Posts By: Tom

Yeah. That post. I started this blog way back when it didn’t seem that weird of a thing to do. Now days it seems personal sites are used as CVs, and I’m not really into that. (1) Nobody is going to hire me for my pottery skills or the small contributions I’ve made to stackoverflow… Read more »

Since writing this post, I’ve worked out a better way of doing things – use python to read directly from the tar file and inject the results into Mongo! I used in with the 2017 ORCID data dump and it’s like lightning compared to the method described below.  Basically download the script and run:

… Read more »

I’ve not posted about much on here other than programming, but well, that’s a bit dull after a while.  What’s really interesting, for me at least, is POTTERY.  Yeah, I said it.  Pottery. I recently got back into throwing pots after a 20 year hiatus.  I rekindled my love of clay so much I ended up… Read more »

ORCID recently implemented a swagger definition file for it’s v2.0 API, which means it’s now even easier to access the public ORCID API from your website.  Just use swagger.js.  It’s Super.  And Easy. Let’s give it a go. First, clone swagger onto your machine.  Either use the git desktop client, click the button on the repository or fetch it… Read more »

(written by Martin Fenner and cross posted from the Datacite blog – I’m one of the co-authors of the report) One of the first tasks for DataCite in the European Commission-funded THOR project that started in June was to contribute to a comparison of the ORCID and DataCite metadata standards. Together with ORCID, CERN, the British Library… Read more »

A bit of background I’ve been working in the C# world for a few months now. While the code is very similar to Java,the culture around open source could not be more different.  Where open source as business as usual in the Java & Javascript worlds, it’s very much exceptional circumstances only in the .Net one…. Read more »

UPDATE: This is a really dead post :D.  ORCID is now on V3.0 of the API and the library has been deprecated. Thanks to the hard work of Stephan Windmüller (@Stovocor) the ORCiD client library now supports version 1.2 of the ORCiD schema.  He’s also updated the companion ORCiD profile updater web app to use the… Read more »

Back when I was a lowly junior programmer, life was great. We had a humongous 64k of memory to play with, two whole (user defined!) colours and an 80 character width screen.  We managed gigantic millions of member pension schemes using the equivalent of a commodore 64.  Recursive functions meant stack overflow.  Not one of these… Read more »

I’ve moved on.  I had a great couple of years working at the library and met a ton of really enthusiastic folk.  The ODIN project came to an end and there was little left for me to do, so I’ve found myself a new workplace more local to home. I’m a delivery engineer, apparently.  I’ve been… Read more »

User stories, requirements analysis and all that Jazz. I’ve been mulling over my approach to gathering requirements recently and it’s become clear that although I’m Doing It Right a lot of the time, I’m also Doing It Wrong. Ron Jefferies wrote about the Three Cs 13 years ago.  He did it in the context of Extreme… Read more »