I'm sorry to say that the ISFDB database is almost wholly unreliable. In looking at my own entries, there are multiple errors in dates, title information, and publication data--and the vast majority of my books in the field aren't listed at all, although the information is readible ascertainable. I've tried sending in corrections to this material in the past, but I might as well be talking to a blank wall for all the response I get. None of the mistakes are ever fixed. There's even a ghost title listed. Pretty scruffy all around.

Robert Reginald

How can you tell? It seems to be stuck on an error 500 for any page I can think of...

Is this about the message I've been getting since Sunday morning? Or is this just me?


  Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@academy.tamu.edu and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

------------------------------------------------------------------------ Apache/2.0.55 (FreeBSD) DAV/2 mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 SVN/1.2.1 mod_ssl/2.0.55 OpenSSL/0.9.8a Server at isfdb.tamu.edu Port 80



QT - grendelkhan wrote:

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I've been getting that error 500 for several days now, every time I try to access the database.

For the last couple of days I've also been getting an error from the ISFDB Wiki:

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /www/isfdb.tamu.edu/root/wiki/includes/ObjectCache.php on line 409

The database and wiki seem to be all working again.

But looking at the Wiki Recent Changes page shows that it's under heavy attack by link spammers.

Edited by author 12-14-2005 06:22 PM
Is it possible to get a copy of the database in Sqlite 3 form? I was wondering how hard it would be to do and to populate each field with actual data instead of links.

E.g in BOOKS publisher might be a link to the publisher index. I wanted to combine the output to include publisher name instead of link (For a project I am working on)

The downloadable backup of the database is in the form of an SQL script, so you might be able to massage that into a form that would read into Sqlite?

However it has extremely long lines - many editors won't handle it.

Once it's in the database it should be easy to write a query to create the output tables you need.

I was afraid you'd say that. Okay, looks like I have to install MySql server again and learn a few things:):)

What formats will Sqlite read? It might be possible to massage the file - it's plain text.

CSV and SQL. But I'm not sure what they mean by SQL format. It could be anything.

I have a very old copy of the IFSDB as text files that someone dumped as some sort of formatted text and wrote a parser for it but it is very old and inaccurate in many cases, that's why I am chasing the latest version.

Because I am no expert, I tried following the indexes from the Backup.gz dump but they didn't make sense to me. The old text dump I had was exported with literal data in each field, instead of link and was immediatley useful to me. Not to mention not giving me a brain ache!!

Kind regards.

fangbeast@gmail.com

Easiest way to find what they mean by SQL format is probably to export something from it to SQL and look at the result.

Yes, the latest version has been normalised to use links between tables much more, and is much trickier. Far better for the database but harder for people.

I suppose that it might end up being easier to run it through MySQL. (But you'd still need to interpret the links to build the query.)

One thing to watch though - the format that's used to describe tables in backup.gz sets the CHARSET as latin1 but doesn't set the COLLATE to latin1_general_ci. So whatever you've set MySQL to do, the tables get the default collation for latin1 which for some reason is Swedish!

I suspect this is drifting rather off topic - if I can help any more it might be better to take it to direct email. My name at filk co uk

A short novel by James Blish, "A Case of Conscience" is missing from the listing for Worlds of IF, Sept. 1953

free blog's
http://www.4drk.com
[url=http://www.4drk.com]Free blogs![/url]

who is running this site? and i need them to contact me immediately....thanks

I'm looking for a book, which I have read many years ago, that I can no longer remember the title. I would really like to find this book and add it to my library. Hoping someone here can help.

Synopsis: Set in close to the current time, some type of disease spreads across the planet, crippling society. If my memory isn't too far off, I think the disease might have been man-made, and that it might have been spread via the glue on envelopes or postage stamps. In any case, society crumbles as untold #'s of people perish, and technology goes by the wayside. It becomes a world of survive the best you can, any way you can. A lone man makes his way westward and the story tells of his trials and tribulations during his travels.

Unfortunately, that's all I can remember. Hope it's enough!

Sounds like it could be George R. Stewart's EARTH ABIDES, published in 1949. That novel took place mostly in California, as I recall, but the plot sounds similar.