UKOLN Dev | Developer Labs

Posted by md269 on May 29, 2012

Archiving Old Dynamic Websites

Archiver is a web based application written in Java using the Spring Framework. Its main use is to produce static versions of websites which are no longer updated with new content. This is important for many reasons; firstly, dynamic sites will typically target specific software dependencies. As time passes certain dependencies will no longer receive patches, posing a security risk, or updates, meaning...

Posted by md269 on Mar 23, 2012

Some are more NoSQL than others

I’m no SQL Expert Over the past few years I have had my fair share of tricky data management opportunities. There was the financial transaction database that had no keys or indexes and had to be pieced back together by getting old source code releases, finding the bugs and reversing the incorrect values. There was the GB’s of web log records that needed cross referencing and finally, analysing free...

Posted by Emma Tonkin on Mar 1, 2012

HCI in the Chemistry Lab

As part of the Smart Online Framework (SRF) project, today saw the first of several sessions geared to usability analysis of Southampton’s LabTrove software in the laboratory.

Posted by Emma Tonkin on Dec 15, 2011

Detecting motion: DLP-TILT 2-axis accelerometer

Using an accelerometer to assess musculoskeletal stresses Accelerometers are helpful for characterising device usage and detecting the mode of use. Most of these devices have an internal accelerometer, but it is convenient for our purposes to use an external device (requires less programming and does not require a jailbroken device). Setup In order to use this device, you must first set up the serial port...

Posted by md269 on Nov 28, 2011

CSS3 – Better Late Than Never

CSS 1/2 Back in the year 2000, we, and by that I mean anyone who wrote web-pages, were bungling around with CSS. I was being told tables were evil, I need to separate code (content) and style and that CSS was the answer to my prayers. While the second was clearly something to aim for, it became obvious that CSS at the time wasn’t really capable of helping me achieve this. Don’t get me wrong, it was a...

Posted by md269 on Nov 11, 2011

RepUK

About The interest in exploiting the content to be found in institutional repositories is growing. At the same time, there is a range of possible uses for a central cache of metadata records held by institutional repositories. RepUK harvests the metadata UK OpenDOAR registered repositories via OAI-PMH and presents the results in the form of visualisations. At the time of writing 152 repositories are...

Posted by Xuan Luo on Oct 28, 2011

Social media sites in China

Introduction When we talk about social media sites, we tend to focus on a number of well-known examples – Facebook, YouTube, and so forth. Yet there are many international social media sites of all kinds. This post is written by Jenny Luo, who is studying Electrical Power Engineering at Bath and works part-time at UKOLN. In it, she looks at some examples of social media sites in China, compares them...

Posted by Harsh Khatri on Jul 22, 2011

Project Sunflower: Usability Study

As part of our eBook usability study, this part deals with studying the devices from the eBook reader point of view. All three devices, Apple iPad 2, Amazon Kindle DX and Motorola XOOM have eBook reading capabilities, with Kindle being a dedicated eBook reader. The aim of the study was to analyse the ease with which a user can perform a particular task on each device, the user-friendliness of the UI...