This morning, I found out that NLB online catalogue (Vistaweb) has enhanced its site to limit the number of connections per IP address or you can also say per PC if have no idea what IP address is.

Basically, if you create more than 5 sessions from the same IP, you will get this message below, and you are asked to reuse your last session. Note that a new session is created when you click on Easy Search or Advanced Search button from the main page.

Obviously this is a good step, it helps to reduce redundant sessions which could be easily created and not used while waiting to be timed-out.

A good step by NLB, but a bad news for BookJetty. BookJetty needs at least 10 sessions in a pool to operate smoothly. Couldn’t bear to see this baby dies, I managed to work out an interim solution. I can still create at least 10 sessions, but I’m not sure how long this will last.

Screen scraping is obviously not the way to go for a mash-up application. I know this day will come, I just don’t expect it to be so soon.

My hope is that one day NLB will be able to provide a simple plug to access library catalogue through REST service (XML over HTTP) just like xISBN, Amazon, eBay, and Flickr services, this will help more creative applications like BookJetty to tap on library information. And I wouldn’t mind to help out in anyway.

We can’t blame the additional security layer put in place, it will come soon or later, it helps to protect Vistaweb from denial of service attack. But, it is really a pity to see an application like BookJetty gone in waste. Anyway, just hope that the interim solution is going to work for a while.

If the marriage of Amazon and NLB really comes to an end, I will have to figure out what to turn BookJetty into. A book exchange site? Hm…maybe. Though I’m sad, I just have to keep a positive mindset, that there is always something that we all can learn from things that happen in life, be it good or bad.