Please vote for this

This is my partner’s work, and you help in voting for her would be greatly appreciated.

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Improved robustness to bibtex parser

Over the past week I’ve been working heavly working on the BibTeX importer for Bibus. As part of this, I’ve collected several large Bibtex databases, which are used in my testcase runner, which tests this parser against the Pybliographer. Now the differences are largely cosmetic.

Not all bibtex fields exist within bibus. For instance:

1. key
2. subject
3. email
4. lcsn which can possibly be mapped to location?
5. except
6. class
7. jel
8. authorx

Also, due to the fact bibus uses VARCHAR(255) fields for everything except Abstract, some fields, like annote which can be big, end up being truncated.

You should be able to just drop the following file into the Import directory of bibus (cvs)

Import/BibTeX.py

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SolarLibrary released

Well, after 2 days of development and testing, I’ve just released SolarLibrary 0.1. Along with this is a new, bug fix version of SolarCategories, which mainly deals with UI issues born out of never using my own interface .
So, SolarLibrary allows you to store and categories (with multiple categories) links, text, and files. The files are stored in a secure download behind SolarGroups authorization. I haven’t really tested this system on a wide range of people yet, but if nothing else, it offers a good example of what SolarGroups and SolarCategories are meant to do. Library notes are here.

Technorati Tags: mambo, digital library

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Working on SolarLibrary

I’ve just started cutting new code for SolarLibrary, which is supost to be a partially structed, categorised repository for different types of data, built as a Mambo component. The reason for doing this is for my purposes, I want links, text, files extra to all share the same category space, and be accessable through the same brower view. This is very Drupalesk. But at the moment drupal also doesn’t fit this bill, and I don’t really like the module architecture, which I am quite fond of the Mambo architecture. Besides, I have several other Mambo components which could do with a minor overhaul, and building this component justifies it.

So, a few notes. There is a bit of a consistancy problem with how the mambo (4.5) HTML functions work. Some will return a string you need to print (mosHTML::selectList), which others, like the editingArea directly echo the HTML, which of course stuffs up my display methods which would normally buffer the writes, and then echo these. I have not yet looked at 4.6, but things may have been cleaned up in this respect.

Technorati Tags: mambo, digital library

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Retrofitting hybrid car technology

After having driven a hybrid car for the first time I was curious if it would be possible to retrofit this kind of technology to an existing vehicle. Basically an electric drive which connects into the crank, or there abouts, which can assist when the engine is under load. Surprisingly there isn’t that many products on the market, with the exception of this: Electrocharger / Retrofit Hybrid :: Sigma Automotive

I’m now searching for some products which are actually in production, or some DIY projects. Any help?