[OLPC-devel] Weekly work summary [6/12]

[mharriso at student.umass.edu]

 eBook External Data Sources
 http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/soc-eds
 git://dev.laptop.org/projects/soc-eds
 
 Status update
 Spent half of this past week at OLPC's offices working with Eric Astor and Ivan
Krstic.  Since the eBook reader and OEPC projects have a lot of overlapping
needs, they are now combined into one project.  Eric and I are working on a spec
for this (http://dev.laptop.org/wiki/ReaderSpec), and the eBook reader format
discussion has been moved to http://dev.laptop.org/wiki/EBookViewerFormatSpec .

Eric and I have looked at several different document formats and Python libs in
order to narrow down the spec for the reader.  We'll continue to do this until
we have a more concrete idea of what we'll be using.

In terms of my Gutenberg stuff, I've got code that parses GUTINDEX.ALL to make a
fairly well-formed pseudo-XML catalog, as well as search that catalog by title,
author, and language, and download etexts from PG's servers.  Ivan and I will
hopefully be working more closely with PG (as well as ICDL) to make things a
little easier.

Next Week's Plans
 The reader spec needs much more information added to it.  Things like use
cases, more document format research, and GUI mockups.  I think I'm going to put
my gutenberg code in the background for now until some decisions are made on
some things regarding that.  I hope to begin writing ICDL code.


All in all, working at OLPC's offices was a wonderful and intense experience,
and I hope Eric and I can use what we've learned to really get this project going.

-Matthew Harrison