Hello

Sometimes it can come in handy to start a temporary elog service on the Windows platform. ( Maybe for testing purposes )

You can use the SC.exe utility to do that. If it is not on you're system you may download it from : ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/reskit/win2000/sc.zip

For this you can use the following procedure ( from the dos prompt ) :

 sc.exe create AIX-elog binPath= "\"c:\ELOG2.7.3\elogd.exe\" -D -c c:\ELOG2.7.3\security.cfg" DisPlayname= "AIX Elog Security" start= auto

If all went well the system answers :

 [SC] CreateService SUCCESS

Please notice the strange way the double quotes are used and the space after the = in the above command.

Now open the windows services ( from the prompt ) : services.msc

In the window that opens you will see the just created service with the DisPlayname you gave in the above command.

You see it is not started. You could click start, but there is an other way.

Now you can start the service from the prompt using the DisPlayname :

  net start "AIX elog security"

Press F5 ( refresh ) in the services window and you will see that the service is started.

Or stop the service :

  net stop "AIX elog security"

To remove the service ( from the registry ) :

   sc.exe delete AIX-elog

The system gives back :

  [SC] DeleteService SUCCESS

The other option is to start elogd.exe from the prompt :

  elogd.exe -c 

This is all for now

We're using elog as our CMDB, but now management wants us to employ "web services" and I fear going to another tool (elog is fitting the admins like a glove, so we'd rather keep it)

Is it possible to configure elog to be able to run as a web-service ?  (basically getting xml-output according to a specific (SOAP) schema instead of html output)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_services

A 'Web service' (also Web Service) is defined by the W3C as "a software system designed to support interoperable Machine to Machine interaction over a network." Web services are frequently just Web APIs that can be accessed over a network, such as the Internet, and executed on a remote system hosting the requested services.

The W3C Web service definition encompasses many different systems, but in common usage the term refers to clients and servers that communicate using XML messages that follow the SOAP standard. Common in both the field and the terminology is the assumption that there is also a machine readable description of the operations supported by the server written in the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). The latter is not a requirement of a SOAP endpoint, but it is a prerequisite for automated client-side code generation in many Java and .NET SOAP frameworks (frameworks such as Spring and Apache CXF being notable exceptions). Some industry organizations, such as the WS-I, mandate both SOAP and WSDL in their definition of a Web service.

I would appreciate if elog could provide a simple support for mathematical expressions.

A solution similar to wikimedia should be easy to implement and would help a lot.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Running_MediaWiki_on_Windows#Alternative_Solution

The idea is to parse the elog entry for a tag (e.g.  <math></math>), extract the code, wrap it into a latex file, and pass this to latex, GhostScript, and ImageMagic. (The latter are already used by Elog, therefore the changes should not be too big.) The resulting image file would then be referenced by the  elog html code.

Of course, the FCKeditor would not support LaTeX. However, the majority of elog-useres should be scientists and rather familiar with LaTeX. Therefore it should be fine if the original LaTeX code is saved (e.g. in the ALT-tag of the image) and the replacement "code to image" is undone for editing.

Kind regards,
Jochen

Well, I tinkered a bit with a journal entry display page and found that without having to suggest the flavor-of-the-month web design mantra of "replace table layout with CSS only",  just a few CSS tweaks can enable exactly what I am desiring.

For your consideration, here are the tweaks I made to get a fixed header and footer section with a scrollable journal entry section in the middle:

1. moved the journal entry content and footer line (elog version info) out of the layout table structure, into their own div sections;
2. in the style sheet, added attribute "position:fixed" to the "frame table" section;
3. in the style sheet, added attribute sections for journal entry content and footer div sections:
   1. #content: overflow:auto;position:fixed;top:230px;bottom:30px;width:100%;
   2. #footer:  text-align:center;bottom:0;position:fixed;width:100%;

Now as I'm not a web designer by trade and not intimately familiar with CSS nuances, I used the time honored method of documentation lookup with trial and error.

In any case, it worked and displays exactly the way I wanted; please do consider this for a future elog release.

Bill

Yes, you are correct, I did simply take a sample page from logs and tinker with the html and css file, with the changes enumerated previously.  I have attached the tweaked sample html elog log page and css file, along with a few of the standard elog png files to complete the page with some semblance of the normal display.

 I would like to be notified by email of some logbook entries regardless of whether the user has chosen to suppress email or not.

This way I will always be aware of new entries, and users will still have the option of notifying a larger group of other users, or not.

As far as I can tell, presently the Suppress Email checkbox overrides Email All.

It would be very cool to be able to select Full from the view menu and then scroll rapidly through all entries looking for that high res photo of a SQUID chip I took two months ago. Presently the photos are all full size so the Full view is slow to load and it takes a lot of scrolling to navigate. Can you implement thumbnails in Full view, and also in the single entry view? Clicking on the thumbnail should, of course, open the full size image.

For now, I'm just using the wysiwyg html entry format and dropping images into the entry, then right-clicking to set a small image size. Clicking on the image gives me a new window with the full size image, which works great.

I hope you don't mind the barrage of suggestions, and thanks again.