Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
As I told a friend recently, I’m pretty happy with the front-end code of AltLaw. It’s just a simple Ruby on Rails app that uses Solr for search and storage. The code is small and easy to maintain. What I’m not happy with is the back-end code, the data extraction, formatting, and indexing. It’s a…
Since we started putting court cases on the interwebs, first with Project Posner and then with AltLaw, we’ve had the occasional angry email from someone who Googles himself/herself and finds a court case from 20 years ago that reveals embarrassing and career-damaging facts. They usually want the page taken down. Now, sometimes I’m sympathetic with…
There’s a school of thought that URIs should be opaque identifiers with no inherent meaning or structure. I think this is clearly a bad idea on the human-facing web, but it is more reasonable for computer-facing web services. However, I’ve been generating a lot of RDF lately, trying to organize piles of metadata in AltLaw.…
Well, it happened. I ran out of space on the 250 GB drive I use to develop AltLaw. Not all that surprising, although it did happen sooner than I expected. I’m deleting gigabytes of cached data — file conversions, mostly — just so I can get enough space to work again. But this makes me…
I am happy to report that AltLaw.org‘s switch to Solr has worked very well. Solr is a RESTful search engine, built on Lucene. The setup was more complicated than just using a search library, but the rewards were worth it. Before, I was using Ferret, which I still like. It’s a great library, and Dave…
New York State’s Office for Technology released a Request for Public Comment on selecting an XML-based office data format. The choices are OASIS’ ODF and Microsoft’s OOXML. Responses were due by 5 p.m. today, Dec. 28. My response is below, submitted just in time to meet the deadline. I didn’t have time to answer all…