PHP

I've just released the PHP PEAR library File_MARC 0.6.0. This release brings two JSON serialization output methods for MARC to the table:

• toJSONHash() returns JSON that adheres to Bill Dueber's proposal for the array-oriented MARC-HASH JSON format at New interest in MARC-HASH JSON
• toJSON() returns JSON that adheres to Ross Singer's proposal for an object-oriented JSON format (I could only find a sample at this paste - not sure if there's a broader description anywhere, but really -- who needs it?)

The JSON formats should be useful for developers who don't want to have to deal with the overhead and sluggishness of a MARC parsing library (yes, File_MARC, I'm looking at you) just to deal with MARC data. Both formats are round-trippable and compact, which is why I chose to support them.

The use of the json_encode() function bumps the minimum PHP version requirement for File_MARC up to 5.2.x from 5.1.x, which kind of sucks, but given that PHP 5.2.0 was released in 2006, I think it's worth it.

You can install File_MARC using the 'pear' command on most environments as follows:

pear install File_MARC-beta

I was tagged by Lukas for the "7 things" meme, and meant to do something about it, but I've been kind of preoccupied with the new baby and the sprinting toddler and work. Anyway, it seems like a heck of a lot more reasonable than the evil Facebook's "25 things" meme, so I'm going to take a few minutes to try to play along.

1. I was an early riser until I was around 15 or 16 years old and discovered the surrealists. At that point, I began experimenting with sleep deprivation as a means of stimulating my prose and poetry. This is also when I began drinking coffee. After about a month, I was no longer capable of being an early riser--and the fruit of writing experiments was, uh, not too impressive.
2. Rather than going directly to university after high school, I elected to take what is now termed a gap year. No trips to Europe for me, though; the goal was to refine my bass-playing and music-reading skills and head to a post-secondary music program. I recorded a few prog-rock tracks in a studio with a fantastic couple of guys (hey Pete and Mike!), but ultimately didn't put enough effort into my bass to carry out the plan. Let me assure you that a year of working night shifts at a convenience store in the entertainment district of a small city is not a waste of time; I can't count the number of experiences that I'm thankful for having had during that time.
3. Although I roast and grind my own coffee, I'm not a coffee snob. In fact, I possess almost no sense of smell and I suspect that my sense of taste is limited in comparison to most people, and I'm quite happy to drink diner coffee. I cannot stand the taste of Starbucks coffee, however.
4. The first time I was able to run a full kilometre without walking was when I was eighteen. Since then I've run a couple of 5K races and and a sprint duathlon.
5. I'm pretty sure I was destined to become a systems librarian. When I was 10, I used to hang out at the local college's computer room until the students would log me onto a completely restricted Gandalf mainframe account so I could pretend to be Matthew Broderick in WarGames. My first real job, when I was 14, was as a "computer page" at the Barrie Public Library Children's Annex. It was my responsibility to oversee the use of the bank of Commodore 64s that the library made available to children, luring them in with games but requiring them to complete their allotment of educational software first. Oh the power.
6. I occasionally wrote reviews for random CDs that came into the campus newspaper office. Nobody else wanted to review this orange CD called Tragic Kingdom by some West-coast band, so I took it on. I gave it a savage review; I wasn't impressed with faux-ska and couldn't stand the lead singer's voice. Six months later No Doubt's "SpiderWebs" was in high rotation on every radio station in North America (look, folks, that song is repetitive enough without being played twice an hour!). I'm sure that my negative review still gnaws at Gwen Stefani today as she weeps bitterly in her platinum mansion.
7. In grade one, my report card read Dan is too critical of his classmates. In my defence, if they weren't so stupid--come on, sound it out buddy--I wouldn't have been critical. Okay, not much of a defence.
8. I am not a very demanding friend. I (almost) never call, (almost) never write, and (almost) never visit. Okay, scratch that: I'm a crappy friend. Most of my close friends found out that we were expecting a second child only through Lynn's Facebook account. I called one couple shortly after Arik was born and his quasi-namesake (one of the Eric's in our life who bring honour to the noble name) asked me after a few minutes: "So, uhh... did we know that you were expecting a baby?". No, no you didn't, and that's not your fault. Man I suck.
9. I'm really good at arithmetic.

Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.

• Share seven facts about yourself in the post — some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

Wow, that was fun. Lemme see, I'm going to break the rules and just tag two people: Helmut, because he's one of the only other people who worked on the ibm_db2 PHP driver out of passion rather than as a job assignment. And Gabriel because I like his style.

PHP is getting a native doubly-linked list structure. This is fabulous news; when I wrote the File_MARC PEAR package, I ended up having to implement a linked list class in PEAR to support it. File_MARC does its job today (even though I haven't taken it out of alpha yet), but due to its reliance on userspace data structures it's an order of magnitude slower than packages like marc4j so it's not the best choice for processing hundreds of thousands of MARC records... today. It hurts a little that the VuFind project has to use a non-PHP solution for populating its Solr indices - although I'm delighted that they have started using File_MARC for some on-demand processing.

Now, when I get a chance (insert raucous mocking laughter here), I hope to be able to make File_MARC use splDoublyLinkedList and see how it fares with 500K records. Should be good fun! After that, it just needs to be taught how to convert MARC8 to UTF-8, and we'll have ourselves a fully featured standard MARC package for PHP.

I gave a lightning talk at the code4lib conference today on File_MARC for PHP introducing the File_MARC library to anybody who hasn't already heard about it. I crammed nine slides of information into five minutes, which was hopefully enough to convince people to start using it and provide feedback on what could be improved or smoothed out... I'm looking forward to chatting with more people about it over the remaining days of the conference. I've already introduced a few people to PHP's simple tests for test-driven development, so even if nobody ends up using File_MARC, at least people are learning about some of the hidden gems in PHP.

The funny thing is that I had originally pitched a full session talk on this subject for the conference, and it didn't make the cut of the ruthless democracy that is code4lib. In retrospect, even a twenty-minute thunder talk probably would have been too much information for anybody but the most die-hard PHP and MARC coder out there; the lightning talk was a perfect format for the talk. I hope to let the documentation do most of the talking in the future.

Here are the slides from the talk in OpenOffice.org and PDF format. Enjoy!

/me notes that UnAPI would be useful here... Gotta try and submit a patch to the s9y repository...