Software

I’ve just switched this blog from typo to PyBlosxom. There is one change I’m adding at the same time: I don’t accept comments anymore. My mail address is in the sidebar column on the right, feel free to mail me. And you can of course voice your opinions on your own blog and link back to me - I’ll probably link back to you from the original post if I find yours. Basically I got tired of fighting spam in my blog, but I already do a good job of filtering it in my mail inbox. ...

TextMate offers an SQL bundle. That bundle can also be used to query MySQL and PostgreSQL databases directly from TextMate. The configuration for the database access is done though environment variables. Specifically the following ones in the case of PostgreSQL: PGHOST: Database host PGPORT: Postgres port (usually the default of 5432 just works) PGUSER: User name PGDATABASE: Database to run queries on TM_DB_SERVER: Tells TextMate to use PostgreSQL. You can either set up these environment variables in the TextMate settings or - much more helpful - per project. In the project drawer deselect all files (by clicking on an empty spot) and then open the properties. There you can add project-specific environment variables. ...

One reason for not posting for a while was that I’ve wanted to move my blog for a while. Thanks to the cooperation of KAYWA I got a database dump of my existing blog. That I now ported to Typo. I’ve still got some issues. Most old URLs will redirect to the new ones. I didn’t port some of the uglier URLs, though. Sorry for any inconvenience. The feeds will all work again and redirect to the right one. ...

At work the templating is done with XSLT. I have the Bitflux freaks to thank for that. Currently I’m writing a really tricky XSLT template (for me), so I was investigating a tool for getting things done quicker. And Marc Liyanage is my hero. He has written an OS X application called TestXSLT to quickly test an XSLT stylesheet against some XML file. It accepts an XML and an XSLT file and gives you the parsed output. You can look at it in text mode, HTML mode (exactly what I need) and even XSL-FO (which I have never used). ...

One of the jobs I have identified as valuable at the Diego Thomson is getting a better software for the library. That should be easy enough. I’m only looking for some good cataloging, being able to lend out a book to a student, and some small extras like printing reports. Oh and Spanish translation of course. Should be easy to find? Maybe. I have so far looked at OpenBiblio and PhpMyLibrary. Neither does convince me. So I guess I’ll have to have a look at other packages which seem to be a lot more work to install. Does anyone know any software they use? And no, my media manager is not an option, we’re talking about a different league here. ...

I reported a few days ago, that I was trying out DEVONthink. I have also had a look at Tinderbox. But after looking at the price ($192 per year) I was not very motivated to have a deep look. A quick look I took and it didn’t seem to provide what I’m looking for. Meanwhile I imported most of the articles from my personal Wiki into DEVONthink and I also had a look at the export function. While it’s not a world-class export function, it’s reasonable. It can spit out a file hierarchy with all the RTF, PDF, etc. files in it (but the links are not preserved). It’s also capable of exporting as a Web site where all the links will be preserved and the RTF pages are converted to (ugly) HTML. All in all I am very impressed. It’s indexing capabilities are great and it also integrates very nicely with the Web. I especially like the features of clipping text directly from Web sites. If you open a Web site in DEVONthink (or DEVONagent) you can add the whole page or a selection to the database as a rich text document. I currently use that mainly to add clippings from Wikipedia or The Economist. I guess I’ll report some of my tips for using DEVONthink in the future. Meanwhile I’m waiting until it presents me with a “buy now!!!” message and will most probably purchase it then. Correction: Tinderbox costs $192 to buy for the first time and comes with one year of free updates (that’s where my $192/year came from). But the update “only” costs $90. Update: As you can see in the following picture, there is already quite a lot of stuff in my database. ...