Linda Octa

Soo what have I been doing lately?

The Fascinator Desktop
The Fascinator 0.3 Desktop was released 3 weeks ago.

Features implemented in The Fascinator 0.3 Desktop can be found in: http://fascinator.usq.edu.au/trac/wiki/tf2/Version0.3.0

P.S: for new features and enhancements request for The Fascinator 0.4 can be found in: http://fascinator.usq.edu.au/trac/wiki/tf2/Planning

So what are the features have been implemented in The Fascinator Desktop so far? I have compiled and created a simple features page for easy browsing: http://fascinator.usq.edu.au/trac/wiki/tf2/DeveloperNotes/Features

Watcher
Together with The Fascinator 0.3 Desktop, we released Watcher Watcher 0.3beta and 0.3pyinotify, http://fascinator.usq.edu.au/trac/wiki/Watcher

In Watcher 0.3beta, we start to support multi platform File system watcher. Ron Ward developed the watcher code in .NET, thus for linux/Mac OS X users, the same code base can be used through mono

For Watcher 0.3pyinotfy, this will be the last release for Linux that use pyinotify. Why we are not using pyinotify anymore? Basically it’s only work in Linux.

Issue found in both version of Watcher-s: file rename/move from a directory to another directory in Linux/Mac OS X is not working properly. This is a known bugs found in mono, https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=418241 as well as pyinotify http://trac.dbzteam.org/pyinotify/ticket/30.

ICE week
Last week is ICE week. Peter Sefton wrote ICE week background on his blog: http://ptsefton.com/2009/11/25/ice-week-background.htm.

My task was generating eBook plugin for ICE package in ePub format based on the manifest items found in the ICE organiser.
Result? The generated eBook can be viewed in Peter’s Android phone as well as my iPhone. During this development, I encounter a usefull tool to check the validity of the epub structure that I created. This tool can be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/epubcheck/

I also successfully implement epub generation in The Fascinator Desktop. This feature will be included in The Fascinator 0.4 release. Some note about epub feature in The Fascinator Desktop: http://fascinator.usq.edu.au/trac/wiki/tf2/DeveloperNotes/Features/eBook

I realise that I have been using a lot of links in this blog entry ==”. But maybe it’s for the best instead of duplicating the documentation that I have written in the wiki page.

Stay tune!!

funbrain

I found a few ebooks downloaded from Internet in .lit extension (Microsoft proprietary ebook format). As a mac user, I can’t open this file. Most of the time in the past, I will just did not bother to download or read the book. But since my favourite books also in this format. I do not have a choice but search for the conversion so I can read from my iPhone.

The converter software for Mac can be downloaded from http://osx.iusethis.com/app/convertlit
Unzip the downloaded file and you can use ./clit command to convert the .lit file. I just extract the lit file in the same directory of the .lit ebook file (or can be extracted to bin folder).

If the ebookFolder not exist, additional “/” is needed after the folder name. Once it’s successfully convert, I can start read the book in html format found in ebookFolder .