Libx maintenance
I published an update to the LibX extension for UGA for the first time in nearly a year today. I did some testing to ensure the basic functionality works. Now that I’m not a regular user of Firefox or UGA’s library [0], I can’t promise that it wont be another year before I think to publish a new version, or that I’ll be motivated to solve any problems that pop up when UGA switches off WebVoyage completely in favor of VuFind. Is anyone else interested in taking this extension over? Thanks to the hard work of the LibX maintainers at Virgina Tech keeping it up to date is an incredibly simple task.
Python mysql and unicode
The top google result for the search terms mysql, python, and unicode is a blog post that recommends using the init_command option to the construct a MySQLdb connection to run the SQL ‘SET NAMES utf8’. A better way is to set the charset option to ‘utf8’. This way MySQLdb realizes the connection is using utf8 and encodes things properly. For more explanation see MySQLDB’s user guide.
Enabling history in shell scripts
If you’ve ever found yourself trying to log the commands ran by your bash scripts (and cursed your failures to quote and escape them properly), then try using bash’s built in history functionality instead. Below is in example of how to turn it on within a script.