Tellico

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.

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.

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.

Amazon.com is shutting down their E-Commerce Web Service 3.0 webservice, as of March 31. ECS3 has been deprecated in favor of Amazon Associates Web Service 4.0. Yeah, there’s some marketing speak in there, but basically, they had an older version of their webservice still available, and it’s going away now.

How is Tellico affected? I made the switch to what was then called ECS4 in November 2005 and have continued to update the API as additional features have been added. The first released version of Tellico with that access was version 1.1, in February 2006.

Amazon has been sending me emails about Tellico’s token still being used with the ECS3 service, so I know there are people out there with versions prior to 1.1 who are using Amazon’s search. After March 31, those data sources won’t work. Just so you know. (The app will work, you just won’t be able to search Amazon.) Upgrade!

Tellico 1.3.1 (the “More Orange on my Calendar” release) is available. Grab it from the download page.

The list of updates, bug-fixes, and additions includes:

• Added data source for discogs.com, a database for musical albums, including vinyl
• Added data source for Google Scholar
• Added LCCN search to z39.50 and SRU sources
• Added DOI search to Pubmed source
• Updated CrossRef source to use new unixref format for more data
• Improved loading performance to delay loading linked images as long as possible
• Updated Delicious Library importer to look for cover images
• Updated BoardGameGeek source to grab cover image, patch from Sven Werlen
• Fixed bug that prevented bibtex from working for external application sources
• Changed “ISBN not found” dialog to only appear when searching for multiple values
• Fixed bug with SRU format not getting remembered in config dialog
• Fixed bug with entries with multiple titles not getting linked correctly in HTML export
• Fixed bug with some free-form date fields getting formatted incorectly into empty strings
• Fixed bibtex import for keywords field

I came across gPapers this weekend, which is a relatively new application that bills itself as “iTunes for PDFs”. It looks pretty good, with lots of features.

It uses pyGtk, so it’s another scripted app, no compilation needed. It has separate lists for authors, organization, etc. as iTunes does for artists and albums. It does a pretty good job of searching online databases, and reading PDF files.

Being a new app, and having a few unusual library dependencies, you probably won’t find it in your distribution’s repository. So if you want to give gPapers a shot, you’ll have to download and run it using the source.

CrossRef.org recently improved their OpenURL metadata search to return additional data in their Unified CrossRef XML format. Tellico uses CrossRef for DOI lookup, so I wrote up the new XSL stylesheet this afternoon to take advantage of the additional data.

Chuck Koscher mentioned it on the CrossRef blog and Alf Eaton picked it up on HubLog.