Monthly Archives: April 2009

That thing got a HEMI?

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Chrysler has now filed for backruptcy, after a trip or two to the taxpayer bailout trough, and a swilling of a few billion. Today, what should have happened from the git-go finally did.

President Obama predictably railed against some Chrysler investors, who took a huge risk by buying debt in the hapless automaker, and who wanted more than 30 cents on the dollar:

“Some demanded twice the return that other lenders were getting. I don’t stand with them,” Obama said of the hedge funds. “I stand with Chrysler’s employees and their families and communities. I stand with Chrysler’s management, its dealers and its suppliers. I stand with the millions of Americans who own and want to buy Chrysler’s cars.”

This from a man who wants the private sector to get involved. Sheesh.

Anyhow, with Chrysler soon to be in Fiat’s capable hands, Chrysler is sure to rise, phoenix-like. Yeah, right. The Fiat 500 pictured here gives me great hope. It couldn’t hold the corners in Martinsville, let alone on a Bristol, Daytona, or Talladega.

First, fiat money. May as well drive cars with the same name. No, I think I’ll wait for the GM/Yugo team offerings.

-k-

A New Weekend Pastime

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That would be reinstalling calibre. The calibre maintainer is not in the least shy about releasing frequent updates. Considering the number of different readers, operating systems, and ebook formats that he’s supporting, I’m not shocked at this. In fact, it’s encouraging; much better to have a constantly changing and improving product than a lame duck that “kinda works.”

Part of participation in free and open source software, from a user’s perspective, is a willingness to stay current with the product; yes that requires a little effort. If you’re not willing to invest that time, perhaps FOSS isn’t really for you.

So, I’m running the latest calibre, and next weekend, I’ll bake a fresh one, if it gets updated again. The time involved in building a new version is measured in minutes, not days or weeks. This is a negligible price to pay.

-k-

O’Reilly Kindles!

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O’Reilly, purveyors of books for geeks, programmers, and sysadmins, have made available 160 or so Kindle-friendly titles, with a promise of adding more. The Kindle offerings are available sans DRM directly from the Amazon Kindle store.

I bought a couple of cheaper titles in mobi format direct from O’Reilly and uploaded them to the Kindle. I wasn’t pleased with the way the Kindle rendered them, and have been holding off purchasing any more expensive mobi titles. In the release announcing the availability of certain titles direct from Amazon:

…we’d been directing Kindle owners to oreilly.com, where all of our “ebook bundles” include a Kindle-compatible .mobi version that can be uploaded or emailed to your Kindle. While the table and code issues remained, readers at least had the other, richer formats (EPUB and PDF) for reference. We’ve now updated all of the .mobi files for sale at oreilly.com to display properly on Kindle 2 (basically undoing many of the hacks we’d done to get something passable the first time around). If you own a Kindle and have purchased ebooks from oreilly.com, visit oreilly.com/e from the Kindle browser to download the updated .mobi files directly to your Kindle. While we will also update our ebooks with Amazon as changes are made and errors fixed, they currently have no way of updating that content for customers who already purchased it.

Outstanding! Thanks, O’Reilly! Such after the sale service and commitment is a rarity.

-k-

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I Didn’t Realize I Should be so Thankful

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MLB continues to mend from her recent surgery/hospitalization. The incision wound no longer requires its twice-daily irrigation and dressing change; a Band-Aid handles it. MLB changes that. My major-league nursing duties are now no longer required. I’m glad for that, and hereby surrender my surgical gloves.

In my original post, I mentioned that she had emergency surgery. I note now that I never documented the nature of the affliction. She had a duodenal perforation, which I artlessly thought was an ulcer-like condition. And, it is ulcer-like, to a degree. This perforation was spewing stuff into the abdominal cavity that just doesn’t belong there. Left alone, the poisoning would have produced a far-from-optimal result.

The potential outcome of MLB’s affliction was made crystal clear to me today. MLB called her sister in Arkansas; sister-in-law mentioned an acquaintance who had recently gone to ER with similar symptoms. The diagnosis was pneumonia. It wasn’t. Sister-in-law’s friend died. From something similar, if not precisely the same thing as MLB had.

I’m more weak-kneed now than I was at the hospital. I had no idea of precisely how grave this was. I’ll use those weak knees, bow down, and give more thanks than I already have.

-k-

I Really Shoulda’ Been There

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This year’s CREATE South conference is underway in Myrtle Beach1. I had planned on being there this year; $DAYJOB provides the wherewithal to fund such an excursion, and I was up for a road trip. Unfortunately, $DAYJOB doesn’t realize:

  1. Project deadlines are not equal to the “Earliest date by when you can’t prove you won’t be finished.”
  2. You can’t get nine women pregnant, and marvel in the miracle of birth in one month.

That, combined with an unexpected drop in my PTO2 balance during MLB’s recent hospital stay, leaves me in the tbbs WorldHQ control room, following the proceedings via the Twitter.

I even restored my old Twitter account, so I could play along. I don’t embrace the Twitter for frivolous causes.

Enjoy, CREATErs! See y’all in 2010!

-k-

1 No, it did not burn to the ground, in spite of what you may have read. This does not imply that assistance is not needed for a large group of people in the area. Help out if you can.

2 Paid Time Off

Earth Day

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I’ve spent all my years on Earth.
I plan to spend whatever time I have left on Earth.
When I’m gone from the Earth, my mortal remains will be buried in the Earth.

I’ve been partial to the Earth for all my years, without the necessity of an Earth Day.

I’ll celebrate the upcoming Earth Day, God willing, by celebrating another day on, well, Earth.

With me, every day is Earth Day.

OK, then.

-k-
Update: For all those Earth Day folk, rock on!
You don’t tell me how I should live, and I’ll return the favor. In other words, Leave me Alone.

Calibre install on Fedora 11 Beta

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I just completed a from scratch, from source install of calibre on my Fedora 11 beta laptop. As documented a couple of posts back, the laptop was installed using the Fedora 11 live USB install method. Here’s what I had to add, to get calibre to build and install:

For building calibre, I needed the following; just do a yum install; there will be a long list of dependencies brought in:

  1. python-setupdocs
  2. python-setuptools
  3. sip
  4. PyQt4
  5. PyQt4-devel
  6. gcc
  7. gcc-c++

Finally, do this:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/qt4/bin

Then, python setup.py build should cleanly build calibre.

To install calibre, I had to yum install the following:

  1. python-mechanize
  2. python-clientform
  3. python-lxml
  4. python-dateutil
  5. python-imaging
  6. python-BeautifulSoup

The python setup.py install worked without complaints. The calibre icon appeared in the Fedora menu, and all is well.

For me, calibre segfaults when being called from the Fedora menu, and the “View MOBI” option is selected. “View PDF” works fine. When I invoke calibre from the command line, all the view options work, irrespective of format. Not necessarily a calibre bug; I’ll check out the calibre release notes and trouble ticket, and poke around my setup a bit.

-k-

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A High-calibre Upgrade Bonus

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Fedora 11 includes an upgrade to python 2.6. This is a good thing: I can now install the latest, greatest calibre. calibre is a tool for managing e-book libraries, and is the descendant of the libprs500 software suite, which I used with success on the Sony e-reader.

With the Sony, I would have been totally in the weeds without libprs500. There was no way short of using a Windows computer to get one’s own content onto the device. libprs500 kept my Windows-free streak alive. After getting my Kindle, I thought the libprs/calibre tools wouldn’t be needed any longer, since the Kindle shows up as yet another USB storage device.

I had a previous version of calibre installed, pre Fedora upgrade. It is much more robust than the libprs500, and the graphical interface is much neater and cleaner.

After sending several PDFs and other documents to Amazon’s conversion service, I have not been overly impressed with the quality and readability of the converted items. libprs/calibre’s MOBI conversions are typically much better than anything else I’ve tried.

So, with part of the Kindle allure being the possibility of having a lot of sysadmin manuals on one easy-to-use device, I’m back on the calibre bandwagon.

I always install calibre from source on my Fedora systems; there are a lot of dependencies to install for calibre to work. I use the time tested method of build, install, run, let stuff blow up as missing dependencies are found, install missing dependencies. Repeat process until everything comes up cleanly.

Maybe I’ll take a shot at making a Fedora RPM for calibre, if for no other reason than to be ready for the next upgrade to Fedora.

-k-

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