On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 4:16 AM, Jim Simmons <[email protected]> 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 <[email protected]> > 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 <[email protected]> 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 <[email protected]> >>>> Subject: [Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Get Books Activity 3, now with >>>> SneakerNet/ChappalNet support >>>> To: OLPC Bookreader list <[email protected]>, Sugar devel >>>> <[email protected]> >>>> Message-ID: >>>> <[email protected]> >>>> 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 ebooks in a pen-drive, put a catalog file >>>> (catalog.xml) in the root[1] directory of the device, and send it to >>>> bandwidth starved areas. (think of a library on a stick ;-) >>>> >>>> Apart from the above features, this release also has some subtle >>>> changes in the behavior which will hopefully make the overall use >>>> experience better. (for example, changing the source in the middle of >>>> a search will trigger a new search within the new selected source) >>>> >>>> I do not consider this release to be stable, so I have not uploaded it >>>> to ASLO yet (I had to do a lot more refactoring that I would have >>>> liked to get the removable device support working). To download the >>>> activity (it should work with Sucrose 0.82 upwards), follow the link: >>>> http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/GetBooks-3.xo >>>> >>>> To test the removable device support, in a USB drive, unzip >>>> http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/books_on_a_stick.zip [2] (make sure >>>> that the catalog.xml file stays in the toplevel directory of the >>>> drive), and plug the USB drive in wherever you are running Sugar. Get >>>> Books is _supposed_ to detect removable devices as and when they are >>>> plugged in/removed, but if your device does not show up, try >>>> restarting the activity before trying anything else. >>>> >>>> Thanks, >>>> Sayamindu >>> >> >> >> >> -- >> Sayamindu Dasgupta >> [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] >> > -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
