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A Calibre plugin for Greek book metadata

January 19, 2012 by Nikos Anagnostou

A few days ago, I sort of promised to deliver a plugin for Calibre for  greek book metadata. I had to dive into Python to accomplish this task but, as I said in the previous post, I had no Python knowledge.

Thank God, all programming languages have many things is common. So, with the assistance of this brilliant short tutorial by Stavros Korokithakis I managed to get a grasp of the basics quickly.

Then I found a couple of similar plugins, studied them a bit, and,  voila, the offspring of this endeavor: the Biblionet calibre plugin.
(Those not interested in code should  download the plugin from here because the github zip adds an extra folder to the plugin and generates an error when trying to add it).

Installation
To install the plugin, open Calibre, go to Preferences>Change Calibre behavior, scroll down and locate in the Advanced section the Plugins icon. Click it and the following window will appear:

Choose “Load plugin from file”, answer ‘yes’ to the warning that will pop up, and you are done.

Use
The best option for mass entering and mass updating printed books in calibre IMHO is this:

Use a mobile phone barcode scanner app to read the isbn barcodes, or write them down, one per line, in a text file.

Then copy paste them in the relevant calibre dialog box (see picture) and fire the process.

The Future
This plugin is not a complete one. Unlike most of  the other metadata plugins,  it only makes use of the book ISBN (10 or 13 digit) to query the biblionet database.
Normally such a plugin can also make use of the  title and author info. But for adding printed books entried  in calibre (that was my initial motive, remember?)  that would be rather tedious, as one would have to manually type every single one of them.
This (:the isbn only feature) is going to change in the next version and the plugin will be able to query metadata based on title or author too.

There is another difference: the plugin makes use of the bookmeta script that acts like a proxy between the plugin and the biblionet database, so the script had to be hosted somewhere. I hosted it at phpfog.com.
If you have some techinal skills, you can host the script wherever you like. Then just  edit the plugin file __init__.py, locate the following line,

    BASE_URL = 'http://bookmeta.phpfogapp.com/index.php?isbn='

and change the ‘http://bookmeta.phpfogapp.com/‘ to the address of your server.
If not, remain assured that I will host this solution to phpfog for your convenience.

In the next version of the plugin, this need will be eliminated. The plugin will not require this kind of intermediary. But the bookmeta script will stay, as there might be other programs/services that could potentially use it.

If you want to fork the plugin and make your own, head to github and serve yourselves.

Please give some feedback if you decide to use the plugin. It both motivates and helps :)

Posted in Code | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Bookmeta: a book metadata extractor for Greek books

January 15, 2012 by Nikos Anagnostou

You know how it is: you want something that no program/service provides and you end up making it yourself.

In my case, what I wanted was a metadata source for my books in calibre.

I use calibre not only for tracking ebooks (which is what is made for), but also for normal, printed books.

I have no problem with the English and French books of my library since the metadata sources provided by calibre are more than enough.

But I also own a big number of Greek books and, there, the results I get through calibre are quite poor: for very few greek books there are metadata available(provided by Google). And these are transcribed into Latin, which is odd to read.

Now, the most comprehensive source of greek books, especially the last 20 years production, is found in the Biblionet database. But there is no web api and the  semantics of their web pages are poor if existent at all. Which means that in order to get book metadata, one has to scrape their web pages.

The simplest query (and the most reliable) to perform in biblionet is to search by isbn, as this returns only one  record (or none, if the isbn is not found).

So what i did, was to make a simple web app(?) that searches a book by isbn in biblionet, parses the result page and returns a json or html output. I call it bookmeta.

Here is a sample output:

{"biblionetid" : "44201", "cover_url" : "http://biblionet.gr/images/logo_gr.jpg", "title" : "Από το Βυζάντιο στην Αναγέννηση", "authors" : "N. G. Wilson", "translators" : "Φωτεινή Πρεβεδούρου - Γεωργίνη", "publisher" : "Εκδοτικός Οίκος Α. Α. Λιβάνη", "yr_published" : "1994.", "original_language" : " αγγλικά", "original_title" : " From Byzantium to Italy", "categories" : "Ευρώπη - Ιστορία - Αναγέννηση [DDC: 940.21]"}

You can find the code at github.

This script  isn’t meant for end users. It is for people who might want to use this in another product or service. Help yourselves folks!

Next steps?

I am now developing a calibre plugin that does exactly the same thing, and since my python knowledge is close to zero, I am going to use this hack to get book metadata in the plugin almost without  any further parsing in python (for v.1 at least).

Posted in Code | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

I call it “Relief”

November 12, 2011 by Nikos Anagnostou

IE6 and IE7 in between 10 and 20%? I call it “relief”. And I also call it, “not fast enough”.

Still, IE6 being used more than IE7 is a kind of a perversion.

The End of an Era: Internet Explorer Drops Below 50 Percent of Web Usage | Webmonkey | Wired.com.

Posted in Tech News | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

Twitter activity stream

November 3, 2011 by Nikos Anagnostou

Back in August we heard about the upcoming real time twitter activity streams but, since then, not many of us have seen them.

Today, I was lucky to observe this functionality in  one of the twitter accounts I admin.

See how the mentions tab has changed? It is not just Mentions anymore. It is “mentions and more” and the more refers to in-stream notifications of who and how-many followed you.

Also, twitter turns more visual, if you look at the adjacent Activity tab.

This is a much more ‘facebookish’ view, isn’t it? It is actually more visual than the respective ticker in Facebook, which displays similar stuff: favs, follows, RTs etc

I wonder if the delay in the roll out has to do with exactly this perception: that twitter is becoming more ‘lite’ this way.

Posted in social media | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

The Android Déjà vu

October 24, 2011 by Nikos Anagnostou

Since it’s inception, Apple meant to offer a combination of hardware and software to the consumer. Back in the ’70s this wasn’t really a novelty. Such was the paradigm of the Computer Industry in general. One needs only to think of IBM as a testimony to this claim.

And then, in the beginning of the ’80s, came an innovator: Microsoft.

Innovator in the sense that it pioneered the business of being a software company that sells primarily operating systems. Because, otherwise, neither OS it sold (the MS-DOS)  was really novel, not the company itself. As a matter of fact, Microsoft is a bit older than Apple. But Bill Gates and Co were the right time in the right place to close a deal (with IBM) that would change their fortunes as well as the whole computer industry.

The decoupling of the Operating System from the Hardware and the widespread copying of the IBM personal computer, led to the boom of the PC industry: hundreds of manufacturers produced cheap clones of the original IBM machine, eroding its dominant position and swallowing its market share. This unprecedented expansion was not matched by a relevant expansion of OS offerings though. Microsoft became the king of the game.

The situation remained practically unchanged for 25 years until, in the middle of the ’00s, Apple, aided by the success of its ipod and itunes, started gaining market share again. The one stop shop approach started showing strength again and this trend, as far as personal computers are concerned,  is still unfolding.

In 2007 enters the iPhone, a mobile phone with HW and SW from the same source: Apple. As with the original Apple computers, ipPhone made significant inroads in the Smartphone market. Soon it became its  driving force and certainly the fastest growing, most profitable and most discussed product.

Android, much like MS-DOS compared to Apple, comes later. Much like MS-DOS too,  it’s coming from a vendor (Google) that does not sell hardware. Much like MS-DOS it helps manufactures around the globe to produce better and cheaper smartphones. And much like MS-DOS (or Windows) suffers from bugs and instabilities and lacks in the user experience it offers compared to the iPhone operating system, the iOS.

But it doesn’t matter.

On it’s way to  becoming the main smartphone operating system  (if it’s not already there) it’s becoming better. And it challenges the wisdom of buying hardware and software from the same source afresh.

If we project these parallels into the future, we will expect to see a marginalization of the iPhone and its latter, much latter, shiny come-back with a vengeance.

But Steve Jobs is not around this time. And this makes things less predictable.

Posted in technology | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Web things I came across lately

October 23, 2011 by Nikos Anagnostou

I have been doing a lot of reading and searching about web development issues lately. Actually it’s a catch up exercise for things that I should have followed but missed.

So here is a list of a few projects that I was really pleased to discover.

  1. CSSLint For those that would like to have some advise and an overlooking tutor in their CSS projects, here is a service that does exactly this: analyzes css files and offers ‘advise’ about usual pitfalls and patterns to be avoided.  CSSLint is a project of  Nicholas C. Zakas and Nicole Sullivan.
  2. 960.gs As you can guess by the name, it’s a grid system for 12 or 16 column grids. I have never used a grid system before. I prefer to hack my way to the design from scratch. But the simplicity of the thing is tempting, at least for prototyping work. 906.gr is a project of  Nathan Smith.
  3. Handlebars Littering javascript with a lot of html is an anti-pattern. The solution? Use some sort of javascript templating mechanism such as Handlebars.  Simple and elegant. A brain child of Yehuda Katz.
  4. Backbone.js A javascript Model View Controller (MVC)  … backbone for web applications. Developed by the guys responsible for DocumentCloud.
Now they have to come together in a future project of mine :)

Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Opacity in Internet Explorer

July 29, 2011 by Nikos Anagnostou

This is an ancient problem: older versions of IE do not support the opacity CSS property. Instead, IE8 uses -ms-filter and IE prior 8 uses filter. Also, in IE, one has to be cautious about the positioning of the element the opacity properties apply to: the element has to be positioned for the filter to work properly. Another trick is to use zoom. 
Let’s wrap this up in the css snippet below:

#page {
  opacity: 0.5;
}
/* IE7 and less */
#page {
  filter: alpha(opacity=50);
  position: relative;
  zoom: 1;
}
/* IE8 specific */
#page {
  -ms-filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=50);
  position: relative;
  zoom: 1;
}

It is a pain but it works.

But what I found is that if you try to set these properties dynamically, through jQuery for instance, they are less obedient.

For filter and -ms-filter to be set through jQuery, the element has to be positioned through css and NOT by jQuery.

So one would need something like this:

/* IE less than 9 */
#page {
  position: relative;
  zoom: 1;
}


if($.support.opacity){
  $('#page').css('opacity' , ".5")
}else {
  $('#page').css('filter' , 'alpha(opacity=50)');
  $('#page').css('-ms-filter' , 'progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=50)');
}

This is empirical knowledge though. I don’t know why is it like this.

Posted in HowTo | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments »

The Nigerian scam goes to Korea

January 20, 2011 by Nikos Anagnostou

If you love spam ‘literature’ like I do, here is  the latest of the Nigerian sequel.

Your Active E-mail made you a Beneficiary

Dear Sir/Madam,

This is to notify you that you have been chosen By the seven-member committee to fulfill Chairman Chung Mong-koo’s promise to donate One trillion won (US$1.1 billion) to charity, contingent to a suspension early this month of his three-year prison sentence for embezzlement and breach of trust. The ruling meant that the 69-year-old chairman will not be thrown back into jail as long as he remains clean during the next five years. In suspending the prison sentence, the Seoul High Court ordered Chung to fulfill the pledge of donations. Chung, want this money used for the protection of the environment and to build art and cultural facilities.

As one of the final recipients of this Cash Grant/Donation for your own personal, education and business development. The Hyundai Company is the world’s largest shipbuilder and 6th largest automaker and owns Hyundai Group, the parent company for all Hyundai Motor. The company has decided to randomly select email addresses that would benefit from this donation. Based on the random selection exercise from internet service providers(ISP) and millions of Super market cash invoices worldwide, you were selected among the lucky recipients to receive the award sum of US$2,000,000.00 (Two Million United States Dollars) as charity donations/aid from Hyundai Group.

You are required to expeditiously Contact the head of committee (HOC) below for qualification documentation and processing of your claims, from Monday through Sunday. On contact with head of committee (HOC), You’ll be given your payment pin number which you will use in collecting the funds. Please endeavor to quote your pin number QN(HM-145-5611) in all discussions.
***********************************
Head of committee: Mr. Imran Khand
Email: xxxxxxxx
***********************************
On behalf of the seven-member committee kindly accept our warmest congratulations

 

Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged | Comments Off

A great filter at last: Facebook Pages Custom Sharing

January 3, 2011 by Nikos Anagnostou

It’s a little bit over two years since when I wrote about the desirability of a language filter for social media news ‘streams’. But while Facebook has given the world one, probably because I missed its initial introduction, I  made the connection only now : In Facebook Pages, one can select who will see a certain status update by selecting a country and a language.

Quite rightly, language is not enough on its own to make targeting work. Neither country. The combination can work wonders though.

Just think the various pages that brands open on a country basis. There is no need to anymore. With the country status targeting, one page can be used to serve all countries. In theory, at least. It will require lots of admins, true. But this is better than a lot of pages repeating similar things over and over.

Also, I can help segment messaging in countries with more than one languages, keeping follower annoyance at a minimum.

Great!

But why only Pages?

The same need exists (to a lesser extend) for Personal Profiles and Groups.

And why is it so difficult for other social platforms to come up with solutions like this?

Is anyone listening in Twitter?

Posted in social media | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Why do we retweet?

December 17, 2010 by Nikos Anagnostou

What are the primary motivations for retweeting? There are countless of quasi answers out there but very little substantial research. Unfortunately I do not bring you one.

I run a little experiment the other day. I said I was running a “Retweet” experiment and asked my followers to RT!

I was not sure what to expect, but it turned out that about 13 people did actually retweet within the first hour.

Now, two days later, the picture is like this:

New Retweets

Please Retweet

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Old Retweets

Please RT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If there is an immediate conclusion to be drawn, is that far more people use the new RT method (the one provided by twitter).

As to why people RT, the answer remains open to speculation. It seems though that what Dan Zarrella has found/suggested (that ‘Please RT’ is a strong factor to get retweeted) is valid and valuable.

Posted in social media | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

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