- Several people have asked me what I think of the Calibre ebook reading, management, sync, and conversion system, and that’s in fact what I’ve been fooling with in recent days. There’s a lot in the package, way more than in any other single ebook reader or manager that I’ve yet seen. A review will follow as time allows.
- I follow this site every day, and I may be a little jaded, but this image (from June 25) made me gasp. (Don’t forget to mouse over it for a guide to what you’re seeing.)
- And if you have any interest in the closest star to Earth, this site should be on your short list.
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Revendication, an old word for “restoration.” Found in Letters from Rome on the Council by “Quirinus” (Acton, Dollinger, and Friedrich), 1870.
- From Jim Strickland comes a pointer to a skin-mag pinup…hold the skin. (C’est si bones…)
- Here’s an interesting list of apps built with FreePascal and Lazarus, an open-source Delphi workalike. I’m going to try some of this stuff, because if it breaks, I may have a fighting chance of fixing it.
- Here’s the best description I’ve yet seen of why broadband in this country is as weak as it is.
- A tie-in with the Shrek movie series has apparently made Vidalia onions this summer’s hot item…with kids. Kids are eating onions like never before, simply because (as they said in the first movie) “ogres are like onions–they have layers!” Dare ya to do the same thing with creamed corn.
- A whole new category of vuvuzela emulator apps is getting lots of online buzz.
Odd Lots
Daywander
Well, as a fair number of people have told me, the logo Carol and I saw the other day was the “hatchet man” icon of Insane Clown Posse, a hip-hop duo from Detroit that I’ve never heard and probably won’t. Key to finding the figure online is knowing that what he’s holding isn’t a map or a piece of paper but a hatchet. (In fact, it looks a lot more like a meat cleaver.) There’s also a girl-version of the icon, with a ponytail, but what we saw on the gate of a pickup truck was almost precisely what I show above left.
We had a relatively small gathering last night, but that was all right, as there were few enough of us to all sit on the two couches and talk about everything from dogs to SF to classic aircraft of the Strategic Air Command. We spoke of that lunatic Lt. Col. Bud Holland, whose lifelong ambition appears to have been to roll a B-52. (Detailed discussion here.) He tried, he failed, and you can see a video of the results here. Eric Bowersox and Sabrina Hoyt brought some Mountain Dew Throwback, made with real sugar instead of corn leavins’, and the original product artwork on the cans. There were intermittent thunderstorms all afternoon, but we had enough time between microcells to grill a batch of smoked brats and Ranch Food Direct burgers. By sheer coincidence both Mike Reith and Peggy Sargent brought cream puffs, and it had been so long since I’d had one that I’d mostly forgotten what cream puffs were. That memory came back in a big hurry, heh.
Alas, the thunderstorms prevented me from getting any Field Day time in yesterday, and with less than an hour remaining in the contest and yet another thunderboomer passing overhead as I write, I doubt I’ll get any time in this year at all. I created what I had hoped to be a low-profile inverted vee, and in truth, when I told people I had antenna off the back deck, several people looked and just didn’t see it, when when I was pointing right at it. It’s designed to be portable, and is attached to the deck railing with bungee cords. I’ll try to get a couple of days’ contacts with it, then roll it up and put it back in the garage.
There was more bear action yesterday. Late afternoon, our doorbell rang, and it was our new neighbors from across the street. Heather and Glen had gone for a walk with their two small boys, aged two and four, and left their garage door open. When they returned, sho’nuff, a bear was in their garage ransacking their garbage can. Heather asked to bring her boys inside, but about then Glen came back and said he’d driven the bear off by throwing rocks at it, after which it vanished up the street and ran between two other houses. (Glen’s an Army officer. Spend some time in Iraq and bears lose a lot of their mystique.) I’m guessing it was the same bear I saw yesterday about lunchtime, eating dog food down in our gully near our back door. It seems a little too comfortable with people and a little too willing to be out and around during the day to stay here, and if it comes back too much we’re going to have to put a call in and see if it can be relocated.
Lots of leftovers from last night, and I’ll be grilling Ranch Food Direct burgers again this evening if the rain will just stop for half an hour. The West is getting soaked this year. Our local reservoirs are full, and western Nebraska’s massive Lake McConaughy is refilling (after a 9-year drought that the doomsayers warned would be permanent) at a rate of two feet per week. When we first saw it we marveled at the broad sand beaches, which were not in fact beaches at all but recently exposed lake bottom. It was about 30% full when we first saw it several years ago. It’s now over 80% full and the water level is rising fast. (Note the end of the curve on the graph, and then see this graph to get a sense for the insane amount of water flowing into it this year.) We hope to take a long weekend up there before the summer’s over.
This coming week should be fairly peaceful. I intend to do some fiction writing and perhaps even finish an experiment I have on the bench downstairs, concerning how well IN23A microwave diodes serve as AM BCB detectors. What I know of detector theory tells me that such detectors should be socko. We’ll find out–that’s what science is for.
Ursa Muncher
I got home from shopping for tonight’s nerd party an hour or so ago to find a phone message from Collette next door. She told me that there was a very large bear sitting in the trees behind our houses, eating a bag of dog food. I grabbed my V530 and snuck out the back door. Well, yup: There he was, about forty feet from our lower deck, with his nose stuck in a huge honking bag of Old Roy or something. Crunch, crunch, crunch.
Wow. We’ve seen bears here a time or three, though generally at dawn or dusk. Pete Albrecht and I were hanging out on our back deck a few years ago, talking astronomy about 11:30 PM, when we heard some crunching down in the gully. We looked over the deck railing, and there he was, looking up at us. He’d been harvesting the summer’s choke cherries, I’d guess. One leg of my improvised Field Day inverted vee terminates down there a few yards from the bear, and I was doing that only yesterday.
We went back and looked again when Carol got home a few minutes ago, but he was gone. So was the dog food bag–so I guess he got tired of being stared at, packed up his Old Roy, and went elsewhere.
Don’t know whose dog food it was, but in any event, better the dog food than the dogs.
Query By Sketching
Earlier today, while Carol and I were out on an errands run, we were stopped for a light behind a beat-up pickup truck. On the back of the truck was an emblem on a sticker, and Carol asked me what it was. And in truth, I don’t know, though I’ve seen it a time or two before. It looks like a band logo, though not of any band that I’ve ever listened to.
It was a right profile of a cartoonish man running, with his hair streaming in the wind. In one hand he’s holding a sheet of paper in front of him. The whole thing is in red, inside a red circle. There’s no text of any kind. (The figure is filled in with red; my sketch above is in red Sharpie. Also note the painfully obvious: I’m a words guy, not a pictures guy.)
The challenge intrigued me when I got home. How would I look something like that up? I tried text descriptions in Google Images: “little red guy running”, “red logo running man,” and so on. Saw lots of interesting things, but not that logo. I didn’t spend a great deal of time on it and gave up after a couple of minutes.
We don’t really have a search system for pictograms, and we probably don’t need one all that badly, but it made me wonder how we would make the attempt. Text descriptions? “Right-side profile of cartoon man running, holding a sheet of paper in front of him. Enclosed in circle. Color solid red.” Or perhaps a sort of Visio interface where we could drag across cartoon fragments of describable things and drop them into a rough sketch that the computer could compare against images in its database. This would require machine abstraction, but would be useful for identifying more than just band logos.
As with “query by humming” for music that sticks in your head, it’s a difficult problem computationally, and not as useful. My guess is we that won’t do it, not because we can’t, but because there’s no payoff. And thinking about it for a few minutes reminds me how really really far we still are from genuine “strong” AI.
In the meantime, does anybody know what the little running red guy represents?
Those Gnarly Duntemann Brothers
A woman contacted me recently who is evidently a fourth cousin; we have a set of great-great-great grandparents in common. She sent me a scan of an old undated photo and told me that the second man from the left was her great-great grandfather, Frederick Duntemann 1846-1927. She thought that one or more of the other men were Frederick’s brothers. What did I know?
Not much. But it’s an interesting sort of detective work, this family resemblances stuff. I do know that my great-great grandfather Heinrich Duntemann 1843-1892 had four brothers, all of whom long survived him, who died of an infection from a farm injury at 48. I have photos of two of his brothers, William Duntemann 1849-1921 (left) and Hermann Duntemann 1859-1933. (right). William’s photo was taken when he was in his sixties, as best I know. Hermann’s was taken when he was 26. If I had to guess, I’d say that the leftmost man in the group photo was William, and the rightmost was Hermann. The remaining man may have been Louis Duntemann 1851-1928. I can’t tell, as I’ve never seen a photo and know very little about him.
Well, they certainly look like brothers to me, and in fact far left and third from left could almost be twins. The guy on the right seems like a shoo-in for an older version of Hermann. That said, I’m not sure how fair it is to say: “This is a photo of the four surviving Duntemann brothers, circa 1920.” Hermann left no descendants, but at least a hundred people descend from the other three brothers. If I say that that’s what it is, all those people will likely take my word for it. (I’m the de facto family history expert, simply because I know a little and everybody else knows nothing.) It would be great to have such a photo of the four brothers, and maybe I do. But I think I have to be real damned careful about saying so. Uncritical acceptance of expert opinions is dangerous, when the experts know only a little more than everybody else but still want the prestige of expertise.
So I will lead by example: These guys may just possibly have a greater-than-zero chance of perhaps being your great-great (and perhaps greater) grandfathers. It is impossible to know. We might wish it were otherwise, but wishin’ don’t make it so.
Daywander
It’s fawn season again, and yesterday we saw a mother deer leading a fawn that was no bigger than Jackie, if perhaps a little taller. Figure that: A deer the size of a bichon. The poor thing can’t be more than a day or two old, and it’s wobbling unsteadily around the First Curve on Stanwell St., where teenagers roar by in their parents’ elephantine Escalades and probably wouldn’t even notice if they had small animals wedged in their grilles. (We’re mostly thankful that they don’t miss the curve and plow through my office window.) Last night about 8 or so, mom had gone off somewhere, and junior was simply lying on our neighbor’s mulch, about six feet from the pavement. It wasn’t as obvious as it could be, but there are much better hiding places in the area. I guess we can think of it as evolution in action.
Our nephew Brian was out for a few days last week, and we all went down to the Garden of the Gods for a vigorous walk around the rock formations. I took a photo of Brian and Carol and something very weird happened: A dazzle from one of Carol’s rings just happened to hit the camera the moment the shutter snapped. Green Lantern must have that problem a lot, but this is the first time I’ve seen it from Carol.
My low-key inverted-vee antenna should be up and running off the back deck by Field Day, and will be 32 feet on each leg. That will get me the 20 meter band and up, and given that I’m feeding it with a short run (~10′) of open wire line through an MFJ Versa Tuner 2, I may get 40 as well. I’ll certainly try.
I’m still testing EPub readers. This morning, at Jim Strickland’s noodging, I installed the Barnes & Noble Desktop Reader. Not a bad item, but as with all the readers I’ve tested so far, doesn’t quite get it right. The presentation on my test files has been pretty good so far, but this time the software does use the title tag, and thus puts up only half of the Beyschlag ebook’s title. Also, it puts my test books up in two-column format, and I still haven’t figured out how to control the column settings. Neither of my two test books with cover images show their covers as thumbnails in the library pane. To its credit, the reader renders PDF documents pretty well, though of course there’s no metadata and thus no display of title or author.
Most annoying is the User Guide button, which brings up a longwinded sales pitch but no user guide. I assume you have to sign up for a B&N account to get the user guide, and I will at some point, but probably not today. I do understand that the product is designed to work tightly with B&N’s online bookstore and won’t slam them too hard for that integration, but basic “here’s how to do it” information should be there long before the sales pitches begin.
Nobody’s perfect, but the winner so far is FBReader, even though it inexplicably displays my copyright notices in ancient Greek. We’ll get there. Just not as soon as I’d like.
Coding vs. Compiling EPubs
It’s always unsettling to admit that the other side has a point, but it’s good practice and often absolutely necessary. I am the VDM guy, after all, and I’ve never been one for hand-coding what can be generated automatically. As I’ve mentioned here earlier, an awful lot of people take their text and hand-code an EPub framework around it to create an ebook, which I found borderline ridiculous…until this morning. Now I think I know why they do it.
It’s simple: Our EPub compilers have a very long way to go.
The process of creating EPub-formatted ebooks can be done two ways: Write your own XML/XHTML by hand, or let a utility of some sort generate it for you. I’ve done both in recent days, and I was bowled over by the conceptual similarities between that and the gulf between writing a program entirely in assembly and writing it in an HLL like C. I’ve done a fair bit of tracing through assembly code as compiled by GCC, and I’ve been very impressed by the cleanness and comprehensibility of the assembly files it produces. GCC is one helluva compiler, as is the Delphi compiler. (And that’s where my low-level code tracing experience begins and ends, mostly.)
Well, I’ve been spoiled. Compared to GCC (or even Delphi, which is now 15 years old, egad) the EPub format is a babe in diapers: poorly understood, still growing furiously, and, as often as not, smelly as hell. All of that will pass. (I remember my nephew Brian in his diapered era; he is now 27 and an investment banker.) But in the meantime, well, the immaturity of the EPub technology must be dealt with.
I did another, larger test case EPub yesterday. I took a 15,000-word article from an old theology journal, extracted the text via ABBYY PDF Transformer, cleaned up the text (which was in fact pretty damned clean to begin with; ABBYY does a superb job here) and loaded the text into the Atlantis word processor. Without a great deal of additional editing, I exported it to an EPub file. That file may be downloaded here. (40K EPub.) There are no images, and all the text exists in a single XHTML section. It’s about as simple structurally as an EPub can get, and what you see is just as it came out of Atlantis. I did not tweak it at all post-Atlantis, neither manually nor in Sigil. (Note well that Atlantis can export EPub, but it cannot import EPub files, nor display/edit EPub XML/XHTML.) I then took that file and loaded it into Sigil, added a cover image, and split the text into two sections. You can find that file here. (1 MB EPub.) Both of these files pass EPubCheck without errors.
The Atlantis EPub renders (reasonably) well in all the local readers I have here, as well as the online Ibis Reader. It’s small (only 40K) and if you can do without a cover it’s a perfectly reasonable ebook. The Sigil copy does not do nearly as well. The online Ibis Reader refuses to render any of the images at all, including the cover image, the copyright glyph, and the generated images of the two grapevine glyphs that I inserted into the title page as decorations just to see what would happen. The copyright glyph issue is disturbing for legal reasons, but worse, it’s a standard character with a standard HTML encoding, and should be renderable irrespective of font. Ditto Azardi, which renders the Atlantis EPub well but not the Sigil copy. Over and above Azardi’s leaving out all the images (including the copyright glyph) the Sigil copy of the EPub loses what little formatting it had in the Atlantis EPub. None of the centered text remains centered, for example.
There are some additional weirdnesses in the readers themselves: FBReader renders both files well, but (weirdly) the Go Forward button moves the reading window toward the beginning of the file, and the Go Back button moves the window toward the end of the file, perfectly bass-ackwards. Ibis displays the title three times, which is overkill. FBReader handles the images just fine, but renders the copyright notice for both versions in Greek letters, sheesh.
These rendering issues are probably reader failures, since the files themselves are EPub-compliant. However, the autogenerated XML/XHTML code is often obscure, and in one case, at least, dead wrong: The title tag includes only the first line of the title. I understand that the title text is split into two lines, but I was never asked to define the text within the title tag and can only assume that Atlantis picked the first Heading 1 style it found and plugged its text into title. (The metadata for the title was stored correctly, and all readers displayed the full title text. I don’t think that the title tag is used by the readers. An empty title tag is perfectly acceptable to EPubCheck.) The gnarliest part of the compiled EPub (in both versions) is the CSS. Atlantis took the page format settings and translated them into generically named CSS classes, which are accurate representations of the word processor settings, but not easily identifiable and in no wise good quality CSS.
This isn’t insurmountable, and most of the problems I’ve had so far can be blamed on incomplete and buggy reader apps, but it shows how young a business this is. The hand coders still have the edge, and I’d be better off on the readability side creating the ebook text in a WYSIWYG HTML editor like Kompozer or Dreamweaver and hand-coding the CSS myself. That is, however, precisely what I’m trying to avoid. Sooner or later, Atlantis or something like it will offer pre-written CSS style sheets designed specifically for text intended for EPub export. That will help a great deal. In the meantime, some manual futzing is unavoidable, and my opinion of Sigil has been greatly tarnished. I may have to try something else on the EPub editor side; suggestions always welcome.
And the readers, yeech. Don’t get me started. I may have to buy an iPad just to see what my own damned books look like!
Odd Lots
- The rate of toxoplasmosis infection in a given nation appears correlated to the level of neuroticism in that nation. I’ve mentioned toxo before, but it appears that we have better numbers now, and that the UK is nowhere near 50% infected, as the source I quoted in 2003 implied. France, well, now…
- Here’s a nice piece that explains why the atmospheric CO2 measurements taken atop Mauna Loa are accurate. And here is NOAA’s explanation of how they do it.
- Bruce Baker sent a link to an article describing how a few scraps of odd film allowed some dogged engineers to re-create the long-lost pallophotophone technology (later known as RCA Photophone), and by doing so give voice to 1920’s recordings of Thomas Edison speaking affectionately about his friend Henry Ford.
- This weekend is ARRL Field Day, in which ham radio ops head out to the hinterlands to see how well they can get up to radio speed from a dead stop, using portable (not mains) power, from a place not previously set up for radio gear. I’ll be trekking out to my back deck and working the world on an inverted vee, draining 829Bs (Diet Mountain Dew over ice in peanut butter jars) Saturday afternoon, and showing all my geek friends how it works that evening during one of our semiregular geek parties.
- We can look forward to the Roman Missal on iBooks soon. But will the priest process down the center aisle holding an iPad over his head?
- I’ve been testing Windows-based EPub-capable reader apps for the last week or so, and guess what: They all suck. Bigtime. Why is it so hard to render reflowable documents that are basically HTML-in-a-sack?
- If you’ve seen The Music Man as often as I have, you’ll remember how there’s trouble in River City, because the kids are memorizing jokes out of Captain Billy’s Whizbang. Well, I’d long thought that Meredith Willson had made it up, but not so: I found a scan of a 1921 issue of Captain Billy’s Whizbang (which is now in the public domain) and put it up in my pub directory so you can see it too. (Note: It’s a 15 MB .cbr.) My reaction? It’s not very funny, but in a world without Lileks, I guess people laughed at whatever they had on hand.
- Ok, there’s a little profanity in it (like that’s unusual in Slashdot comments?) but damn, I like this one.
Atlantis and the EPub Toolchain
You’ve heard me say this before, and I suspect you’ll hear it again and again: Creating ebook files is much harder than it needs to be, and creating ebooks in the EPub format is particularly–and inexplicably–hard. In my June 9, 2010 entry, I spoke about the EPub format itself, and how it’s not a great deal different from a word processor file format. In fact, Eric Bowersox pointed out that OpenOffice’s ODF files are also based on XML and organized in a similar way.
Bogglingly, most people appear to be hand-coding EPub XML. In recent days I’ve been looking for better ways to create EPub ebooks. Many places online cite Sigil as the only WYSIWYG EPub editor in existence right now, and I grabbed it immediately. It’s a very nice item, but appears to be an undergraduate’s Google Code project, and I certainly hope he will hand it off to others if he ever gets tired of hammering on it. Version 0.2.1 has just been released, and it fixes a number of bugs that I stumbled over in the last couple of weeks that I’ve been using it.
Then, yesterday, without any need for ancient maps or Edgar Cayce, I found Atlantis.
The Atlantis word processor is a $35 shareware item created by a very small company in France. It’s portable software, meaning it can live on a thumb drive and does not have to be installed in the usual fashion. It’s tiny; nay, microscopic (the executable is 1.1 MB!!) and lightning fast. It doesn’t have all the fancy eye candy of modern software, but it’s amazingly capable, and highly focused on the core mission of getting documents down and formatted. It has a spellchecker and other interesting features like an “over-used words” detector. It reads and writes .doc, .docx, and .odt (ODF) files, and here’s the wild part: It exports to EPub.
Furthermore, it does a mighty good job of it. I loaded a .doc of my story “Whale Meat” into Atlantis and then exported it to EPub. The generated EPub file passed the very fussy EPubCheck validator immediately with flying colors. Now, this was pure text, without any images or embedded fonts or other fanciness, but that’s ok. You have to start somewhere, and I would prefer to start with a genuine word processor.
I then loaded the EPub file that Atlantis had generated into Sigil, which I used to divide the story into chapters and add a cover image. Sigil isn’t really a word processor in the same sense that Atlantis or Word are, but it allows split-screen editing of WYSIWYG text on one side and XML/XHTML code on the other. Sigil 0.2.0 had a bug that generated an incomplete and thus illegal IMG tag (XHTML requires the ALT attribute) but I see that the new 0.2.1 release fixes that. Adding the ALT attribute manually in Sigil 0.2.0 allowed the EPub file to pass EPubcheck without further errors.
I have not yet generated a TOC in Sigil, nor have I attempted to create an EPub of any significant size. (“Whale Meat” is only 8,700 words long.) When I’m through playing around, I’m going to load the entire .doc image of Cold Hands and Other Stories into Atlantis, export it to EPub, semanticize it in Sigil, and see what I have. At some point along the way I may be forced to hand-code (or at least hand-correct) the XML or XHTML, and you’ll hear me bellyache about it when I do. But I will admit that I’m pleased with what I have so far. Yes, Atlantis and Sigil ought to be one product, or at least two closely-knit utilities in the same product family. Still, given the primitive state of the EPub reader business (I have yet to find a Windows or Linux-based EPub reader that I’m willing to use) I’m satisfied with the way that Atlantis and Sigil cooperate. Now that Apple has anointed the EPub format for iBooks, I’m guessing that EPub-related improvements will be arriving thick and fast in coming months.
Review: The Ineo Toaster Dock
I have a 320 GB SATA drive that got corrupted when power dropped during a thunderstorm. I lost nothing in terms of data (I do backups well here) but now I have this naked drive in the drawer. I want to go through it and make sure there’s nothing worth taking from it that wasn’t in my backups, and then low-level reformat it and see if it could again be of use.
This is something that most of us do from time to time. I have a small pile of hard drives downstairs on my shelves, pulled from defunct machines before they went to the recycler. A couple of the older ones (1.6 GB anyone?) I treated with one-clunk degunking (in which that single clunk is applied out on one of the flatter boulders behind the house, with a five-pound sledge) but there are some that are still large enough to be useful.
Ordinarily I stick them inside a system to examine and reformat them, but most of the systems in the house are now USFF Dells, and don’t have an “inside” as we define insides. My current Antec desktop tower, as nice as it is in some ways, is miserable to open up. I used to use my old Antec and just left the covers off, but then the mobo died, making it junk. It would be damned fine to have an easy way to connect the occasional drive to a system to work with it, without having to fuss with Metric screws and cables and covers.
One solution is shown above and (top view) at left: The Ineo I-NA317U+ “toaster” dock. It’s a USB 3.0 device (which works at reduced speed at a USB 2.0 port) with a spring-loaded hatch on the top. You drop a SATA hard drive into the hatch and shove it down until the drive data and power connectors mate with those in the dock. That’s it. The drive then appears as a USB storage device to Windows and Linux without any additional fuss or installing of drivers. The hatch has a notch in the connector corner sized to fit a 2.5″ laptop SATA drive. When you drop in a 2.5″ drive, the hatch doesn’t push down and away, but acts as a positioning guide. The SATA connectors are physically identical irrespective of the size of the drive, and located on the drive end plates so that the dimensions from the corner of the drives are the same on both 3.5″ and 2.5″ drives.
The dock requires a separate wall-wart power supply; there’s not enough power available from a typical USB connector to run both the drive and the dock. (USB 3.0 is more power hungry than 2.0, evidently.) The cable is also different from the conventional USB 2.0 model, and relatively short, at 3′. SATA drives are hot-swappable, and you don’t have to power-down the dock or the system to change drives in the dock. Just do the usual USB unmount, and you can then pull the drive up and out of the dock without damage.
The Ineo device worked flawlessly the first time. It’s SATA only, and I have begun looking for something similar for ordinary parallel ATA drives. I know that ATA drives aren’t hot swappable, so I may be forced to use an ordinary external USB enclosure and just not screw the top back on, but I can live with that. SATA is the future, and as I migrate away from ATA-equipped SX270 USFF machines to SATA-equipped SX280s the Ineo dock will become more and more generally useful.
About $50. (Mine came from Amazon.) Highly recommended.
