Tellico 1.3 (the “Jane Austen” edition) is available. Grab it from the download page.

At one point, I thought that the next major release I made would be version 2.0, with a SQL backend or something. But that turned out to be hard, so this has some incremental stuff. I might end up porting to KDE4 before going to a different backend, too, just depends on how I feel about things. Thus is open source! :)

Updates include:

• Added board game collection, and data source for BoardGameGeek, using patch from Steve Beattie (requires ruby).
• Added data source for using any GCstar plugin
• Added importers for Griffith, Referencer and Delicious Library
• Added importer for PDF files, using the exempi and poppler libraries (optional)
• Added drag & drop for importing PDF, bibtex, and RIS files
• Added DOI field and searching crossref.org, citebase.org, Bibsonomy, and arxiv.org
• Added command for merging multiple entries, based on a patch from Cyril Dangerville
• Updated CSV importer, IMDb fetcher, and Spanish Ministry of Culture script
• Added option to save image files in a local directory relative to data file
• Added option to save a link to an image file instead of copying it
• Extended the DCOP interface to allow more scripting, including adding and modifying entries
• Experimental barcode scanning with a webcam (use --enable-webcam for the configure script). See Sebastian’s website about his patch for more details.
• Added Ukrainian translation, from Serhij Dubyk

Please send all bug reports, comments, etc. to the Tellico mailing list.

Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic rolled out SpaceShipTwo last week, what is expected to be the first commercially-available space travel. What I wouldn’t give for $200,000!

It’s a really impressive concept. And it’s just a darn beautiful design, too. Wired has a good story on the risks for such travel, as well as some funny videos of potential passengers taken during training.

It appears that someone added Tellico to the KDE TechBase KDE4 Porting Status page, linking to an email I wrote about not starting the port yet.

Tellico 1.3 will be available shortly, and everything in the 1.3 branch will stay with KDE 3.x, obviously. Regis has been working on some initial porting in another branch and he’s made some real progress. With the current excitement about KDE4, it’d be fun to move over to porting and working with KDE4, I think. So maybe Tellico 2.0 will be the port. Qt4 has some better SQL integration, so maybe changing the backend will be easier.

I’ve also been thinking about requesting that Tellico move into the KDE SVN repo. It would go into one of the extragear modules, I think. Doing that would gain exposure, translation, and coding help (presumably). I’d be giving up lots of control, obviously, but that doesn’t really bother me as much anymore. Stay tuned…

Apparently, the UTF-8 support in libyaz and Tellico is not only good for Hebrew, it works for Korean, too!

KDE의 컬렉션 관리 도구. 책과 참고문헌 목록을 관리할 수 있다. BibTeX 또는 BibTeXml 형식을 읽을 수 있고 내보낼 수도 있다. z39.50 프로토콜을 통해 국립중앙도서관, 국회도서관 자료를 프로그램 내에서 검색하고 결과를 목록에 추가할 수있다. 책과 참고문헌 외에 비디오, 음악, 게임, 동전, 우표, 등의 수집 관리를 기본으로 제공하고 자유롭게 새로운 데이터베이스도 만들 수있다.

The page has information for a Korean z39.50 source at korcis-net.nl.kr.

CNN had an awful headline earlier this week, that I saw mentioned by Jeremy. The story basically said black women won’t be voting issues because they’re too set on voting their identity. I guess that makes Edwards the “white male” candidate that he joked about at the debate?

Evidently, CNN caught some flak for that headline, and rightly so. How’s this for a quote from the story:

For these women, a unique, and most unexpected dilemma, presents itself: Should they vote their race, or should they vote their gender?

Yep, good thing the Republicans don’t have to worry about hard questions like that. They only have issues to look at, instead of gender and race.

I just want to say that I really appreciate the work that folks contribute in package and translating Tellico. Tellico is part of several distributions at this point, and seems to have gained some small following, and it would not be out there and available were it not due to it being packaged and translated. And there are many folks who have put some real effort into that.

I am a custodian of a great human adventure. So says the LA Times, so it must be true.

I don’t want to be “victimized by a shabby crowd of apprentice Torquemadas.” I mean, who would? But, as they say, “the folks with the pocket protectors … turn[ed] out to be the ones with the right stuff.”

Sunday, after church, I took the Gold Line down to Union Station and met some friends to walk around downtown and have dinner. Roland is a great photographer and had all of his gear for the afternoon. He took some fun photos. I hadn’t been in the cathedral yet, and that was very impressive.

The Sports Gal asks a question

According to Bill, my record is 127-104-9, putting me 23 games over .500. I have no idea what the “over .500” part means or why it matters but Bill seemed to think it was really impressive. What’s the big deal about .500? Who cares? Why not just say that I picked 59 percent correctly or whatever the number is? Bill said that “we don’t do it that way” and that .500 equals 50 percent. OK, why not say that I’m 23 games over 50 percent? Or 23 games over 50/50? I don’t get the .500 thing at all.

I’ll admit to wondering the same thing myself. Heck, say they’re 23 games above .5000, it’d be the same thing. The Lakers being 15 games “over .500” right now is a heck of a lot different than saying the same thing at the end of the season. It’s a meaningless number, far better to look at winning percentage.

I came across a mention of Tellico in an Ulteo review. Ulteo is a new type of Linux distribution from Gaël Duval, originally from Madrake/Mandriva. From the website, it appears that it’s still in beta, so I couldn’t try it out yet. We’ll see.

Having Tellico included makes me proud!

Over at the Evangelical Outpost, Joe Carter asks a great question.

Religious bigotry: The question about wives submitting to husbands could have been a disaster yet Huckabee turned it from a negative to a positive. Still, it was an inappropriate question to ask someone running for President. Would FOX News ever dare to ask Romney about a point of Mormon doctrine?

Short answer? Of course not. And indeed, what does that tell us?

Update2: There was a bug that would edit multiple entries at once, when only one was selected. Fixed in pre3

Update: I messed up the packaging, so there’s a 1.3pre2 tarball available now that should have all the files in it.

I’ve got a new version of Tellico available, the first pre-release version of 1.3. Download it from here.

At one point, I thought that the next major release I made would be version 2.0, with a SQL backend or something. But that turned out to be hard, so this has some incremental stuff. I might end up porting to KDE4 (out today!) before going to a different backend, too, just depends on how I feel about things. Thus is open source! :)

I still need to update the documentation and clean up a few things. There shouldn’t be any new strings after this, so if you want to update translations and send them to me, that’d be great!

Updates include:

• Added board game collection, and data source for BoardGameGeek, using patch from Steve Beattie (requires ruby).
• Added data source for using any GCstar plugin
• Added importers for Griffith, Referencer and Delicious Library
• Added importer for PDF files, using the exempi and poppler libraries (optional)
• Added drag & drop for importing PDF, bibtex, and RIS files
• Added DOI field and searching crossref.org, citebase.org, Bibsonomy, and arxiv.org
• Added command for merging multiple entries, based on a patch from Cyril Dangerville
• Updated CSV importer, IMDb fetcher, and Spanish Ministry of Culture script
• Added option to save image files in a local directory relative to data file
• Added option to save a link to an image file instead of copying it
• Extended the DCOP interface to allow more scripting, including adding and modifying entries
• Experimental barcode scanning with a webcam (use --enable-webcam for the configure script). See Sebastian’s website about his patch for more details.
• Added Ukrainian translation, from Serhij Dubyk Сергій Дубик

Please, backup your data files. Export to Zip and archive them or something. I use Tellico myself, almost daily, and everything seems ok, but you never can tell.

This is just silly.

Hurricane Katrina’s victims have put a price tag on their suffering and it is staggering - including one plaintiff seeking the unlikely sum of $3 quadrillion.

For the sake of perspective: A mere $1 quadrillion would dwarf the U.S. gross domestic product, which Scott said was $13.2 trillion in 2007. A stack of one quadrillion pennies would reach Saturn.

Katrina’s victims ask for huge checks

They oughta be sent back to 4th grade for asking for such a ridiculous amount of money and wasting the time of other hard-working people.

This’ll be fun, maybe I’ll have to watch the episode.

Caedmon’s Call’s lyrically compelling song about redemption, “Ten Thousand Angels” will receive a rare and lengthy place on an upcoming episode of the ABC hit drama series “Grey’s Anatomy” on January 10th. Featuring vocals by Derek Webb, the song will play for five consecutive minutes during an emotionally charged final scene.

ABC News and Charles Gibson did a fantastic job with the New Hampshire Debates tonight. That was easily the best and most productive format of any debate held thus far, far far better than that dumb Iowa debate where the candidates weren’t even allowed to respond to each other. I think I learned more about the candidates tonight than I have in the last 6 months of media-induced frenzy.