Binary Elysium

[stextbox id="info"]Update: 2009.12.20. New version of installer released with major bugfixes.[/stextbox]
Blurb Booksmart is a book layouting application from Blurb Inc. that enables budding authors to create books using their own text and images. Think of it as a highly specialized Adobe Illustrator or Microsoft Publisher. After creating your book in the software, you upload it to Blurb’s website where you can then order printed copies of the book.

Officially, Blurb supports Booksmart only on Windows and Mac, however it is a generic Java application, and as such can easily be ran on Linux – with some finagling. You could try and run it through wine, but the layer of emulated Windows on top of the Java makes for an annoyingly sluggish experience. To make it easier for others, I’ve created a little script that will automatically download, convert, and install Booksmart in Linux.

[stextbox id="info"]Note: While, the following instructions are Ubuntu specific, a determined other-distro user could replace the apt calls in the script with calls to the appropriate package management tool.[/stextbox]

[stextbox id="download" big="true"]
Blurb Booksmart Installer
Author: Ramblurr, version: 0.2, updated: December 12, 2009,
Requires Java Version 1.6 or higher, Ubuntu Linux.[download id="1"][/stextbox]

Setting up the Location

After downloading the package, open up a terminal, and then extract the contents of the tarball.

tar zxf Blurb_Booksmart_Installer-0.2.tar.gz

Change to the directory where you want booksmart installed, and copy install.sh to that location.

Example:
cd /home/username/bin/
cp /path/to/Blurb_Booksmart_Installer/install.sh .

Run the Installer

With the terminal still open to the location where you want booksmart installed, execute the install script. Don’t forget to give it executable permissions first.

chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh

It will download all the necessary files to install booksmart 2.5.1. The process might take awhile on a slow internet connection.

Edit the launcher script

Once the script has finished executing, Booksmart should be installed in the current directory. You’ll need to edit the launcher script, so it knows where Booksmart is. The launcher script is booksmart.sh in the tarball.

Open it in an editor and edit the second line to point to the directory you created in step slash booksmart.

Example: BOOKSMART_PATH=/home/username/bin/booksmart

You can put this launcher script anywhere and use it to start bookmark. Don’t forget to give it executable permissions.

By default, Booksmart saves its data in $HOME/My Documents if you don’t like this you can change it by opening Booksmart and running File > Change Data Location.

Booksmart running in Kubuntu

I’m writing this post from my G1 (thanks to the PostBot wordpress application) in Cairo, Egypt using Vodafone Egypt’s 3G service.

Before coming over I was told (by T-mobile) that my phone absolutely would not work, because the G1 only works with the “google network” that T-Mobile has exclusive access to. Without this “google network”, I was told, my phone wouldn’t turn on and was essentially a paper weight (exact words). Yeah right.

I convinced the customer service representative to give me my unlock code (which you are entitled to after 90 days of service), and told her I didn’t want the outrageous international plan (15$/megabyte). Note: it takes 1 or 2 days for the unlock code request to be processed and emailed to you.

Getting my G1 working in Egypt was quite simple. I bought a prepaid sim card from one of the Vodafone shops you’ll find on every street (literally) for 45 L.E. (approx. $6) and a 100 L.E. (approx $17) card for 100 minutes.

After putting the simcard in and powering up the phone, I was greeted with an unlock dialog into which I entered the T-Mobile unlock code. Poof! Instant cellular access. 3G service was slightly more complicated. You have to add a new APN in the mobile network settings.

Instructions for adding the Vodafone Egypt APN

1. Open Settings > Wireless Controls > Mobile Networks > Access Point Names
2. Click Menu > Add APN
3. Enter the following information
   Name: Vodafone Internet
   APN: internet.vodafone.net
   User: internet
   Pass: internet
   APN type: default
4. Leave every other field at the default setting
5. Reboot the phone
6. Enjoy 3G service

My hands are cramping from writing this post on the tiny keyboard. Pardon any spelling/grammar mistakes. My hands are done.

Last week I mentioned a secret project involving Last.fm. Well today it was finally announced! Since late last November I, and several other open source android developers, have been working together with the official last.fm developers on an Android application that would leverage the full suite of Last.fm features. Today this app was officially released to the Android Market.

Not only does the application bring the full power of last.fm radio to the Android platform, but it also demonstrates the power of open source development in a commercial setting. When last.fm expressed interest around late November in developing an android application to be featured in the Marketplace, Google responded with an enthusiastic thumbs up but included a deadline of mid-January. A month and a half is an incredibly short turnaround time for a fully featured mobile application.

Last.fm contacted several 3rd-party developers who had already began work on their own last.fm android clients, and suggested that we work together and pool our resources. You can take a peek at the results below. I am proud of our product after such a short development cycle, even though there exist several outstanding bugs at launch time. We already have a slew of bug-fixes and feature additions in the tubes for another release.

Keep an eye out for posts announcing the opening of the site where the source code can be found, as well as bugs and feature requests submitted. Due to licensing issues the source code repository and issue tracker will be delayed several days.

(click for full image)

The “conference” ended yesterday as the final presentations were given, however we still have 4 days left here among the sunny beaches. Today Till Adam gave a fantastic lecture-slash-hands-on-workshop of Qt’s Model/View and plugin architecture. Just a couple weeks ago I was slamming my head against the desk trying to wrap my head around Qt’s M/V concepts, the results of which can be seen in Amarok’s new last.fm service browser. Through the creative use of roleplaying (thanks Ade, Jeff, Sebas, and Leo!) and two helpful hands-on exercises I’ve finally gotten a decent grasp of the system. Tomorrow morning we hope to sip QtConcurrent knowledge from the cup that is Till.

I’d write more, but the ocean is calling and I still need to get a Pina Colada. But before I go, check out some photos from the past couple days.

Earlier this summer I had noticed that National Public Radio (NPR) launched a brand new open API based on open source technologies. My initial reaction was at best skeptical. I assumed any sort of “API” released by a major media outlet would turn out to be nothing more than a few customizable RSS feeds. If the company was particularly progressive the RSS feeds might include full articles, rather than the neutered one-sentence teasers you find in all the big name’s syndicated content.

I couldn’t have been more mistaken. NPR’s API is no small potatoes. Just take a look at the comprehensive Query Generator to get an inkling of the types of complex queries you can create. Looking at the Query Generator also sheds some light on the content you can retrieve using the API. The API’s main page says the API exposes the entire NPR archive of content starting from the launch of the NPR website in 1995. Just how big is this archive? Over 250,000 stories including text, images, video, and audio!

This quote from the article announcing the API caught my eye immediately:

There were quite a few questions that we addressed when developing the API, but one thing that was not really in question was the need to open as much of our content as possible.¹

This isn’t the first open media API. BBC was the first to offer a public open access API, however BBC’s API is restricted to the content from the past 7-days. Seven days! That’s nothing compared to the (approx.) 4748 days – and counting – that NPR’s API offers. NPR and the BBC are two large companies leading the technological shift towards open and free information.

But that’s only half the story.

After discovering this fantastic API I had to do something with it, and the new service architecture in Amarok 2 provided the perfect platform to build a NPR mashup. That was several months ago, and at the time the scripting API in Amarok was still being flesh out (Thanks to Peter). On Monday I noticed the BBC scriptable service Nikolaj had created for Amarok 2. I happened to have several hours of free time, so I cooked up a similar service for NPR:

You can get it at kde-apps or via the “Get More Scripts” button in Amarok 2′s Script Manager.

There is definitely room for improvement and in fact here are a few things I plan to do with it:

• Display more than 20 stories under a category
• Sort content by date
• Support searching
• Display the full articles, with images, in the context view

Major props and thanks go out to the entire NPR technical team and all the contributors who made API a reality.

1. NPR API is Live on NPR.org [↩]