Despite several things working against me* I have now populated the On Line Library with the real ALUG library book list.
The contents of the Library now represent all the books currently held by the library, Those who currently have books on loan will have accounts auto-generated as their books are added to the system within the next few days.
Any reservations or bookings made during the testing phase have been removed, however any accounts generated still exist.
Currently the library is resting in my ISP's hosting area
http://cgi.digimatic.plus.com/opendb/
I hope to move it to the ALUG site very shortly (there are still a few minor changes I want to make, and where it is now I have shell access which makes things a bit easier)
When I get a moment I will stick a link at the top of the old ALUG Library page pointing to the Library as the URL is hardly memorable.
Potential borrowers can of course still use the old system of just waiting to the next meet and leafing through the box to see if something interests them (I should be at the kit meeting next month and am going to make an effort to be at the 2nd Thursday thing on the 10th of March, subject to some work commitments)
It should be noted that in the interests of fair play, reservations only count up until the next meeting that I attend, if somebody is at the meeting and wants to borrow a book reserved by somebody that hasn't turned up then I think it only fair that the reservation is overruled, so all reservations do is get you first dibs at a book if you attend the next meeting that I do.
* Firstly when populating the database I decided that rather than manually typing in the ISBN numbers I would use an old barcode reader I had lying around to get the ISBN from the barcode number, naturally in true geek fashion getting this to work actually took longer than typing in the ISBN numbers manually, a feat which I ended up doing anyway as curiously the barcode does not seem in include the last digit of the ISBN.
If someone wants to write me some script that (given a barcode number) looks up the book on amazon and populates the database with the correct title,author,publisher etc then that would be very welcome.
Then I discovered that for some reason the PHP mail function has stopped working (actually it looked more like it had been intentionally disabled) so membership email and other stuff wasn't working. I sent a mail to PlusNet support and it magically reappeared despite their claims that they hadn't switched it off.
On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 08:51:11 +0000, "Wayne Stallwood" ALUGlist@digimatic.plus.com said:
..... a feat which I ended up doing anyway as curiously the barcode does not seem in include the last digit of the ISBN.
I remember this from A level computing: the last digit is a check digit. Don't ask me how its calculated, though.
Richard
On Tue, 2005-02-22 at 09:37 +0000, Richard Lewis wrote:
On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 08:51:11 +0000, "Wayne Stallwood" ALUGlist@digimatic.plus.com said:
..... a feat which I ended up doing anyway as curiously the barcode does not seem in include the last digit of the ISBN.
I remember this from A level computing: the last digit is a check digit. Don't ask me how its calculated, though.
http://www.isbn-international.org/en/userman/chapter4.html#usm4_4
-- Martijn
On Tue, 22 Feb 2005, Richard Lewis wrote:
I remember this from A level computing: the last digit is a check digit. Don't ask me how its calculated, though.
If the way the check digit of an ISBN is calculated matters to your application, you can read all about it on the third page of http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itprnn/ps/233.239.pdf.
On Tue, 2005-02-22 at 08:51 +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Currently the library is resting in my ISP's hosting area
I tried to make an account. That seemed to work. So I tried to log in to that account and it said double check your username and password. Which I did to no avail. Then I clicked the forgot your password link and it claimed to send me a new password. Which I haven't received an hour later. So unless I have missed something vital I'd say this isn't working :(
/Kirsten
Thanks to Wayne for his work on this. I can help with explaining one thing he spotted:
- Firstly when populating the database I decided that rather than manually
typing in the ISBN numbers I would use an old barcode reader I had lying around to get the ISBN from the barcode number, naturally in true geek fashion getting this to work actually took longer than typing in the ISBN numbers manually, a feat which I ended up doing anyway as curiously the barcode does not seem in include the last digit of the ISBN.
Here's my understanding:
There are many standard systems of barcode. Each one serves a different purpose. The one on the backs of books is like that on many other products. It's called Uniform Product Code and it has an international relation EAN. They are 8 or 13 digit codes which include subcodes for different countries and a check digit. Books are from the country "ISBN" and periodicals from "ISSN" with a different check digit.
To convert to ISBN, remove the country code from the start (I think 978 is ISBN or "Bookland" as some Americans I know call it) and the UPC check digit (the last one). Recalculate the check digit by multiplying the other digits by their positions, so 009942692 is 1*0 + 2*0 + 3*9 + 4*9 + 5*4 + 6*2 + 7*6 + 8*9 + 9*2 = 0 + 0 + 27 + 36 + 20 + 12 + 42 + 72 + 18 = 227 now take 227 mod 11 = 7 and that's the last digit of the ISBN. If it comes out as 10 then it's written as X.
It would be cool to use the distributed free software ISBNsearch for the book lookups, from http://www.isbn.org.uk/ but I've not time to hack it right now.
-----Original Message----- From: main-admin@lists.alug.org.uk [mailto:main-admin@lists.alug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Kirsten Naylor Sent: 22 February 2005 13:06 To: alug Subject: Re: [ALUG] ALUG Library on line
On Tue, 2005-02-22 at 08:51 +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Currently the library is resting in my ISP's hosting area
I tried to make an account. That seemed to work. So I tried to log in to that account and it said double check your username and password. Which I did to no avail. Then I clicked the forgot your password link and it claimed to send me a new password. Which I haven't received an hour later. So unless I have missed something vital I'd say this isn't working :(
/Kirsten
Same happens here so it's broken for me too
cheers bj
On Tuesday 22 February 2005 1:06 pm, Kirsten Naylor wrote:
I tried to make an account. That seemed to work. So I tried to log in to that account and it said double check your username and password. Which I did to no avail. Then I clicked the forgot your password link and it claimed to send me a new password. Which I haven't received an hour later. So unless I have missed something vital I'd say this isn't working :(
/Kirsten
Ahh my mistake, it isn't clear from the sign me up page, but the sign up for new accounts is moderated, so I have to respond to your account request before you get a welcome email and your account becomes active.
You should now have received that mail and be able to log in. I think an ammendment to the sign up page to explain this should go on my todo list :-)
let me know if anybody who has tired to sign up hasn't yet got their welcome mail.
Kirsten, your password on the welcome mail may be wrong, use the password that you requested when first trying to join, the system generates a random password and mails it to you if you click the "lost my password" link.
On Tue, 2005-02-22 at 18:13 +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Kirsten, your password on the welcome mail may be wrong, use the password that you requested when first trying to join, the system generates a random password and mails it to you if you click the "lost my password" link.
All workee luvlee now thank you :)
I see the books that are currently out are not listed when you go "list all"?
/Kirsten
On Tuesday 22 February 2005 6:16 pm, Kirsten Naylor wrote:
I see the books that are currently out are not listed when you go "list all"?
no that is true, I need to generate accounts for those who have books and don't list themselves before adding the books that are out. I thought I'd give it a few days to let people add themselves before doing that.
In a few days all books that are out will be added
Regards Wayne
On Tuesday 22 February 2005 1:39 pm, MJ Ray wrote:
To convert to ISBN, remove the country code from the start (I think 978 is ISBN or "Bookland" as some Americans I know call it) and the UPC check digit (the last one). Recalculate the check digit by multiplying the other digits by their positions, so 009942692 is 1*0 + 2*0 + 3*9 + 4*9 + 5*4 + 6*2 + 7*6 + 8*9 + 9*2 = 0 + 0 + 27 + 36 + 20 + 12 + 42 + 72 + 18 = 227 now take 227 mod 11 = 7 and that's the last digit of the ISBN. If it comes out as 10 then it's written as X.
It would be cool to use the distributed free software ISBNsearch for the book lookups, from http://www.isbn.org.uk/ but I've not time to hack it right now.
Cheers for the description of the barcode thing MJ, gawd only knows how/why you know that.
The ISBNsearch thing looks to be really useful as well, they even provide public access to their sql server via a little php script, so with a bit of twiddling it should be possible for me to hack together something to dump the data into the relevant tables in the Library database. This is going to be a rainy day project someday when I have some free time, so as always if there is somebody out there who fancies giving it a shot then make yourself known.
Another little question, I have just gotten the picture support to work properly in the Library, does anyone know if it's legal to nick images from Amazon and present them on another site without crediting the source ?
Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Another little question, I have just gotten the picture support to work properly in the Library, does anyone know if it's legal to nick images from Amazon and present them on another site without crediting the source ?
How about making an affiliate ID for the group, then using Amazon as a source of images (as per the agreement) and a small income to increase the library?
On Thursday 24 February 2005 12:29 pm, sheridan wrote:
How about making an affiliate ID for the group, then using Amazon asa source of images (as per the agreement) and a small income to increase the library?
That is a really good idea, if it were anyone other than Amazon.
Personally I feel (although feel free to persuade me otherwise here) that Amazon's previous abuse patents goes against the very ideals we as a group should promote, with that in mind I see the idea of ALUG becoming an affiliate as a bit of a contradiction.
That said the FSF ended their boycott in 2002, so maybe we should look into this. I'd really appreciate the views of other ALUG members before proceeding with or dismissing this.
Wayne
On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 11:15:53PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
That said the FSF ended their boycott in 2002, so maybe we should look into this. I'd really appreciate the views of other ALUG members before proceeding with or dismissing this.
I say go for it, anyhow while the boycott was on I used amazon more because at the time they were generally making a loss on everything they sold so my theory was that using them cost them more than me not using them :)
Adam
That is a really good idea, if it were anyone other than Amazon.
Sometimes you could be forgiven for thinking that Amazon are the only people who sell books online.
I've had good experiences with http://www.computerbooks.co.uk/, and they run affiliate schemes through TradeDoubler. Don't know off hand what the payback rates are, but they ought to be worth looking at.
A minute or two ago I said:
I've had good experiences with http://www.computerbooks.co.uk/, and they
run
affiliate schemes through TradeDoubler. Don't know off hand what the
payback
rates are, but they ought to be worth looking at.
I just checked it out: commission rate is 10%.
On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 01:55:51PM -0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
That is a really good idea, if it were anyone other than Amazon.
Sometimes you could be forgiven for thinking that Amazon are the only people who sell books online.
I've had good experiences with http://www.computerbooks.co.uk/, and they run affiliate schemes through TradeDoubler. Don't know off hand what the payback rates are, but they ought to be worth looking at.
When I want to buy a book I check out http://www.bookbrain.co.uk
Adam
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adam＠thebowery.co.uk -
Dan Hatton -
John Woodard -
Kirsten Naylor -
Mark Rogers -
Martijn Koster -
MJ Ray -
Richard Lewis -
sheridan -
Wayne Stallwood