Month: February 2016

LibraryThing is awesome. It’s pretty much the only way my library can possibly be in any sort of order and the database export is the starting point for the cluster analysis shelving project. On top of that it’s a great community of tech people with a love for books, real actual physical printed books, which is a rare and valuable quality in the world today.

Unfortunately, in the process of cataloging and double-checking books as I boxed them up to take over to the new house, I discovered that some of the auto-generated physical dimensions are out-of-order (swapping height and length, length and thickness, etc.) or wrong.

Which means that I am now ~1% done with verifying and/or entering the dimensions of the books piled throughout the first floor.

So…

And it has begun…

https://github.com/dnorum/cluster_analysis

Technically, as can be seen from the commit history, it began at the end of November last year. But with books piled knee-deep around pretty much the entire periphery of my first floor, it needs to begin to get serious.

It still needs a bit more refactoring and updating to go from being a personal project, i.e. a hideously messy set of ad-hoc scripts racing to stumble and flop across the finish line before they achieve a critical mass at which point any bug ‘fix’ introduces k>1 new bugs resulting in an event horizon from beyond which useful results can no longer escape, to a ‘real’ project with an actual useful README and notes and well-structured directories and all of that that you can be reasonably sure you can run without accidentally rm-rfing (remreffing? rm -fr and rimfiring, maybe?) yourself in the foot.

And then I need to actually finish it.

But it’s getting there.