Author: dale

My tech career started as an audio visual technician, setting up sound reinforcement and projection equipment at a convention facility, before I moved to electronics maintenance and repair at a community college. After obtaining a university degree in engineering, I designed integrated circuits for the first generation of 900 MHZ analog cellphones, the first generation of CA-code-phase tracking GPS receivers and digital pro-audio. I then progressed through a variety of leadership roles in product management, marketing, engineering product development and manufacturing, in fields such as industrial GPS-based positioning and navigation, pipeline integrity inspection and industrial process control.
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New brakes for the Fusion (only a 55km ride to get them)

I lost rear braking on my Rocky Mountain Fusion last week. Biking pathways wasn’t bad, but I didn’t want to ride off-road with only a front brake, so the next day I biked downtown to The Bike Shop on my way home after work (not only did I buy my Fusion there, they also do great drop-in service so long as the job won’t take too long). Adding the 3 legs up in my head as I pedalled home, I was sure I would be close to 100Km. However, Google Maps calculated my route to be 55km, which I trust because my it was pretty straight, and I’ve found Google knows all about Calgary pathways (just make sure you select Bicycling for the navigation mode).

I really liked this route. On the way downtown, I was up and close with one of Calgary’s oldest industrial areas. After my rear brake pads were changed and brake fluid topped up, I left downtown and rode through one of Calgary’s oldest affluent residential areas. I also noticed an unfortunate casulty of this year’s flooding – a missing pedestrian suspension bridge over the Elbow River. I can sympathize with local users and commuters through the area; loosing the pedestrian bridges over the Bow River at both Mackenzie and Southland Park has meant changes to my own travel routes.

Marker “D” is my home, “B” is work, and “C” is The Bike Shop (I was travelling counter-clockwise).

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Compiling mdb-tools on Ubuntu 12.04

I recently replaced Linux Mint 13 with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as the GNU Linux distribution on my dual-boot laptop. One of the first tasks after basic configuration was to install mdb-tools for Maestro development (used to extract data from a Parts&Vendors MS Jet4 database).

Install build dependencies:

$ sudo apt-get install libtool
$ sudo apt-get install automake
$ sudo apt-get install txt2man
$ sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev libdb-dev

Clone the mdb-tools GitHub repo:

$ cd ~/src
$ cd src
$ git clone https://github.com/brianb/mdbtools.git mdbtools
$ cd mdbtools

Compile mdb-tools, and install executables and man pages

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Rebuild ld cache:

$ sudo ldconfig

Man pages are installed for mdb-tools executables:

  • mdb-array
  • mdb-export
  • mdb-header
  • mdb-hexdump
  • mdb-parsecvs
  • mdb-prop
  • mdb-schema
  • mdb-sql
  • mdb-tables
  • mdb-ver

For more information on mdb-tools:

For more information on why you have to run ldconfig after installing mdb-tools:

 

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Calgary Flood

If you follow any mass media news, you’ve probably heard about the flooding in Calgary caused by high water volumes in the Bow and Elbow rivers. The rivers join together in the downtown heart of Calgary, where most businesses were shuttered during the worst of the flooding. However, many residents along the rivers were also significantly impacted with lost homes and property. My family has been exceedingly fortunate, only my son’s and my bicycle routes to work have been affected.

In order to bicycle from our home (on the west side of the Bow) to our work (on the east side), there used to be a choice of five bridges – with commute times ranging from 50 minutes to 2 hours depending on the route and bridge. Today, only one of the bridges remains navigable, but the commute is still less than an hour and a half. The bridges themselves do not appear to have been significantly damaged, but the surrounding landscape and pathways leading to the bridges may be forever altered.

Here is the McKenzie Meadows golf course (close to the south end of Calgary),  5 days after the start of the flood. The photo was taken looking west, with the Bow River and Rocky Mountains in the background.

mackenzie-golf-course-960x198.jpg

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Mayan EDMS

I might have mentioned liking the Django web application framework for good documentation and a strong community (there are even books you can buy!). I spent the first two weeks of 2012 learning some Python and working through The Definitive Guide to Django. Developing and testing locally was easy, but I abandoned the effort after another two weeks trying to configure a Python web stack on my FreeBSD server and returned to the pervasive AMP stack because of its simplicity.

However, yesterday I became aware of the Mayan EDMS project after being featured in a recent FLOSS Weekly podcast (hosted by Randal Schwartz of Perl book fame). It’s a really cool EDMS written using the Django framework, and might be suitable as the DMS component in Maestro.

It seems Django/Python documentation has matured since my aborted effort last year, so a new attempt may be more successful (I’ve also approached some local Meetup groups for some help this time). If I can deploy Mayan to my production server I might be switching frameworks (and languages) again. I don’t have much to lose though because I haven’t really deployed any significant Maestro code yet – most recent work has involved sorting out data structures and synchronizing data from external systems, with some re-usable shell/cron scripts for import data and throw-away ATK and Yii code (I didn’t even write the Yii code, it was generated CRUD code).

What makes Mayan EDMS great? Here are the features as listed on the Mayan EDMS project website, plus a couple additions of my own:

  • Electronic signature verification
  • Unlimited document versioning with revert
  • Unlimited user defined metadata
  • Automatic OCR of documents (with distributed OCR processing)
  • GPL3 license (although I’d prefer a BSD-type license)
  • No commercial “premium” version (the open source version isn’t a limited-feature teaser!)
  • Django/Python
  • and many more….
    • Dynamic default values for metadata
    • Filesystem integration
    • User defined document unique identifier and checksum algorithms
    • Local file or server side file uploads
    • Batch upload many documents with the same meta-data
    • Previews for a great deal of image formats, including PDF
    • Full text searching
    • Configurable document grouping
    • Permissions and roles support
    • Multi-page document support
    • Multilingual user interface: English, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal) Russian, Italian, Polish, German, French, Bulgarian and Dutch.
    • Duplicated document search
    • Plugable storage backends
    • Color coded tagging

I’ll post detailed installation instructions on FreeBSD as soon as I’ve got it working.