Tag: unsung heroes

Koha unsung heroes – Part 15

The #koha irc channel

On irc.katipo.co.nz we have a #koha irc channel (have had since 2000). There have been literally thousands of times someone has been helped on there. Here are some of my favourites:

  • Thd helps audrey with understanding MARC21
  • si teaches kados about ssh-keychain
  • I help kados out with html::template
  • We help 2 people with Koha installs, and then discussion turns to cricket and rugby
  • Lots of talk about cricket
  • Even more talk about rugby

(I’ve only done the early years, and I leave it as an exercise for the reader to find other gems and link them in the comments)

Unsung Koha Heroes – Part 14

Rob Weir

On the 13 of December 2002, Rob Weir posted the first link to his windows packages for Koha. This begun countless volunteer hours spent packaging and testing windows installs. Packages were created all the way up to version 2.2.9. There is a current perl module dependency that is uninstallable on windows, which is blocking the packages for 3.0.x. I’m sure as soon as that is fixed, Rob will be hard at work creating packages again.

Windows users around the world thank you Rob.

Unsung Koha Heroes – Part 13

Andrew Arensburger

Anyone who has ever looked at the Koha code will have noticed there is one module everything else uses, C4::Context. Back in September of 2002, this was not the case until Andrew wrote this neat module.

It has been poked at by a lot of people since then, but 269 lines of it are still the lines that Andrew wrote. It still retains the purpose it was written for to provide a single place to get things like config variables, system preferences and to implement database connection pooling.

With 163 commits to his name this was not all Andrew did, but it is probably the one that has had the longest lastest influence.

If you read this, stop by #koha on irc.katipo.co.nz and say hi sometime.

Unsung Koha Heroes – Part 12

Ed Summers

As well as chatting on irc and the mailing lists (mostly helping out with MARC encoding problems) Ed has done a huge amount of work on modules for dealing with MARC records in perl. Including MARC::Record, MARC::XML and MARC::Charset which Koha uses. Without these modules building MARC support into Koha would have been much much harder. So thanks Ed and also thanks CPAN 🙂

Koha Unsung Heroes – Part 11

Laurel Barr – My Wife

Laurel has had no direct input into Koha but a huge indirect input. For being understanding when the phone rings at 3am to tell me the koha.org site was down. For accepting I need to bring my laptop to bed sometimes, or wake up at 3am to attend a koha meeting on irc. For letting me skip out on the family to fly from Pittsburgh to Athens, Ohio to visit with Liblime (even before I did my year of work there). For not even blinking when I said I needed to fly to Texas for Kohacon while she was 32 weeks pregnant with our second son. And for every night she has had to repeat something three times because I was busy typing something up for Koha on my laptop and not listening properly.

So a huge Thank You Laurel, Without your support I would have packed it all in.

Unsung Heroes of Koha – 10

The Staff at Horowhenua Library Trust

Most people familiar with the Koha ILS will have heard of Rosalie Blake and Joann Ransom from HLT who played the biggest roles in creating Koha. What people probably won’t have thought about is all the other librarians and staff at HLT who all played major roles in the creation of Koha. I’m not going to name names because I may accidentally leave someone out, and causing offence is the last thing these posts were designed to do.

But be it the circulation librarians explaining to me how they circulate books, or them putting up with the occasional segmentation fault of the underlying C code in the circulation interace. Or the acquisitions and cataloguing staff spending countless hours explaining how they work to a programmer who just seems unable to grasp it 🙂 Or just the bucket of Cookie time cookies I got given for Christmas one year. All these things, and many more like them, are reasons why Koha exists and is successful.

This morning I was listening to “The little things” from Trinity Roots … it’s main line is “It’s the little things that really matter” and it is true, it is and always has been the Thank You’s and the smiles that have kept me working on Koha.

Koha Unsung Heroes – Part 9

Anthony Mao

I’m not exactly sure when Anthony first became involved in Koha, I know it was before 2006 when he contributed a Chinese translation of Paul Poulains Logiciel documentaire. Anthony is a big part of the koha-taiwan group, which provides numerous resources in Chinese. He has played a big part in getting Koha installed in Libraries in Taiwan and also in mainland China. Including as far as I know, the first public library in China to be running Koha,  Qin Xian County Public Library, in the ShanXi province.

So Anthony, I would like to say Xie Xie to you. (I tried to do it in chinese characters but the stupid database kept wrecking the utf8, I will have to fix that)

Unsung Koha Heroes – Part 8

Roger Buck

Although Roger Buck was the 10th and first Australian committer to Koha, his real claim to fame was setting up and maintaining the first Koha wiki. But more than that, he actually put a lot of content on it. 🙂 He set the wiki up on the 20th of March 2002, and it lived there until it was shifted to it’s current home some 3 years or so later. Roger was also a frequent contributor on the mailing lists, helping out other users.

I’m gonna pull out the Australian stereotypes on this one and say “Bonza Roger”

Unsung heroes of Koha part 7

Nicolas Rosasco – The first documentation manager

Nicolas first got involved in Koha way back in 2001, and by October 2001 had started work on a FAQ, some of which still remains on the koha wiki (its been shifted a couple of times) and on the koha.org site.

Apart from trying to collaborate and wrangle documentation, Nicolas always had a relentlessly upbeat and positive attitude to the community and was a joy to correspond with. Work needs unfortunately meant that Nicolas could not spend as much time as he would have liked to, or the community would have liked him to, working on Koha. But he can be sure that he did make a positive difference and that us oldtimers remember him fondly.

Unsung Koha Heroes – Part 6

Mike Mylonas

Mike Mylonas first became involved with Koha in early 2002, a fellow Wellingtonian, Mike was influential in moving his workplace towards free software. Mike was the 12th committer to Koha, and while he doesn’t have a large amount of commits to his name, one thing he can certainly be proud of is the CPAN bundle he created and maintains.

Bundle::KohaSupport allowed users to install all the modules from CPAN that Koha depended on in one command.

perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::KohaSupport'

This made installing a lot easier.
So Kia ora Mike.