The PBCore cataloging tool that I’ve been working on has now been released under the GNU GPL. Here’s the announcement from pbcoreresources.org:

WNET/Thirteen hereby releases the software of its PBCore Repository Project under the GPLv3 license.

The PBCore Record Repository is an online database tool built on Ruby on Rails, Sphinx search, and MYSQL that was created at WNET/Thirteen to facilitate the import, export, search, creation and modification of PBCore records according to the PBCore 1.2.1 standard.

For testing and evaluation a public installed version of the application can be found at pbcore.vermicel.li (for administrative testing log in as username=admin and password=secret).

This work employs PBCore. The PBCore (Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary) was created by the public broadcasting community in the United States of America for use by public broadcasters and others. Initial development funding for PBCore was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The PBCore is built on the foundation of the Dublin Core (ISO 15836), an international standard for resource discovery, and has been reviewed by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Usage Board. Copyright: 2005, Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Further technical documentation can be found online and a current snapshot of the source code here. This tool is under development and feedback is appreciated.

The Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde reports today that Cuba has developed a new GNU/Linux distribution, “Nova.” Reuters has also picked up the story.

Reuters quotes Hector Rodriguez, dean of the School of Free Software at the University of Information Sciences, who says that 80% of the computers in Cuba currently run Windows. This comports with my observations when I travelled to and reported from Cuba in 2006.

Obviously there are elements in Cuba who don’t like this. In addition to a Communist régime’s natural affinity for Free Software over proprietary alternatives, the US embargo makes it difficult for Cuban entities to legally procure Microsoft products. It’s probably also bad security policy for the Cuban government, in particular, to rely on closed-source, proprietary software produced in the US.

However, it’s uncertain if this new initiative will be successful. Cuba announced in 2005 an intent to switch to Linux, and apparently not much progress has been made. Richard Stallman, founder and leader of the Free Software Foundation, traveled to Cuba in 2007 and met with some acceptance of his ideas; however, as he notes, Microsoft’s inability to sue Cubans for violating copyright law makes windows costless and thus harder to eliminate.

It’s an interesting situation, and we’ll see what happens.

A week from Friday (that is, February 13), at 6:31:30pm EST, is 1234567890 seconds since the UNIX epoch.

$ date -d '@1234567890'
Fri Feb 13 18:31:30 EST 2009

Please schedule your parties now, if you have not yet done so. If you are in a different time zone, see timeanddate.com for further assistance.

Since writing my blog post on “Common” PBCore Errors, I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a PBCore validator—a tool to automatically verify if an XML file complies with the PBCore standard and best practices with the aim of better ensuring interoperability among PBCore implementations. Such a tool has now been written, and you can check it out at pbcorevalidator.org.

Like the W3C’s HTML Validator, this is designed to be a tool which you can use to check the conformance of your documents with established standards. Some of the PBCore standard, however, is a bit more subjective or poorly-defined than HTML, so the results of the validator are also somewhat subjective.