I posted a couple of weeks ago that I’d lost one of the little marvels of technology that brightened my day when the Austin Public Library upgraded to a new online catalog.

Last night, I tried to access the catalog to double-check the due date on my latest read. Attempts to login to my account resulted in a “Unable to create socket: errno = 24”. After e-mailing the library about this, they translated the error from computer to english. Apparently, it meant

The catalog was down from 9:00 pm last night until almost 8:00 am this morning. It was necessary to run a full back up of the system because of changes to the server done over the weekend. Please try again today.
We regret the inconvenience.

That’s cool, although figuring out a way to have that message displayed on the site as opposed to the one I got would be even cooler. Since I was e-mailing them anyway, I offhandedly mentioned the broken Library Lookup and pointed them to a couple of links, asking if they could perhaps fix it?

I was pleasantly surprised this morning to get an e-mail from Carlos, APL Web Developer Extraordinaire. He’s fixed what I couldn’t pull off on my own (I was missing an extra “/x” in my attempt.) and I’m very happy to report that the LibraryLookup is functioning again. He even created a page for it with some instructions on the APL site. How cool is that?

Carlos, I’m telling Toby Futrell here and now that you deserve a raise. You rock.