Yaz4J is a wrapper library over the client-specific parts of YAZ, a C-based Z39.50 toolkit, and allows you to use the ZOOM API directly from Java. Initial version of Yaz4j has been written by Rob Styles from Talis and the project is now developed and maintained at Index Data. ZOOM is a relatively straightforward API and with a few lines of code you can write a basic application that can establish connection to a Z39.50 server.

Recently, my son asked me a series of questions about the cold war, and the political/military paradigm of mutually assured destruction (MAD for short). It's always seemed like an odd premise to me, and somehow, discussing it with a 13-year old doesn't make it look any more sensible. However, we came to agree that landing on the moon was a pretty cool thing. Would the lunar landing have happened, realistically, without the cold war?

Over on Eric Hellman's blog, I was reading a recent entry entitled My Funnest Bugfix Ever: the Double Relative Redirect, and it reminded me of a war story of my own. Others might be amused; I'll be interested in who can guess, how soon, what was going on.

It was 1990 or possibly 1991, and I was working on an Application for Windows 2 -- which at that time was a rather exotic extra that a few adventurous people were running on top of their MS-DOS systems.

In my colleague Wolfram's series of blog posts on using Z39.50, he shows how easy it is to acquire MARC records from openly available sources (but do show consideration for the people who run the servers!) This inspired me to think about other ways to use simple Unix command-line tools to manipulate these records once you have them.