Tellico

Thomson Reuters is suing George Masons University, sponsors of the Zotero bibliographic software. The Disruptive Library technology blog has details and extracts from the suit.

I’d note that it doesn’t look like the Thomson legal team actually had anyone look at the Zotero code. The complaint alleges that “users of Zotero [are freely converting] the EndNote Software’s proprietary .ens style files into open source Zotero .csl style files and further distributing such converted files to others.”

It’s hard to figure out what Thomson Reuters thinks they’re gaining with the lawsuit, aside from the eternal ire of technically-savvy people all over the world.

According to a story from Courthouse News Service, Reuters is claiming that George Mason is violating the terms of its license agreement by including a function in Zotero that will convert citation styles from the proprietary EndNote format to a format that can be used by Zotero. Reuters also asking for $10 million in damages for destroying the EndNote customer base. Since George Mason is a state institution, the Commonwealth of Virginia is also named in the suit.

Heh, to each his own. I’ve always held that the Java widgets are some of the ugliest I’ve seen since Motif, but Claudio compares them favorably against Qt.

…tellico is QT and thus ugly as hell (not as important, but not pleasant to work with).

By contrast, JabRef has a very clean interface and the search is fine for my needs (regular expressions). You can even change the look and make it look it like a GTk+ application.

I didn’t know about the Gtk+ theme. I’ll have to figure out if I have that available somewhere on my system.

I have another minor release of Tellico, 1.3.4, available.The changes include:

• Updated IMDb import.
• Improved drag/drop to match on file extension.
• Added (minimal) searching for board games from Amazon.
• Fixed bug with linked images in HTML reports.
• Fixed CSV import error for consecutive white-space.

Raphaël Pinson recently blogged about using Tellico for his collection of board games. He’d emailed me to ask about searching Amazon, so I expanding the Tellico search to include Toys. That’ll be in the next version release, 1.3.4 I guess.

The catch is that Amazon just lumps a lot of the information as BrowseNodes, including the number of players, game genre, age group, and others. And, as my fiancee would say, the vocabulary is not controlled at all. The format is free-form, for the most part. I can’t really blame Amazon for that, but it does make it impossible to sort through meaningfully.

And unfortunately, Tellico and GCstar don’t import and export board game collections from each other yet, so I my suggestion to Raphaël to use the GCstar plugin didn’t work.

I’ll have to take a shot at getting that import working in Tellico, at least. My list of things to work on grows!

This is pretty awesome news. LibraryThing is offering a webservice to download book covers, over a million user-contributed images. LibraryThing also just announced they have 30 million books in their user libraries. Pretty amazing.

Eventually, maybe I can add an interface for Tellico so that users can add a LibraryThing Developer Key and grab covers directly.

Just a quick note, if you’re using openSUSE 11.0, then be aware that it ships libxslt 1.1.23 which has a fairly significant bug. Most importantly for me, it keeps Tellico from working.

I hope that Novell will offer an update for the libxstl1 package, maybe a bump to libxslt 1.1.24.

Besides the big stuff of adjusting to Qt4 and a slightly difference KDE4 API for the port of Tellico to the KDE platform, I’ve hit a few gotchas that took me some time to figure out. These happen after everything compiles, but when something doesn’t seem to work quite right. They’re mentioned on the KDE4 Porting guidelines, but are easy to miss.

• KSaveFile and KTemporaryFile must be open()’ed before you use them, and the file name itself gets cleared when you close() them. That took me a long time to track down.
• KUrl::directory(false) will compile, but trigger a big assert, since the function signature has changed to use enum’s.

I’ll add to this list as I come across new ones.

I think this is a first for Tellico. LinuxUser mentioned it on the cover of the May 2008 issue! It’s all in German, so I’m a little lost, but I used Google Translate to order the issue and got it today.

The article is also available onlinet. And it’s 4 pages long! I think that may take the record for the longest review, in print, too. Wow! I’m rather excited!

Tellico 1.3.3, the “Angels Gate Proposal” release, is available from the download list. Just a few changes since the last release.

• Fixed bug with file catalogs to properly match on file location
• Changed Arxiv fetcher to remove ID version number from results
• Updated drag-and-drop to allow HTTP urls, i.e. dragging bibtex file from browser
• Updated Porbase in z39.50 server list
• Fixed copy() for text selection in main entry view

Last night, I finally got the KDE4 port of Tellico to compile and run. There are a few things that have been disabled until I figure out the KDE4 equivalents, but the last couple of months work has paid off. Like most everyone else who ported their application, the first run basically shows misplaced menus, icons, overlapping text, etc. But here it is…

It runs very slowly so I suspect I have a bad loop somewhere, or a hung job, or something. But at least, it’s a start. I can actually test-run it and figure out what’s going on.

Developing on it has been different since I can’t figure out how to get KDevelop3 to do what I want in the KDE4 build approach (separate build-dir, using cmake, etc.). Mostly, it’s been kate.

The work is going on in the Tellico SVN trunk.

As noticed on iLibrarian, Tellico was listed by Job Profiles (whatever that is) as an awesome open source resource for online writers

Tellico is a program that works to help you manage a collection, whether it’s of your short stories or of your favorite novels. It can help you keep track of anything writing related that requires database maintenance.

If you’ve run into a Tellico problem lately where most of the entry data doesn’t show up in the view, it’s due to the fact that you upgraded to libxslt 1.1.23. I was able to figure out that the issue is in the XSL templates but I can’t figure out if it’s a Tellico bug or an libxslt regression.

I can certainly work around the issue, and in fact, it’s probably best if I do. I’ll have updated templates in the next Tellico release. But I haven’t actually filed a bug report yet, since I’m trying to find other examples of this usage pattern.

UPDATE: looks like it’s RedHat bug 442097, and the libxslt code change has been reverted in Fedora RPMs.

UPDATE2: I filed GNOME bug 531873

UPDATE3: It’s been fixed in libxslt SVN and 1.1.24 will be out soon.

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!

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.

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.