I had been meaning to upgrade our library website to Vue 3 for a while now. We had been on Vue 2 for some time. But there was a hard deadline for switching over, because Vue 2 reaches end-of-life at the end of 2023. Out of prudence I didn’t want to push up too close […]
Author Archives: Mark Eaton
The last days(?) of the Kingsborough Twitter archive
It looks like it might be the end of the road for our bot that archives tweets about Kingsborough Community College. Recently, the official @twitterdev account announced the impending end to the free tier of the Twitter API. On top of that, Mr. Musk himself suggested that the new replacement basic paid tier should cost […]
The ghost of Code4Lib future
I was complaining about the Computers in Libraries magazine website recently, for pretty obvious reasons. I wanted to link to an article I wrote for the magazine from my faculty bio page, but I can’t in good faith send people to that website. I mean, it’s fine that the site is old; it’s actually kind […]
Become illegible
One thing I appreciate about Mastodon (and the Fediverse) is the desire among some users to not be legible. Some users don’t want to be seen, understood, or to have any “reach”. There’s a desire to not be visible, to not be widely understood, and to basically be baffling to outsiders. I’m taking this idea […]
Posted in mastodon
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BBS
As a high school student, I spent quite a bit of time on my local BBSes. For those who are too young to remember them, or were not paying attention, BBSes were proto-internet social networks of a sort. You would use your modem to dial a local telephone number, where you would then log in […]
Posted in old
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Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one that was not machine learning
I started making a Mastodon bot over the weekend, although I’m not super excited about it. Mostly this is because, from a technical perspective, it’s not new ground for me. The bot is text-based, and uses Python and SpaCy to work with text drawn from the Wikipedia API. I’ve done this before, so I’m not […]
Posted in python
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Abstraction
Abstraction is largely the story of computing. Software developers have been building abstraction upon abstraction for decades now. Lev Manovich (of the CUNY Graduate Center) captured this clearly in his book Software Takes Command, and my thinking about this topic is influenced by his book. Abstraction makes life easier by simplifying tasks and making complex […]
Posted in software
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CUNY IT Conference, debrief
My presentation yesterday at the CUNY IT Conference went fine; surprisingly I was not particularly nervous, which was unusual for me, and very welcome. The CUNY IT Conference is a bit unique, because while it is decidedly aimed at technical people, the talks are usually not particularly technical. But I just went for it and […]
Posted in conference
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CUNY IT Conference
On Friday, I’ll be presenting at the CUNY IT Conference on our library’s efforts to apply some features of Vue.js to our library webpage. It’s a one-hour session, which is really a lot of Vue (maybe too much?) for one sitting, but I’ll do my best. It’s interesting that there’s a lot to say about […]
Posted in conference, vue
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