From tristil at gmail.com  Sun Mar  4 13:09:41 2007
From: tristil at gmail.com (Joseph Method)
Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2007 13:09:41 -0500
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Ghost books
Message-ID: <167b6aa00703041009s1622b464p42d619686315ad6b@mail.gmail.com>

I need some help with this one, plus I suspect that it has something
to do with the ean stuff and not the !str:Amazon::Search::Response
string removal code I've been playing with, as I thought.

I get a bunch of ghost books in the display. They behave like blank
space when you click for context, and they display a different isbn
than the canonical one stored in the yaml.

As I suggested in the commit message, please back up your libraries
until this is solved.Sorry for the irregularity but this has been
stumping me for a while and blocking further development.

-- 
-J. Method

From tristil at gmail.com  Mon Mar  5 09:33:31 2007
From: tristil at gmail.com (Joseph Method)
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 09:33:31 -0500
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Ghost books
In-Reply-To: <167b6aa00703041009s1622b464p42d619686315ad6b@mail.gmail.com>
References: <167b6aa00703041009s1622b464p42d619686315ad6b@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <167b6aa00703050633j1410c3c3o93e0219f0b3b35ae@mail.gmail.com>

Update:

The way I'm dealing with this is by attempting to coerce all the isbns
into ean at library load. The books that don't make it get put into an
array called ruined_books, and if there are ruined books are displayed
in a message dialog at program start saying that Alexandria will
attempt to replace those books with valid isbns or else make them into
manual books. A thread starts up that processes the old books/isbns
and tries to make sense of them. So the remaining work is to actually
fulfill this offer of replacing the bad isbns.

My theory about why there are ghost books is this: the mystery string
masked the outdated isbns, and Amazon has since moved to ean, so it no
longer references them. Something like this.

On 3/4/07, Joseph Method <tristil at gmail.com> wrote:
> I need some help with this one, plus I suspect that it has something
> to do with the ean stuff and not the !str:Amazon::Search::Response
> string removal code I've been playing with, as I thought.
>
> I get a bunch of ghost books in the display. They behave like blank
> space when you click for context, and they display a different isbn
> than the canonical one stored in the yaml.
>
> As I suggested in the commit message, please back up your libraries
> until this is solved.Sorry for the irregularity but this has been
> stumping me for a while and blocking further development.
>
> --
> -J. Method
>


-- 
-J. Method

From tristil at gmail.com  Tue Mar 27 23:59:31 2007
From: tristil at gmail.com (Joseph Method)
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 23:59:31 -0400
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Update
Message-ID: <167b6aa00703272059x1222277dj9031973cf190e7dc@mail.gmail.com>

Just an update: I'm still with the project and plan to commit more
work soon, especially sometime this weekend. The last couple weekends
have been occupied by obligations and sickness, sorry. Marco
Costantini, on the other hand, has been working steadily on book
providers and library exporting. Thanks, Marco!

Out of curiosity, does anyone other than Marco and I read this list?
-- 
-J. Method

From waldner at waldner.priv.at  Wed Mar 28 01:04:44 2007
From: waldner at waldner.priv.at (Robert Waldner)
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 07:04:44 +0200
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Update
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 27 Mar 2007 23:59:31 EDT."
	<167b6aa00703272059x1222277dj9031973cf190e7dc@mail.gmail.com> 
References: <167b6aa00703272059x1222277dj9031973cf190e7dc@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20070328050448.59F6D1C0B5@fsck.waldner.priv.at>


On Tue, 27 Mar 2007 23:59:31 EDT, "Joseph Method" writes:
>Out of curiosity, does anyone other than Marco and I read this list?

Yes ;) - and at least I have another 50odd books to inventorize, so I 
 can help with testing.

cheers,
&rw
-- 
-- a trainstation is a station where the train stops,
-- therefore a workstation is ...?
-- (origin unknown)


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From olivier.jousselin at solago.com  Wed Mar 28 02:12:56 2007
From: olivier.jousselin at solago.com (Olivier Jousselin)
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 08:12:56 +0200
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Update
In-Reply-To: <167b6aa00703272059x1222277dj9031973cf190e7dc@mail.gmail.com>
References: <167b6aa00703272059x1222277dj9031973cf190e7dc@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <460A0768.1000103@solago.com>

Joseph Method a ?crit :

> Out of curiosity, does anyone other than Marco and I read this list?

	I'm still around as well, even if I never found enough time to actually 
code anything, alas. But I'm testing it, too !

	Thanks for your work, Joseph and others !
-- 
_Olivier Jousselin_    Solago sarl

From vanous at penguin.cz  Wed Mar 28 02:31:21 2007
From: vanous at penguin.cz (Petr Vanek)
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 08:31:21 +0200
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Update
In-Reply-To: <20070328050448.59F6D1C0B5@fsck.waldner.priv.at>
References: <167b6aa00703272059x1222277dj9031973cf190e7dc@mail.gmail.com>
	<20070328050448.59F6D1C0B5@fsck.waldner.priv.at>
Message-ID: <20070328083121.23e7c81c@localhost>

Dne Wed, 28 Mar 2007 07:04:44 +0200
Robert Waldner <waldner at waldner.priv.at> napsal(a):

> 
> On Tue, 27 Mar 2007 23:59:31 EDT, "Joseph Method" writes:
> >Out of curiosity, does anyone other than Marco and I read this list?
> 
> Yes ;) - and at least I have another 50odd books to inventorize, so I 
>  can help with testing.


hey, you aren't alone :) !


-- 
Petr Vanek
http://biodynamika.cz

From lennart at karssen.org  Wed Mar 28 03:28:34 2007
From: lennart at karssen.org (L.C. Karssen)
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 09:28:34 +0200
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Update
In-Reply-To: <167b6aa00703272059x1222277dj9031973cf190e7dc@mail.gmail.com>
References: <167b6aa00703272059x1222277dj9031973cf190e7dc@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1175066914.6273.8.camel@barabas.karssen.org>

On Tue, 2007-03-27 at 23:59 -0400, Joseph Method wrote:
> Out of curiosity, does anyone other than Marco and I read this list?

Yes! However I'm in the process of finishing my PhD, so I can't really
help out.


Lennart.

-- 
----------------------------------------------------
L.C. Karssen
Utrecht
The Netherlands
---------------------------------------------------
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From alexandria at pebble.org.uk  Wed Mar 28 03:22:12 2007
From: alexandria at pebble.org.uk (Marble)
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 08:22:12 +0100
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Update
In-Reply-To: <167b6aa00703272059x1222277dj9031973cf190e7dc@mail.gmail.com>
References: <167b6aa00703272059x1222277dj9031973cf190e7dc@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20070328072212.GA11925@snowplains.org>

On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 11:59:31PM -0400, Joseph Method wrote:
> Out of curiosity, does anyone other than Marco and I read this list?

I do. I'm a newish user, with just over 150 books in my collection. I'd
have posted earlier, only I wasn't sure if the list was subscribed
properly, then I forgot about it ;)

~Marble.

From slamboy at gmail.com  Wed Mar 28 06:26:00 2007
From: slamboy at gmail.com (Jason Mayer)
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 05:26:00 -0500
Subject: [Alexandria-list]  Update
In-Reply-To: <5ae8cc980703280325k3916effcsc2492fadc361bece@mail.gmail.com>
References: <167b6aa00703272059x1222277dj9031973cf190e7dc@mail.gmail.com>
	<20070328072212.GA11925@snowplains.org>
	<5ae8cc980703280325k3916effcsc2492fadc361bece@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <5ae8cc980703280326q28551dfl39573c40b825edc6@mail.gmail.com>

Yes, but I'm also in the "school is taking up too much of my time" boat.  I
plan on doing some coding this summer.

On 3/28/07, Marble < alexandria at pebble.org.uk> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 11:59:31PM -0400, Joseph Method wrote:
> > Out of curiosity, does anyone other than Marco and I read this list?
>
> I do. I'm a newish user, with just over 150 books in my collection. I'd
> have posted earlier, only I wasn't sure if the list was subscribed
> properly, then I forgot about it ;)
>
> ~Marble.
> _______________________________________________
> Alexandria-list mailing list
> Alexandria-list at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/alexandria-list
>
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From qibhom at wideopenwest.com  Wed Mar 28 08:58:09 2007
From: qibhom at wideopenwest.com (Lissa)
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 08:58:09 -0400
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Update
In-Reply-To: <167b6aa00703272059x1222277dj9031973cf190e7dc@mail.gmail.com>
References: <167b6aa00703272059x1222277dj9031973cf190e7dc@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <460A6661.20109@wideopenwest.com>


on 03/27/2007 11:59 PM Joseph Method said the following:

> Out of curiosity, does anyone other than Marco and I read this list?

Yes.

(I'm no programmer, but I'm a librarian, and I really want to be able to 
use Alexandria at home, with my cue cats. I lurk to find out about new 
versions, but fear I'm useless.)

Be well,
Lissa

-- 

If television's a babysitter, the Internet's a drunk librarian who won't 
shut up.

Cat and Girl, http://catandgirl.com/view.php?loc=282

From tristil at gmail.com  Wed Mar 28 16:52:42 2007
From: tristil at gmail.com (Joseph Method)
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 16:52:42 -0400
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Contributing
Message-ID: <167b6aa00703281352q16b4d66fs6c29ad942a293b9e@mail.gmail.com>

Wow. I'm really surprised by all the responses. I really thought
everyone had just drifted off.

I'm obviously very sympathetic to the problem of simply not having
enough time to help, but it looks like some people aren't sure of how
to help. So let me ask (and don't worry, there are no commitments if
you answer yes):

Is there anyone who:

 - Is skilled at web development (especially Ruby on Rails) or just
web page design?
 - Is comfortable with C# (Mono/.NET) or Python but not Ruby?
 - Would like to work on developing a standalone application (in Ruby
or another language) that inter-operates with the Alexandria library
data files?
 - Would like access to the bug tracker to triage bugs (and especially
feature requests)?

If so, there is a possible role for you.

As always, anybody who would like developer access to the svn
repository please send me your Rubyforge username and I'll give it to
you. Also, anyone who is interested in helping is free to contact me
by IM (jabber) at my email address.
-- 
-J. Method

From tristil at gmail.com  Thu Mar 29 09:40:00 2007
From: tristil at gmail.com (Joseph Method)
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 09:40:00 -0400
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Contributing
In-Reply-To: <5ae8cc980703290449j26d01f0foc0ba62f64faff880@mail.gmail.com>
References: <167b6aa00703281352q16b4d66fs6c29ad942a293b9e@mail.gmail.com>
	<5ae8cc980703290449j26d01f0foc0ba62f64faff880@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <167b6aa00703290640uf8a9829w429202297982eb1a@mail.gmail.com>

[This is in response to a message Jason Mayer sent me]

I was holding off on describing what my ideas for Alexandria's needs
are because I wanted to get a pure bugfix release out first. I'll send
that post to the mailing list soon.  Basically, Alexandria itself in
the short term needs to handle data migration (moving books en masse
over to the new 13-digit isbns) in a way that preserves cover images
and doesn't destroy people's libraries, and provide for a migration
path for future versions. In the long term, we need to change to a
sqlite database backend and do major code re-factoring (for example,
code needs to get out of main_app.MainApp.initialize). Then we should
focus on taking functionality *out* of Alexandria and putting it into
standalone targeted applications that operate on a common database. We
should also work to make Alexandria's data accessible and useful in
other applications, like Tomboy and beagle/deskbar-applet. Anyways,
that's just my idea, and I'll expand on the details later.

[Jason's message snipped]
-- 
-J. Method

From steven.knight at unh.edu  Thu Mar 29 18:30:26 2007
From: steven.knight at unh.edu (Steven Knight)
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:30:26 -0400
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Contributing
In-Reply-To: <167b6aa00703281352q16b4d66fs6c29ad942a293b9e@mail.gmail.com>
References: <167b6aa00703281352q16b4d66fs6c29ad942a293b9e@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1175207426.13152.13.camel@skk.ath.cx>

On Wed, 2007-03-28 at 16:52 -0400, Joseph Method wrote:
>  - Is skilled at web development (especially Ruby on Rails) or just
> web page design? 


Hello,

I've done a bit of web page re-design work on Alexandria web pages.  You
can see the result of my work here:  

  http://zathras.sr.unh.edu/alexandria/

At this point I've simply updated the look and free; no content changes
have been made.

Is this something this project would be interested in using?  Let me
know.

Thanks,

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven Knight  steven.knight at unh.edu

and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

-- Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------



From tristil at gmail.com  Thu Mar 29 23:45:41 2007
From: tristil at gmail.com (Joseph Method)
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 23:45:41 -0400
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Contributing
In-Reply-To: <1175207426.13152.13.camel@skk.ath.cx>
References: <167b6aa00703281352q16b4d66fs6c29ad942a293b9e@mail.gmail.com>
	<1175207426.13152.13.camel@skk.ath.cx>
Message-ID: <167b6aa00703292045h2ecd4aadnbdcec67e34600baf@mail.gmail.com>

Steven, this is great. It's a small but effective change that does a
much better job of presenting Alexandria. We can go with these changes
right away, and improve upon them. If you like, you could make the
changes directly to the svn with a developer account.

On 3/29/07, Steven Knight <steven.knight at unh.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-03-28 at 16:52 -0400, Joseph Method wrote:
> >  - Is skilled at web development (especially Ruby on Rails) or just
> > web page design?
>
>
> Hello,
>
> I've done a bit of web page re-design work on Alexandria web pages.  You
> can see the result of my work here:
>
>   http://zathras.sr.unh.edu/alexandria/
>
> At this point I've simply updated the look and free; no content changes
> have been made.
>
> Is this something this project would be interested in using?  Let me
> know.
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Steven Knight  steven.knight at unh.edu
>
> and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days
> Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
> One equal temper of heroic hearts,
> Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
> To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
>
> -- Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Alexandria-list mailing list
> Alexandria-list at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/alexandria-list
>


-- 
-J. Method

From unapersson at linuxmail.org  Fri Mar 30 02:15:38 2007
From: unapersson at linuxmail.org (Ian Davey)
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 07:15:38 +0100
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Contributing
In-Reply-To: <167b6aa00703290640uf8a9829w429202297982eb1a@mail.gmail.com>
References: <167b6aa00703281352q16b4d66fs6c29ad942a293b9e@mail.gmail.com>	<5ae8cc980703290449j26d01f0foc0ba62f64faff880@mail.gmail.com>
	<167b6aa00703290640uf8a9829w429202297982eb1a@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <460CAB0A.7070307@linuxmail.org>

Joseph Method wrote:
> [This is in response to a message Jason Mayer sent me]
>
> I was holding off on describing what my ideas for Alexandria's needs
> are because I wanted to get a pure bugfix release out first. I'll send
> that post to the mailing list soon.  Basically, Alexandria itself in
> the short term needs to handle data migration (moving books en masse
> over to the new 13-digit isbns) in a way that preserves cover images
> and doesn't destroy people's libraries, and provide for a migration
> path for future versions. In the long term, we need to change to a
> sqlite database backend and do major code re-factoring (for example,
> code needs to get out of main_app.MainApp.initialize). Then we should
> focus on taking functionality *out* of Alexandria and putting it into
> standalone targeted applications that operate on a common database. We
> should also work to make Alexandria's data accessible and useful in
> other applications, like Tomboy and beagle/deskbar-applet. Anyways,
> that's just my idea, and I'll expand on the details later.
>
> [Jason's message snipped]
>   
That all sounds good to me. I have done a bit of hacking on Alexandria 
in the past, trying to add some of the features I was interested in, but 
I'm sure they've bitrotted a bit. Some of the bits I added to my own 
copy were:

Page Count, Read Dates, Read/Unread status
Export to SQLLite
Forcing images to a particular width when importing/displaying them

The last two because I was trying to find out why my 1000+ book library 
was taking so long to load. I thought it might be the back end that was 
making it slow, but in the end that turned out pretty fast, the actual 
cause of the slowness was the displaying of the covers and needing to 
resize each one on import. So I was hoping to get a large size/thumbnail 
image into SQLLite and load it from there.

I also wanted to look at some kind of lazy loading but at the time the 
version of Ruby I was using didn't seem to implement some of the GTK 
features I needed to use.

ian.

From lennart at karssen.org  Fri Mar 30 04:59:11 2007
From: lennart at karssen.org (L.C. Karssen)
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 10:59:11 +0200
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Contributing
In-Reply-To: <1175207426.13152.13.camel@skk.ath.cx>
References: <167b6aa00703281352q16b4d66fs6c29ad942a293b9e@mail.gmail.com>
	<1175207426.13152.13.camel@skk.ath.cx>
Message-ID: <1175245151.25874.2.camel@rubidium01>

On Thu, 2007-03-29 at 18:30 -0400, Steven Knight wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I've done a bit of web page re-design work on Alexandria web pages.  You
> can see the result of my work here:  
> 
>   http://zathras.sr.unh.edu/alexandria/
> 
> At this point I've simply updated the look and free; no content changes
> have been made.
> 
> Is this something this project would be interested in using?  Let me
> know.

It looks great. A simple but effective change. 
One note: The tab "Feature" should be "Features", right?


Lennart.

> 
> Thanks,
> 
-- 
----------------------------------------------------
L.C. Karssen
Utrecht
The Netherlands
----------------------------------------------------
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From tristil at gmail.com  Fri Mar 30 09:08:21 2007
From: tristil at gmail.com (Joseph Method)
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 09:08:21 -0400
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Contributing
In-Reply-To: <460CAB0A.7070307@linuxmail.org>
References: <167b6aa00703281352q16b4d66fs6c29ad942a293b9e@mail.gmail.com>
	<5ae8cc980703290449j26d01f0foc0ba62f64faff880@mail.gmail.com>
	<167b6aa00703290640uf8a9829w429202297982eb1a@mail.gmail.com>
	<460CAB0A.7070307@linuxmail.org>
Message-ID: <167b6aa00703300608v13fc7a2bubd9021d72e0f0ca0@mail.gmail.com>

Wow. Ian, it sounds like you understand the database issue well enough
that if you wanted to you could "own" it and the solution. I wanted
the sqlite backend for the same reason, the load times are
unacceptably long. If it's the images, then maybe sqlite is
unnecessary. Did your solution work to improve load times?

On 3/30/07, Ian Davey <unapersson at linuxmail.org> wrote:
> Joseph Method wrote:
> > [This is in response to a message Jason Mayer sent me]
> >
> > I was holding off on describing what my ideas for Alexandria's needs
> > are because I wanted to get a pure bugfix release out first. I'll send
> > that post to the mailing list soon.  Basically, Alexandria itself in
> > the short term needs to handle data migration (moving books en masse
> > over to the new 13-digit isbns) in a way that preserves cover images
> > and doesn't destroy people's libraries, and provide for a migration
> > path for future versions. In the long term, we need to change to a
> > sqlite database backend and do major code re-factoring (for example,
> > code needs to get out of main_app.MainApp.initialize). Then we should
> > focus on taking functionality *out* of Alexandria and putting it into
> > standalone targeted applications that operate on a common database. We
> > should also work to make Alexandria's data accessible and useful in
> > other applications, like Tomboy and beagle/deskbar-applet. Anyways,
> > that's just my idea, and I'll expand on the details later.
> >
> > [Jason's message snipped]
> >
> That all sounds good to me. I have done a bit of hacking on Alexandria
> in the past, trying to add some of the features I was interested in, but
> I'm sure they've bitrotted a bit. Some of the bits I added to my own
> copy were:
>
> Page Count, Read Dates, Read/Unread status
> Export to SQLLite
> Forcing images to a particular width when importing/displaying them
>
> The last two because I was trying to find out why my 1000+ book library
> was taking so long to load. I thought it might be the back end that was
> making it slow, but in the end that turned out pretty fast, the actual
> cause of the slowness was the displaying of the covers and needing to
> resize each one on import. So I was hoping to get a large size/thumbnail
> image into SQLLite and load it from there.
>
> I also wanted to look at some kind of lazy loading but at the time the
> version of Ruby I was using didn't seem to implement some of the GTK
> features I needed to use.
>
> ian.
> _______________________________________________
> Alexandria-list mailing list
> Alexandria-list at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/alexandria-list
>


-- 
-J. Method

From costanti at science.unitn.it  Fri Mar 30 09:55:03 2007
From: costanti at science.unitn.it (costanti at science.unitn.it)
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 15:55:03 +0200
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Contributing
In-Reply-To: <167b6aa00703290640uf8a9829w429202297982eb1a@mail.gmail.com>
References: <167b6aa00703281352q16b4d66fs6c29ad942a293b9e@mail.gmail.com>
	<5ae8cc980703290449j26d01f0foc0ba62f64faff880@mail.gmail.com>
	<167b6aa00703290640uf8a9829w429202297982eb1a@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1175262903.460d16b77d389@www.unitn.it>

Dear all

Joseph Method <tristil at gmail.com> wrote:

> I was holding off on describing what my ideas for Alexandria's needs
> are because I wanted to get a pure bugfix release out first.

I think that the main problem to solve before releasing is the problem with
charset encoding, and after having fixed that, Alexandria 0.7 can be released;
however, I invite everyone to have a look at the bugs at
http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?atid=863&group_id=205&func=browse , and try to
fix them. There is for instance [#9666], an harmless problem, which may be
confusing for the new user.

Now Alexandria uses internally only UTF-8, however, if a user has, in the
~/.alexandria directory, some data saved by a previous version of Alexandria,
there may be strings with a different encoding, which cause Alexandria to crash
when a book is manually entered or modified, because it tries to provide
autocompletion.
In order to solve this problem, I propose the following.

* Use the ruby function GLib.UTF8_Validate , see
http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/hiki.cgi?GLib%3A%3AUTF8 to check whether the
existing  strings are valid UTF-8 strings. Otherwise, the strings should
considered ISO-8859-1 (which is the most used by the books providers) and
converted to UTF-8.

* Make the autocompletion optional, by adding among the options, the one that
enables autocompletion.

* Add a version number in the ~/.alexandria/*/*.yaml files, I mean something
like

creator: "Alexandria"
version: "7.0"

Thereafter, Alexandria can check whether the data was saved by an older version,
and perform the check only in that case.
Also the "creator" may be useful, because Tellico too, or another program, can
export its data to Alexandria format.
By the way, I wrote about the encoding of the ~/.alexandria/*/*.yaml files to
Robby Stephenson, the author of Tellico, a program similar to Alexandria that
can import the Alexandria data. He asked me:

 "Would it be feasible to add some sort of version string in each data file?
 That way, you could easily check to see if the file was written by an old
 version of Alexandria, and deal accordingly."

See also http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html#id2879112
about having a version number in the files.

> I'll send
> that post to the mailing list soon.  Basically, Alexandria itself in
> the short term needs to handle data migration (moving books en masse
> over to the new 13-digit isbns) in a way that preserves cover images
> and doesn't destroy people's libraries, and provide for a migration
> path for future versions.

For that, it is necessary to manually check each occurrence of
Library.canonicalise_isbn and in case replace it with Library.canonicalise_ean.
There are some other problems, for instance, when exporting to ONIX, the XML
output contains the ISBN-13 in the ISBN field, which doesn't conform to the
ONIX standard (see Feature request [#862]).


> In the long term, we need to change to a
> sqlite database backend and do major code re-factoring (for example,
> code needs to get out of main_app.MainApp.initialize). Then we should
> focus on taking functionality *out* of Alexandria and putting it into
> standalone targeted applications that operate on a common database. We
> should also work to make Alexandria's data accessible and useful in
> other applications, like Tomboy and beagle/deskbar-applet. Anyways,
> that's just my idea, and I'll expand on the details later.

In my opinion, changing to sqlite is not so necessary nor urgent; consider also
that the Yaml format is easy, simple, textual, and already works well. See also
"The Importance of Being Textual" at
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch05s01.html . Requiring Sqlite is
another dependency.


The main task in the long term is, in my opinion, to separate the core from the
graphical user interface (GUI), which is probably the same idea behind "code
needs to get out of main_app.MainApp.initialize".

There should be a core as a standalone library, which handles getting the data
from the providers, saving it in yaml or sqlite, and so on.
Then this library can be accessed by the GUI, or by a command line interface, or
by a web interface, or by scripts or by other programs, such as Tellico or
GCstar. These other programs could then use Alexandria for searching the book
providers.

The attached image should explain this idea; I also strongly encourage to read
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch11s07.html about this. In this
way, the standalone library would not depend on Gnome or Gtk, but will be
available one each machine on which Ruby runs, that is, even on Windows.

Feature request [#1774] asks for a "Web interface: Is there any chance of
creating a web interface, rather than requiring a graphical toolkit?"
See http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch11s08.html about having a web
interface

Alexandria core can be already used by other programs. For instance, the
attached (rudimental) script, which is called as

ruby al.rb 9782213617268

searches the book with ISBN 9782213617268 using the Alexandria providers, and
returns data as a piece of Tellico format. Some work will be required to adapt
the already implemented  code for exporting to Tellico format, and thereafter
Alexandria core can be used by other programs such as Tellico and CGstar,
greatly increasing the number of users of (this part of) Alexandria.

The Alexandria core could even be a Z39.50 server, so that one can let other
people check his/her books.


On the other hand, the Alexandria GUI could access not only the standalone
library, but also other programs.

Bugs item [#4888] asks " I want to ask if I could use the GUI etc. for a own
version using pyAmazon, which I know to work perfectly with all amazon
websites.. Would be a nice project :) ..?"

Among other programs that could be accessed, there is Thokbook. For lists of
possible other programs, see
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.378798.142 and
http://periapsis.org/tellico/ after ALTERNATIVES .

One of these programs, GCstar http://www.gcstar.org/ , can be accessed quickly
and soon. GCstar can already be used as a standalone library, and this command:

gcstar -x -c GCbooks -e Tellico -w Fnac --download  9782213617268

search the book with ISBN 9782213617268 at provider Fnac, and return the data
about in the Tellico format (not compressed). Alexandria can already use the
Tellico format (zipped), hence with some minor modifications in Alexandria we
can get all the book providers already implemented in GCstar. Tellico can
already use GCstar.


After having reorganized the code, having separated the GUI and the core, and
having separated the part that handles the saved data from the rest, it will be
possible and useful to provide alternatives to saving the data as yaml files.

This could be done by letting the user choose among the yaml files (as now),
Sqlite (as Joseph proposes) MySQL (as requested by some users) and so on
(PostgreSQL, Tellico format, ...).

Feature request [#2551] says that "would be nice to have the books stored in a
SQL/MySQL database instead of files."
Feature request [#1099] says: "Another option is to talk to a MySQL DB, but now
I'm just dreaming. :)"

For all these tasks, volunteers are very welcome.

Cheers,
Marco
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From tristil at gmail.com  Fri Mar 30 12:38:46 2007
From: tristil at gmail.com (Joseph Method)
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 12:38:46 -0400
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Marco's Vision
Message-ID: <167b6aa00703300938k63bc634fs671ed8f60c4463dd@mail.gmail.com>

I agree entirely. You laid out everything better than I could have.
This is exactly what we should do, both the steps toward 0.7 and your
proposals for the future.

Just to recap what you said about steps to reach 0.7:

* identify and convert non-UTF-8 strings
* store a version number
* make autocompletion optional

Perfect! Let's do this, and get 0.7 out there (finally!).

As for your proposals for the future, I agree that sqlite or any
particular db technology is not essential. As I wrote to Ian Davey, I
was mainly concerned with the load speed issues, and this is
apparently not related to loading yaml. I agree that separating the
gui from the back-end should be the most important goal for 0.8+. I
think the process itself would result in better refactored code and
the resolution of some deeply ingrained bugs, as well as the
technical/theoretical improvements you write about.

An additional advantage of separating out alexandria-gui and
alexandria-core is that these can be distributed as separate packages.
The situation would be similar to that with Totem, which can be used
as a front-end for either gstreamer or xine. We'll also be able to
write better unittests for both systems.

One consideration that is not essential to your proposal but would
follow from it is that eventually the various book/cd/stuff managers
might want to agree on a single "stuff server" that could run as a
service on startup. This server would have a generalized access
protocol that would abstract from any of the systems and allow them
all to access and alter the same set of objects.

For the record, I would support you if you would like to become the
release manager for 0.7->0.8.

> I think that the main problem to solve before releasing is the problem with
> charset encoding, and after having fixed that, Alexandria 0.7 can be released;
> however, I invite everyone to have a look at the bugs at
> http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?atid=863&group_id=205&func=browse , and try to
> fix them. There is for instance [#9666], an harmless problem, which may be
> confusing for the new user.

> Now Alexandria uses internally only UTF-8, however, if a user has, in the
> ~/.alexandria directory, some data saved by a previous version of Alexandria,
> there may be strings with a different encoding, which cause Alexandria to crash
> when a book is manually entered or modified, because it tries to provide
> autocompletion.
> In order to solve this problem, I propose the following.
>
> * Use the ruby function GLib.UTF8_Validate , see
> http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/hiki.cgi?GLib%3A%3AUTF8 to check whether the
> existing  strings are valid UTF-8 strings. Otherwise, the strings should
> considered ISO-8859-1 (which is the most used by the books providers) and
> converted to UTF-8.
>
> * Make the autocompletion optional, by adding among the options, the one that
> enables autocompletion.
>
> * Add a version number in the ~/.alexandria/*/*.yaml files, I mean something
> like
>
> creator: "Alexandria"
> version: "7.0"
>
> Thereafter, Alexandria can check whether the data was saved by an older version,
> and perform the check only in that case.
> Also the "creator" may be useful, because Tellico too, or another program, can
> export its data to Alexandria format.
> By the way, I wrote about the encoding of the ~/.alexandria/*/*.yaml files to
> Robby Stephenson, the author of Tellico, a program similar to Alexandria that
> can import the Alexandria data. He asked me:
>
>  "Would it be feasible to add some sort of version string in each data file?
>  That way, you could easily check to see if the file was written by an old
>  version of Alexandria, and deal accordingly."
>
> See also http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html#id2879112
> about having a version number in the files.
>
> > I'll send
> > that post to the mailing list soon.  Basically, Alexandria itself in
> > the short term needs to handle data migration (moving books en masse
> > over to the new 13-digit isbns) in a way that preserves cover images
> > and doesn't destroy people's libraries, and provide for a migration
> > path for future versions.
>
> For that, it is necessary to manually check each occurrence of
> Library.canonicalise_isbn and in case replace it with Library.canonicalise_ean.
> There are some other problems, for instance, when exporting to ONIX, the XML
> output contains the ISBN-13 in the ISBN field, which doesn't conform to the
> ONIX standard (see Feature request [#862]).
>
>
> > In the long term, we need to change to a
> > sqlite database backend and do major code re-factoring (for example,
> > code needs to get out of main_app.MainApp.initialize). Then we should
> > focus on taking functionality *out* of Alexandria and putting it into
> > standalone targeted applications that operate on a common database. We
> > should also work to make Alexandria's data accessible and useful in
> > other applications, like Tomboy and beagle/deskbar-applet. Anyways,
> > that's just my idea, and I'll expand on the details later.
>
> In my opinion, changing to sqlite is not so necessary nor urgent; consider also
> that the Yaml format is easy, simple, textual, and already works well. See also
> "The Importance of Being Textual" at
> http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch05s01.html . Requiring Sqlite is
> another dependency.
>
>
> The main task in the long term is, in my opinion, to separate the core from the
> graphical user interface (GUI), which is probably the same idea behind "code
> needs to get out of main_app.MainApp.initialize".
>
> There should be a core as a standalone library, which handles getting the data
> from the providers, saving it in yaml or sqlite, and so on.
> Then this library can be accessed by the GUI, or by a command line interface, or
> by a web interface, or by scripts or by other programs, such as Tellico or
> GCstar. These other programs could then use Alexandria for searching the book
> providers.
>
> The attached image should explain this idea; I also strongly encourage to read
> http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch11s07.html about this. In this
> way, the standalone library would not depend on Gnome or Gtk, but will be
> available one each machine on which Ruby runs, that is, even on Windows.
>
> Feature request [#1774] asks for a "Web interface: Is there any chance of
> creating a web interface, rather than requiring a graphical toolkit?"
> See http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch11s08.html about having a web
> interface
>
> Alexandria core can be already used by other programs. For instance, the
> attached (rudimental) script, which is called as
>
> ruby al.rb 9782213617268
>
> searches the book with ISBN 9782213617268 using the Alexandria providers, and
> returns data as a piece of Tellico format. Some work will be required to adapt
> the already implemented  code for exporting to Tellico format, and thereafter
> Alexandria core can be used by other programs such as Tellico and CGstar,
> greatly increasing the number of users of (this part of) Alexandria.
>
> The Alexandria core could even be a Z39.50 server, so that one can let other
> people check his/her books.
>
>
> On the other hand, the Alexandria GUI could access not only the standalone
> library, but also other programs.
>
> Bugs item [#4888] asks " I want to ask if I could use the GUI etc. for a own
> version using pyAmazon, which I know to work perfectly with all amazon
> websites.. Would be a nice project :) ..?"
>
> Among other programs that could be accessed, there is Thokbook. For lists of
> possible other programs, see
> http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.378798.142 and
> http://periapsis.org/tellico/ after ALTERNATIVES .
>
> One of these programs, GCstar http://www.gcstar.org/ , can be accessed quickly
> and soon. GCstar can already be used as a standalone library, and this command:
>
> gcstar -x -c GCbooks -e Tellico -w Fnac --download  9782213617268
>
> search the book with ISBN 9782213617268 at provider Fnac, and return the data
> about in the Tellico format (not compressed). Alexandria can already use the
> Tellico format (zipped), hence with some minor modifications in Alexandria we
> can get all the book providers already implemented in GCstar. Tellico can
> already use GCstar.
>
>
> After having reorganized the code, having separated the GUI and the core, and
> having separated the part that handles the saved data from the rest, it will be
> possible and useful to provide alternatives to saving the data as yaml files.
>
> This could be done by letting the user choose among the yaml files (as now),
> Sqlite (as Joseph proposes) MySQL (as requested by some users) and so on
> (PostgreSQL, Tellico format, ...).
>
> Feature request [#2551] says that "would be nice to have the books stored in a
> SQL/MySQL database instead of files."
> Feature request [#1099] says: "Another option is to talk to a MySQL DB, but now
> I'm just dreaming. :)"
>
> For all these tasks, volunteers are very welcome.
>
> Cheers,
> Marco
>


-- 
-J. Method

From steven.knight at unh.edu  Fri Mar 30 18:48:26 2007
From: steven.knight at unh.edu (Steven Knight)
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 18:48:26 -0400
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Contributing
In-Reply-To: <1175245151.25874.2.camel@rubidium01>
References: <167b6aa00703281352q16b4d66fs6c29ad942a293b9e@mail.gmail.com>
	<1175207426.13152.13.camel@skk.ath.cx>
	<1175245151.25874.2.camel@rubidium01>
Message-ID: <1175294906.8427.9.camel@skk.ath.cx>

On Fri, 2007-03-30 at 10:59 +0200, L.C. Karssen wrote:
> 
> It looks great. A simple but effective change. 
> One note: The tab "Feature" should be "Features", right?

Hi,

Thanks for noticing this.  I've updated it.
> 
-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven Knight  steven.knight at unh.edu

and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

-- Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------