avenue to vent, to point out the folly of all our ways, and to make a mockery of the shortcomings of repository systems. The wittier, the more profound, the better.

Failing that, if you can make me laugh out loud in a quiet office, you win. Also, the shorter it is, the less likely you will trip over a 'tl;dr' [tooo long -> didn't read.]

Oh and don't worry about anonymising stuff - I'll be gatekeeper to that, your dirty little secrets are safe with me. (Just pick a funny codename to go by)

Any Topic then?

Just about anything that I think is vaguely relevant will be looked at - think of it as a game, "What does the Anonymous Hater want to read?". My topic suggestions are eprints, fedora, dspace, xkcd, vendor-pain, last-century-legalese, xml==wrong, code-comments, typewriters-are-cool, error-codes-in-real-life, or there's-a-monkey-in-the-serverroom-and-it's-pissing-on-my-services.

Will I be rick/sh1t/spock-rolled by a link?

No... well... maybe. Only if it'll be really funny.