Better sit thus, and observe thy strange things

Ingo Pfennigstorf

You may know the dark mode from your mobile phone or elsewhere. It’s basically a theme that can be activated, but also can be a system-wide default. Most browsers do also support this setting - and we as web developers can read these preferences (Firefox) and use media queries to apply a dark theme for our website. Note that this is not togglable, as some JavaScript solutions offer this feature, but only reacting to the browser preference.

Darkmode in CSS

Athanasios Mazarakis

Von Athanasios Mazarakis und Paula Bräuer  Eine Teilprojektvorstellung unseres Partners CAU Kiel zum Projekt OA-FWM   Das vom BMBF geförderte Projekt „Fachspezifische OA-Workshops und Bereitstellung von OA-Materialien - OA-FWM“ zielt darauf ab, insbesondere die fachspezifische Information und Ansprache im Bereich Open Access zu verbessern.

Die Wissenschaft retten und dabei Spaß haben

Mathias Göbel

Since a couple of years we prepare applications for the eXist-db ecosystem based on the EXPath Package standard. Last week we setup the first test environment. No questions; no excuses: Tests are extremely important! In some cases one can start developing a software by specifying a test, so called Test Driven Development.

A Testscenario for EXPath Packages

Friedrich Müller

A Do-A-Thon event took place at the SUB on the 14th and 15th February that brought members from the Göttingen Campus and the Wikidata community together in order to dive into the world of Wikidata and pilot projects. For a research library a knowledge base like Wikidata should be of particular interest.

Wikidata Do-A-Thon

It has been quite a while since the last version of SADE – the TextGrid flavoured version of the »Scalable Architecture for Digital Editions« – was published. Here is a new version, with a new deployment strategy and a complete new architecture. Everything is new in 2018.  Once this version of SADE was derived from a development that Alexander Czmiel (TELOTA at BBAW) promoted in »Editio ex machina - Digital Scholarly Editions out of the Box«.

SADE²⁰¹⁸

Looking for platforms to start prototyping the Atom text editor or its superior platform Electron passed our way at the Research and Development Department recently. For feasibility studies we sometimes test new frameworks and when we can use web technologies to start coding, there is quite a good chance for a seamless connection between data structures, algorithms and the front end.

Hacking the hackable editor

The continuous integration toolchain has developed a lot during the last years. Our mission, to build and deploy everything completely automatic and reproducable became more and more elegant. But let me take you back into the ancient halls of our workflows. Let’s take a TYPO3 CMS website. We built sites with this PHP-based Content Management System for ages, but let’s skip the dark woods of Subversion.

Building and deploying applications

Sometimes the most sophisticated deployment strategies and infrastructure models can unfortunatly not be shifted into the real life, so one has to go back a few decades and use tools from that time and mix them with current ones. In a former post I described a cool solution for building a static HTML website and putting it into a Docker image.

(S)FTP and Gitlab CI

I tried to improve the downlad-time and size of the assets used in this blog. This is mainly about optimizing the images for web. Not only that all JavaScript from this site has been removed previously, the images were a huge factor in the traffic of this page..  The images used in this blog are of different types. We use PNG, JPEG and SVG. Some of these files are huge and not optimized for web use.

WebP

Jörg Panzer

Conducting debug sessions   In our teams, we have repeatedly conducted debug sessions to help team members get started with the development. An entry point is pointed out and the control and data flow is followed together. At important code points breakpoints are set and the state (variable values) is inspected. The whole thing can be recorded as a video cast, e.g. with BBB and is available for recapitulation or for others.

How to simplify the familiarization with the code

On many of our Websites we have contact forms. And recently there seems to be an elevated number of bots filling out these forms with spam data. That’s especially a problem, when a contact form is directly connected to an Issue Tracker, that automatically generates an issue when a mail to a specified address arrives. A possible solution for avoiding automated form-fills is using CAPTCHAs.

Spam-Protect a Symfony5 Contact-Form with CAPTCHA

Just because you have some geographical data doesn’t mean you should always map it but often the usage of data visualization with an interactive web map application can bring benefits to your project. Map visualization helps to reduce the degree of abstraction and supports communication and sense-making (a.k.a. data analysis) of your data.

Be kind to your users-use a map application

Central Logging Service for Distributed Applications   With the release of our great new presentation layer for the Goettingen Digitization Centre we faced new problems. The Application consists of many different separate services (and servers). For example a Symfony frontend application, separate applications to deliver and process IIIF manifests and images.

Logging for distributed applications

Kay Liewald

Heute soll es um die Werte in Scrum gehen. Ich glaube, dass gelebte Werte in der Teamarbeit eine absolute Grundvoraussetzung für ein High Performing Team sind. Zum Einstieg möchte ich mit ein paar kurzen einleitenden Worten zu den Scrum Werten beginnen. Wenn euch das neugierig macht, solltet ihr unbedingt den kurzen Methoden-Montag Podcast dazu anhören!

Werte bei Scrum

The way we are using TYPO3 has constantly been changed in the last 10 years. I will show you, how we use state-of-the-art technologies to optimize and automatize the way of building and deploying our TYPO3 sites. History   There were times no source code repository existed and everything was done live on the server. Then we had monolithic repositories in Subversion (do you member?) where each and everything belonging to the site was stored.

A modern way to organize and build your TYPO3 Site with Composer and Webpack Encore

Dennis Neumann

Well, at least partially self-updating. You still will have to write the sentences and all that…  Suppose you are at the beginning of a project and have written some classes.

How to write a self-updating documentation

Sibylle Nägle

I wanted to switch a small website into a one-pager website lately, and as it so happend - the site was managed with TYPO3. Turns out, with TYPO3 it’s a piece of cake. I already had a sitepackage and a template, so the only thing was to glue the pages in a string, make them distingusable from each other, and adjust the menu. Taking care of the glue   The pages can be glued together with two viewhelpers from the vhs-extension.

Creating a onepager website with TYPO3

Stefan Hynek

(Dependency Track, Best Practices) Introduction   In May 2021 President of the USA Joe Biden has issued the Executive Order 14028 on “Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity”. The document makes several demands on federal agencies concerning the implementation of Cybersecurity and identifies the security and integrity of the software supply chain as one vital claim.

SBOM, anyone?

I was quite sceptical if an online conference could make me pay attention in the same way a “physical” conference could. Spoiler: It could. There were some minor issues, such as not so perfect sound, but it was sufficient. The conference took place at an online platform (hopin). All sessions were pre-recorded and made available for all attendees after the conference.

SymfonyWorld Online 2021 Summer Edition

In our University - and also our Data-Center GWDG we use Open-Source Software whenever it is possible. So, instead of using proprietary Video Conferencing Services, such as Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams / Skype, the GWDG provided us a reliable Big Blue Button Service. This Software is - compared to the proprietary solutions mentioned above - limited in its functionality, especially the fun part!

Fun with Big Blue Button

When writing code at some point we want to highlight a specific state, we want to celebrate reaching a new milestone and usually this is the moment to prepare a

 release

. Nowadays when we all are about to use git, it is quite common to utilize

 tags

for this. A tag points to a specific commit, it is a persistent shortcut to this point of the development.

Gitlab Releases and Blobs

Mustafa Dogan

The Alliance of German Science Organisations has recently published its “Recommendations on the Development, Use and Provision of Research Software”, in English and German. Research software has been an emerging subject in recent months, which has been considered as a subtitle of research data by the scientific community for a long time. But software is not data. It must evolve and adapt to the changes in its environment.

Research Software Sustainability

C

reate

 R

ead

 U

pdate

 D

elete — these operations describe the most common tasks a relational database is used for. A common task on top of that, is to build interfaces for users, to execute these operations in a nice way and create a frontend for these task.

A Simple CRUD Application with Symfony

Last week I attended the official 2019 IIIF Conference in Göttingen. It was maybe the hottest week of the year, so the first thing the IIIF Consortium bought, was a fan to get some fresh air for the audience. IIIF? IIIF (Triple-eye-eff), the

 I

nternational

 I

mage

 I

nteroparability

 F

ramework is a set of APIs for having a standardized retrieval of Images, Metadata and more.

IIIF Conference Göttingen

Here is a cheat sheet to XQuery serialization.

XQuery Serialization Options

Carsten Thiel

Technology fails – at least sometimes. This is particularly true for a modern distributed research infrastructure, such as DARIAH-DE.  For the operation of this infrastructure, we have implemented a monitoring solution with Icinga. This enables us to be informed about problems and react quickly.

Static Infrastructure Status with Jekyll and GitHub Pages

Welcome everyone! This is the place to read about projects, resources and all the things we deal with at our work on digital collections, databases, APIs, tools and esoteric programming languages we prefer to write in. It is

 not

meant for a single subject, but covers all topics we 💖. So I hope you don’t mind if the next post is about one of my adorable cute rabbits.

Welcome to the Lab

In dem Podcast „Code for thought“ erzählen Kristine Schima-Voigt und Kay Liewald über unsere Erfahrungen mit agilen Methoden in der Gruppe Software- und Serviceentwicklung an der SUB Göttingen. Peter von „Code for thought“ wurde auf der „Conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany“, kurz deRSE, auf uns aufmerksam.

Podcast „Code for thought"

We are looking for developers who fit into our team - so if you want to work in a great work environment in a beautiful city (Göttingen) and are an experienced software developer, please apply. We are working with a wide range of technologies, so we hope, there’s something for you.

Developers wanted (PHP, Java, TYPO3, Frontend, Symfony, Go, ...)

The colleagues from the other side of the library also started blogging, but more of the book- and collection related library topics.  For hosting the blog, the platform hypotheses.org was chosen. Hypotheses.org mainly focuses on academic content.  Check it out at https://sub.hypotheses.org/ or subscribe to the RSS Feed.

New blog from the colleagues

I really like the

 file drop

feature of ownCloud. You can configure a directory to receive files from a thrid party without authentication and with no troubles. You get a URL and that is everything you have to share. People will see a simple file upload field and can push their files directly into your ownCloud. Easy.

Upload to ownCloud without auth*

Creating screencasts, for example for documentation, is easy with these three powerful open-source tools: OBS, Kdenlive and ImageMagick, which all run on Linux, MacOs and Windows respectively. After downloading and installing all three, (https://obsproject.com, https://kdenlive.org and https://imagemagick.org) you are good to go. Let’s start with creating the screencasts.

Creating videos for documentation

Tired of presentations made with a full-featured (as in: full of features you are never going to use) software suite stored in unhandy proprietary formats? OK, I am sorry for this rhetorical question.

Preparing Presentations with Markdown

Well, this might be a catchy title. But what we are going to do, is to put the Jekyll artifacts into a Docker image and get a completely self-contained website. Jekyll, what? Artifacts? Ok, let’s start from the very beginning. Jekyll is a static website generator. This blog is run by Jekyll. That means, we do only have to edit markdown files and a ruby program generates everything around that and transforms the posts into a website.

Serving a Jekyll Blog with Docker

On the 14th of october a ‘IIIF-Friday’ will be held at Ghent University. Most importantly, the major IIIF-Viewers are being presented, followed by a Q&amp;A session.  Feel free to register for the online event at meemoo.

IIIF Friday at Ghent University

Michelle Weidling

A few years ago an internal initiative on software quality launched at the Research and Development Department. There is always room for improvements and some guidance can help implement best practices for better workflows and for better code. The very first stop on our ride was at Joel`s Test for better code, published 24 years ago. It is time for a review — again. Do you use source control? Who doesn’t? Can you make a build in one step?

The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code

I just stumbled over a nice post and became inspired writing about agility in our teams, how we got there, how we use it and how it may fail. The intellectual foundation for becoming agile in a software development group, is to internalize the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development “. Starting the transition   We started off with a new project about 4 years ago and some people that were keen on changing the way we worked in the past.

Agility

When going for Text Mining a collection of resources pretty much the first step is to check for the language. If it is a multi-language collection may be there is at least

 some

metadata. At SUB we often use the METS/MODS standard based on XML.

You might not need Metadata

Docker activated “rate limits” by the end of 2020 - and as we are frequently pulling images from the main docker registry, we ran into trouble and our builds failed. But there is a quite simple solution for circumventing these rate limits - as we are using a gitlab runner on a dedicated server. This server already has the docker daemon installed and the solution is already documented.

Gitlab Runner and Docker's Rate Limits

Using a dependency proxy with npm, yarn or pnpm in CI or local development can greatly reduce outgoing traffic. Fortunately, FE now maintains an instance of such service. Verdaccio – not only a classical underpainting technique   The project maintains a current Helm chart that made its deployment into a Kubernetes cluster work like a charm.

Introducing a lightweight Node.js proxy registry service: Verdaccio

This blog post accompanies my DH-Tech talk about config management.

 tl;dr

: There is a recording available. Problems with infrastructure administration Operating an infrastructure can be hard. Among the most common problems is that of reproducibility, i.e. Is the documentation both current and correct? Is it clear how to do a fresh install or set up a secondary system? Another is that of uniformity, i.e. are there any standards?

Config Management

Web-scraping is ugly, but sometimes it may become necessary, because services don’t expose an API to retrieve data. Basically web-scraping is a mechanism to programatically open a website and grab the contents in order to using it for own purposes. The mission   In one of our sites, we are using the HTML output of a not-that-hip-anymore-database allegro.

Webscraping with Symfony

Twitter for Goettingen Digitisation Centre / Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum   Did you know, that with the current relaunch of the GDZ (Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum), we implemented a small bridge to Twitter that tweets out the newly scanned works?  This feature was integrated in our Symfony App using the simple endroid/twitter library.  Feel free to follow this unofficial account at @just_scanned.

Twitter for Goettingen Digitisation Centre

Symfony console   For a rather small task we needed to build a standalone command line app to process and copy some files. Our first approach to that included using the JVM (Java, Kotlin), because it needed to be deployable and runnable without any great hassle. But going a little further we skipped that approach and remembered the great Symfony Console which provides a quite simple interface.

Using Docker for a simple Symfony Console App

First of all - I could have put much more words in the title because we are covering a complete workflow for our TYPO3 documentation (for our customers and their sites).  We will see the tools used, how it is organized and finally how it is deployed. Format   TYPO3 used to use an OpenOffice-based documentation shipped as *.sxw files ages ago.

Documentation with reStructuredText for TYPO3

This article introduces an XQuery library that allows code generation according to the OpenAPI 3.0.2 standard based on RESTXQ. It uses xqDoc as well as XQuery function annotation with %rest and %test prefix, combined with type declaration and also searches for general information in package description resources (expath-pkg.xml and repo.xml). It ships with the “swagger-ui-dist” package grabbed from npm, but can be built without by ant.

OpenAPI Code Generator for RESTXQ

A data import is part of most of our projects and in some cases, we need to re-import all the data from time to time. This post shows how you can delegate this task to a GitLab CI job and start it by adding a certain keyword to your commit message. What is the problem? There are several circumstances when a data import (or a re-import) is required.

Data Import by CI Job

lab.sub - Articles

In our University - and also our Data-Center GWDG we use Open-Source
Software whenever it is possible. So, instead of using proprietary Video
Conferencing Services, such as Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams /
Skype, the GWDG provided us a reliable [Big Blue
Button](https://bigbluebutton.org/) Service.

This Software is - compared to the proprietary solutions mentioned
above - limited in its functionality, especially the fun part!

## Big Blue Button

Big Blue Button is an Open-Source Videoconferencing Software - it claims
to be built for Online Learning. It was our go-to solution during the
Lockdown-Times here and basically all our Weekly-, Daily- and whatsoever
Meetings were done using Big Blue Button. In the very beginning we hat
to struggle with some issues, but the people at BBB and GWDG did a
really good job in fixing Bugs and applying Updates.

As it is aimed at Students and Pupils, all the maybe unnecessary
Schnickschnack was not implemented - so there was no possibility to use
Custom Backgrounds and have funny Animations running.

## OBS Studio

So, after toying around for some time, I got on the right track and
discovered the greade Video Broadcasting Software [OBS
Studio](https://obsproject.com/) - Open Broadcaster Software, an
Open-Source Software that is used by lots of Influencers and Video
Streamers around the world. It offers Real-Time streaming and has
built-in integrations for a lot of streaming portals, such as YouTube,
Twitch and so on.

But I didn't find any Integration for Big Blue Button, but after
investigating a little further, I found a few articles describing how to
use the output of OBS Studio as a "virtual" Webcam on ones Computer and
ended up installing
[obs-v4l2sink](https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-v4l2sink). This only
works on Linux Machines, but there are equivalents on Mac and Windows.

One word on the term "virtual webcam" - it is not a physical device, but
a device that emulates one. When starting the video in Big Blue Button
one is asked which video device should broadcast the video, and instead
of the "real" webcam on the computer it broadcasts the video from the
OBS Studio output.

![OBS Studio](assets/images/bbb-fun/obs-scenes.webp)

## Hardware and Integration

### Webcam

Webcams have become quite expensive in the last few month, and the
built-in webcam of my Laptop did not meet my requirements. It is a
really good one, but as with all Laptop Cameras you always look down. I
wanted something that filmed me straigt from the front. When I thougt
about possible solutions, I wondered why it should not be possible to
use the best camera I do have available - the camera on my Smartphone.

Again after some research I discovered the App
[droidcam](https://www.dev47apps.com/) that has some nifty features. It
is used in conjunction with an Desktop Application of the same name
which is available for most major platforms. When the App starts it
opens a connection vie HTTP and if the phone is connected via USB-Cable
this more reliable connection can be used.

### Integration

Desktop client:

![droidcam Desktop](assets/images/bbb-fun/droidcam-desktop.webp)

Android App:

![droidcam Phone](assets/images/bbb-fun/droidcam-phone.webp)

This droidcam camera can be used as video device for OBS Studio, but
also directly for Big Blue Button.

One step further I found the App [droidcam
OBS](https://www.dev47apps.com/obs/) that - once started on the phone
and given the plugin is installed on the desktop - nicely and directly
integrates as a video device in OBS-Studio.

### Camera Holder

The Camera needs to go into a good position, so that you are looking
direcly straigt into the camera. For achieving this, I bought
[this](https://www.lamicall.com/product/gooseneck-tablet-holder-ls02/)
cheap and real stable second hand smartphone holder, that sits directly
on the top of the monitor and does a great job.

![droidcam Phone](assets/images/bbb-fun/smartphone-holder.webp)

## Green Screen

Green Screen or [Chroma key](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_key)
is a technique, that every one of us has seen directly or indirectly,
when watching the news or any movie with special effects and
CGI-Visuals. Basically it is about having a color, that does not exist
in the human nature, that is replaced by any arbitrary image, video and
so on. The color green is mostly used for achieving this and so the term
"Green Screen" is quite common for Chroma-keying.

I wanted to have fancy backgrounds in Video conferences, so I took an
old - really green bedcloth and put that on two microphone stands right
behind me, that the scene the camera was filming only contains me an the
green cloth.

Front:

![Green Screen Front](assets/images/bbb-fun/cloth-front.webp)

From Behind:

![Green Screen From Behind](assets/images/bbb-fun/cloth-back.webp)

## Backgrounds

Backgrounds for the Green Screen - or for me should be funny - but not
too exaggerated. So, a colleague took some photos and also some videos
from different perspectives and rooms of the office. Having some moving
things in the background provides a far more vivid and realistic
experience for the viewer.

In OBS Studio you can combine videos with images and Webcam Video and
position everything until it fits. In one test-drive video conference I
used an image I found in the
[Internet](https://www.curbed.com/2020/3/26/21193949/zoom-background-options-images-home-interior)
that shows a really cleaned-up room with a book shelf and so on, but
none of the participants wondered about it - so I guess I had a good and
realistic setup.

When using one of the colleague's as background videos in a group
meeting, some participants thought I was in the office. So, mission
accomplished.

## Performance

The broadcasting thing - especially with loads of scenes and videos
running in the background is really CPU and Memory Intensive and it may
be laggy, so use a fast and modern computer for that. Sound and Video
may be out of sync if different devices are used - I did not try to
route the audio input through OBS-Studio, but that is definetly
possible.

## Conclusion

I had a really good time setting up and trying these things and got some
insight into the streaming / broadcasting techniques many Youtubers are
using. One thing I did not really care about was the lighting - there
may be some things I can optimize.

The combination of Software and Hardware I used is really powerful and
can also be used for a more professional Video production. Maybe one day
I will become a famous Influencer.
