Wow, Tellico got mentioned in the Manila Standard Today, in the Philippines. Chin Wong wrote the article.
Remarkably, I stumbled upon Tellico, a program that met all these requirements and then some, after six months of on-and-off searching.
Developed by Robby Stephenson as a hobby, Tellico is described as a collection manager for KDE, a common desktop environment for Linux. Ubuntu Linux uses the Gnome desktop, but can install and run KDE applications with no problem. To install Tellico, simply choose it in the Synaptic Package Manager.
I don’t think Tellico has ever been mentioned in a newspaper before. This is a milestone!
Seen on the DNC website, the text of an advertisement against John McCain has a bit of a math error.
CG: "Gas Prices Up 200%"
Retail Price Per Gallon:
Jan 1, 2001: 141.6
Apr 14, 2008 339.7
Ask your nearest fifth-grader. Business & Media Institute points out that the actual increase is 138% when you do the math correctly, ignoring whether the president has much of a say about gas prices at all. The DNC needs to do some remedial work.
Then, how do you tell when someone cheats on a test? If they all get the same wrong answer. ABC News reported the same math mistake.
But what they also could have pointed out is
Over the six years (2191 days) Bush was president with a Republican-controlled Congress, the price of gas increased 85 cents per gallon. The price has gone up $1.19 in the 472 days Democrats have controlled Congress.
Who has more control over gas prices at all?
The May 2008 issue of Linux User has a review of Tellico (in German). From the google translation, everything appears to be pretty positive. They’ve run reviews twice before, once in 2006 and once in 2005.
Die Datenbankverwaltung Tellico präsentiert sich als solider Archivar für alle denkbaren Zwecke. Die durchdacht aufgebauten Vorlagen erleichtern den schnellen Einstieg in die Software erheblich. Das Erstellen eigener Datenmasken erweist sich als unkompliziert und darf sich zurecht äußerst benutzerfreundlich nennen.
As seen at NasaWatch…
Steve Squyres on the Colbert Report
Michael Grunwald at Time magazine was disappointed in the moderators because the Democratic candidates didn’t take positions in the debate last night. Why is that the moderators fault?
Last night, for example, Gibson tried to nail Obama over capital gains taxes, revealing only his own misunderstanding of the difference between correlation and causation.
So why didn’t Obama point that out? It’s supposed to be a debate, for crying out loud.
For all the back-and-forth over a crazy Weatherman he once served with on a board, Obama never got to tell voters that he opposed the war in Iraq from the start.
After months of campaigning, who doesn’t know Obama gave a speech several years ago where he denouced the war? Seriously, why should he need to remind voters of the same thing he’s reminded them of 5 gazillion times already?
For all the back-and-forth over her Tuzla goof, Obama stayed out of it, although he acknowledged that his campaign aides addressed it when asked. Clinton never got to mention anything she’s done in the Senate.
Got to mention? Are you saying one of the questions should have been Senator, what have you done in the Senate? Politicians are polished at ignoring the actual question and saying what they want to. If Senator Clinton had wanted to emphasize her Senate record, she could have plugged it very easily.
And the only real constitutional issue that got discussed was the right to bear arms.
And neither candidate actually said anything substantial about that. They both work in DC and neither one is familiar with the DC gun law? Both said something about reasonable gun control, but the moderators never asked what reasonable means. That was one of their biggest faults, not the shallowness of the questions.
Peter Fink let me know about a Tellico review in the German magazine, c’t and was even kind enough to send me a PDF scan.
Für alle, die eine Sammlung unter Linux katalogisieren und verwalten wollen, ist Tellico das Werkzeug der Wahl. Das KDE-Programm bringt diverse Vorlagen, unter anderem für Bücher, Münzen, Briefmarken, CDs und Wein mit, die man nur noch mit den Daten seiner Sammlung füllen muss. Darüber hinaus lassen sich eigene Vorlagen mit beliebig vielen Feldern definieren.
According to Advertisers: Men Are Not Idiots.
While the advertising industry’s negative depiction of fathers certainly isn’t the cause of fatherlessness, it is part of the problem. In a TV culture like ours, the fact that the only fathers one can see on TV are buffoonish (at best) does influence young people’s perceptions of fathers.
I’ve pretty much quit watching any sitcoms because the men are always portrayed as insensitive, dumb jerks. Why would I find that funny?
As Rose Cameron, senior VP-planning director and “man expert” at Leo Burnett, says: “One of the great markers [society] looks to about the intelligence of a woman is her choice of husband. So if advertisers position men as idiots in the husband scenario, then you’re commenting on her smarts. Women have told us, ‘If you want to get on my good side, you do not show my husband as the idiot.’”
Indeed.
Thomas Klausner let me know that Tellico has been added to the NetBSD pkgsrc repository. He’s provided me with some feedback on a couple of bugs I need to fix, too. I appreciate that.
The tellico-users mailing list seems to be down again. This is possibly related to Novell bug 89, which I closed last week because I could again successfully moderate the mailman queue, but now, none of my test emails are going through at all and I’ve had a few direct emails from people asking what the problem is.
The weird thing is that I still see moderated messages in the queue. But no messages from list members are getting through apparently.
Sadly, there’s not a lot of support on Novell Forge these days.
Update: it’s been transferred into Novell Bug 378724, and it turns out to be a mailman bug. Looks like we might get a fix in the next day or so.
Something quite strange happened in Washington today. Three US Senators took a day off from their usual working routine and showed up in the US Senate.
That’s a quote from a TimesOnline article by Gerard Baker. The fact that a British guy has also noticed that there are 3 senators who are not doing their jobs is telling, no?
This is such an awesome story, and it happened out here in Hermosa Beach! Improv Everywhere, they of the Frozen Grand Central fame, gave a bunch of little league baseball players just about the best game ever.
Three agents played the role of crazy shirtless dudes, painting “Mudcats” across their bare chests. These fans were particularly vocal in getting chants together. The players started looking back at the crowd with puzzled expressions. A few in the dugout peered around the corner to see what was going on. The game was in progress, so they had no choice but to keep playing and decide to figure it out later.
They got an NBC Sports newscaster and the Goodyear blimp, too!
Just came across StuffKeeper.
Stuffkeeper is a generic catalog program. It is not focused on a particular type, like incollector focuses on notes,logs, chat’s etc, or cdcollector on cd’s, it can hold any type of data.There are programs that can do this, like tellico, but it opens new db for every type. StuffKeeper tries to provide one program, with one view that can show any type of data, in a easy to use and good looking interface.
Linux.com reviews Referencer
Despite its simplicity, Referencer is a useful application that can help you to kill two birds with one stone. You can use the application to organize your documents into easy-to-manage searchable libraries. And the ability to retrieve and manage metadata combined with the ability to handle bibliography files makes Referencer a great tool for researchers and writers alike.
My Ubuntu Blog reviews video collection managers, including Tellico.
Definitely Tellico wins with a clear margin for its intutive approach to manage, display, import, export, search, retrieve and manipulate data.
Tellico can import metadata about a CD by generating a disc profile and querying a CDDB server. To do this, it uses KDE’s KCDDB library. Unfortunately, using this library appears to be a rare thing. In fact, Tellico is the only app in Fedora to link against libkcddb.so.
OpenSUSE thinks you shouldn’t be able to edit or even see your CDDB settings. Check out the ping-pong in bug 254175. Simply insane. When NoDisplay=true is set, then you can’t even run
kcmshell libkcddb
So since I’ll probably forget this in the future, and SuSE will push an update that overwrites my setting, I’m bloggin about it. First, edit /opt/kde3/share/applications/kde/libkcddb.desktop to fix the NoDisplay setting. Then rerun kbuildsycoca.