On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 4:16 AM, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote:
Sayamindu,
I'm not sure why you think you'd need to use multithreading to deal
with the multiple chunks. Can't you just bring them in one at a time,
parse as you go, and then display the finished result set all at once?
I'm a bit worried with incredibly long result sets (for example, a USB
stick with a few thousand entries).
I saw your Get Books activity got praised on the OLPC blog as being a
key part of their latest efforts with Internet Archive books. (My
name was listed also, but it was clearly your Activity they were
praising).
I'm not sure about this, but I think this was done to push OPDS as
much as possible, which I believe is a sensible thing to do :-)
It just seemed to me that it would be a good idea to give
your efforts an official status (its own git repository, wiki page,
ASLO downloads, etc.) as soon as possible. Even with the shortcomings
you mention it deserves that much.
If you want to keep the original around for awhile it's fine with me.
In the short run it won;'t hurt anything. In the long term it makes
more sense to have just one Activity to find and get books on the
Internet and just one Activity to read them. I understood from you
that eventually Read would be able to use the formats I wrote View
Slides and Read Etexts for. Those Activities could also stay around
but they might be of more use to teachers and other adults than they
would be to the young students Sugar is targetted at.
Agreed. I think will require a couple of releases more to fix the
immediate problems, and then we could perhaps make the activity more
official.
Thanks,
Sayamindu
James Simmons
On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 2:22 PM, Sayamindu Dasgupta sayami...@gmail.com
wrote:
Hi Jim,
I think GIAB should stay. Get Books still has a few deficiencies :
* Metadata: GIAB seems to pull in more metadata that what is currently
offered by OPDS.
* Large resultsets: The OPDS results returned by IA are chunked into
segments of 50 items each. Get Books only handles the first segment.
Getting it to handle the other segments (essentially, loading them
automagically as the user scrolls down) requires quite a bit of coding
effort (and the optimal way here would be probably to use threading,
and threading in PyGTK can be a dangerous thing to tread on) - there
is no timeframe for its implementation yet.
* Formats: While the current format code is hardcoded, and I will
offer whatever is there in the OPDS data from next version, it will
not cover all the formats from IA. I would prefer not to hard-code
anything (since I'm handling a number of sources, hardcoding for a
particular source will lead to a lot of messy code)
Let me know what you think.
Thanks,
Sayamindu
On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 2:15 AM, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote:
Sayamindu,
Regarding the friendly fork of Get Internet Archive Books, I'm
thinking that perhaps you will soon have Get Books in good enough
shape that the original Activity will no longer be needed, and at that
point you should merge your clone with the mainline and take over the
Activity. About the only thing that GIAB can do that you can't (yet)
is give the user a choice of download formats. It shouldn't be too
tough to implement that option if you restrict it to the Internet
Archive.
I could rename the original Activity in ASLO and rename its wiki page,
then give you authority in git to update the mainline. You would need
to renumber your Activity version to number 4, as GIAB is currently at
version 3.
It's pretty clear that GIAB is a dead end and what you're doing is the
future. You've even addressed the future needs of the Rural Design
Collective for distributing children's books on a thumb drive, which
was something I had hoped to do with GIAB at some point.
Let me know what you think.
James Simmons
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2009 04:26:07 +0530
From: Sayamindu Dasgupta sayami...@gmail.com
Subject: [Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Get Books Activity 3, now with
SneakerNet/ChappalNet support
To: OLPC Bookreader list bookrea...@lists.laptop.org, Sugar devel
sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org
Message-ID:
a1314bfe0911051456k2e7791a8h989e41265d127...@mail.gmail.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Hello,
Get Books Activity is a friendly fork of Jim Simmon's Get Internet
Archive Books activity and it allows Sugar users to search for and
download Ebooks from various sources. One of the major points of
concern for many was this activity required Internet access, and I
have tried to address that issue with this release.
The activity can now access catalogs in removable devices (pen drives,
etc) and lets the user search through these catalogs. A removable
device with a catalog will show up in the list of sources from which
the books can be downloaded/copied. Utilizing this feature, one will
be able to copy thousands of
