Author: Olivier Berger

L’ “Année des TIC” à nouveau en ligne

OSTIC (L’Observatoire des Strat�gies et Technologies de l’information et de la communication, un groupe de recherche de l’INT) vient de mettre en ligne le nouveau site de “l’ann�e des TIC“, l’ouvrage annuel dressant un panorama des TIC, r�solument pluridisciplinaire. Et voil� la mise en ligne de plein d’articles d’un coup (dont quelques vieux de votre serviteur), couvrant la p�riode 2004 – 2005.

Bonne lecture.

RecentChanges in Picolibre…

There have been several recent efforts around Picolibre at INT. Maybe they will attract some interest of the curious ones. We hope they will help enhance phpGroupware quite a bit.

Reminder : more details on what Picolibre is may be found here, but quite old [en] and more recent here [fr].

  • Picolibre packaged for Debian : not really new, as I blogged about that earlier ([fr]), but mostly working for our needs ;). It’s not an official packaging yet, but Picolibre is not meant to fit every system configuration anyway, as it requires pretty much control of all the system (users and groups through LDAP for CVS, etc.)… but who knows, some day, we could make some regular packages and go for official package ?
  • After having made the packaging, Christian is also working on rewriting some PicoLibre components so that they are much more object oriented, and maintainable. Cool ;).
  • Picolibre should fit in a Shibboleth network, to allow single sign-on, as we (actually students doing their internship here) have developped adapters for Shibboleth for phpGroupware. Using these mechanisms we can more easily integrate the platforms with enterprise networks, using external auth sources, and have SSO, as well as integrate several Picolibre platforms : one developer may do single sign-on when working on different projects hosted on different platforms. Next step is to integrate several kinds of platforms, like picolibre, gforge, sf, etc. ? 😉
  • Picolibre may be using soon Subversion (SVN) instead of CVS, which will allow users to get more advanced mechanisms, and another of the students in internship here has been working on integrating the phpgroupware filemanager with SVN. SVN can be accessed as a DAV server, so he added some modifications to be able to manage documents on a versioned DAV server, with this new SVN backend. The goal is to offer users of the platform ways to manage versioned information even if they don’t understand SVN and wouldn’t know how to use it or install its client programs. It may also be useful for the remote user. And using a DAV client on SVN in autocommit mode is pretty interesting too for the average user… wtill being able to access the history through the filemanager. Nice addons to phpgroupware to come when it will be ready.
  • Last thing : one of the students has worked on integration of PicoLibre and TWiki, to be able to offer wikis for the hosted projects in addition to the other tools. It may also use bits of what was done for the shibbolethisation, for managing user mappings between these applications.

That was it : Picolibre is not dead, although most of this work is happening behind the scene, and not everything has been published yet… but we expect to be able to release some of these elements in next phpgroupware versions, and published a new release of PicoLibre in the future. More testing and coding is awaiting us still ;).

I hope we have enough time to document all that also… and maybe submit some articles about that to the Hepahaistos conference ?.

Managing docbook XML bibliography with refdb

I’ve build my professional webpages using Docbook XML Website.

I include Docbook XML (article) papers inside the website, and didn’t like the way the bibliographies were produced using standard elements. It seems including bibliography in webpages was not a priority. And writing each biblioentry as a entry is a bit of a pain.

I’ve then tried and adopted refdb, which allows management of all bibliographic entries in a database (edited as RIS format, for instance, and managed thrgough a nice emacs mode, btw), and the generation of docbook XML bibliomixed fragments, which contain the bibliography. The order and appearance of the bibliographic entries can be customised through a set of “stylesheets” defined with the Citeref DTD inclued in RefDB.

The whole thing is a bit tricky as lacks extensive documentation, and required some adaptation of the XSL parsing : the existing examples and scripts in RefDB will produce some (X)HTML or XSL/FO, but I needed to produce some docbook Website in the end… but I managed to hack a couple things in the XSL parsers and Makefile, and there it is. You may find such an output bibliography at the bottom of this page.

There’s still a little thing missing in RefDB for me : the ability to get the RIS citation key in the output using CiteStyle, but that’s already much better than managing things on my own in Docbook source.

I’ll try to document this a bit better in the future, but I hope it has already raised some interest on your side. In the meantime, I have to convert all previous manual bibliographies to the new system.

Automatically reconfigure smtp relays in exim with NetworkManager and whereami

I’ve found a way to have my local SMTP server (exim) on my notebook automatically reconfigured to the proper relay host whenever I change networks.

I’m using NetworkManager in Gnome (on the Debian system), and its hook scripts in /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d to launch whereami, which will detect which network conf is activated, and hence reconfigure the smtp relay to use, with its script setmailrelay.

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