Tag: Kindle

Amazon, Project Gutenberg, and Italian Literature

This post starts in the strangest of places. The other night, my mother was complaining how few free Italian books are available on the Kindle Store.

Turns out, a friend of the family, who also has a Kindle, has been enjoying reading free English older books on hers. As my mother does not speak or read English, she’d been complaining that the same is not possible in Italian.

The books she’s referring to are older books, the copyright of which expired, and that are available on Project Gutenberg. Indeed, the selection of Italian books on that site is fairly limited, and it is something that I have indeed been sadden about before.

What has Project Gutenberg to do with Kindle? Well, Amazon appears to collect books from Project Gutenberg, convert them to Kindle’s native format, and “sell” them on the Kindle Store. I say “sell” because for the most part, these are available at $0.00, and are thus available for free.

While there is no reference to Project Gutenberg on their store pages, there’s usually a note on the book:

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Another important point is that (again, for the most part), the original language editions are also available! This is how I started reading Jules Verne’s Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours while trying to brush up my French to workable levels.

Having these works available on the Kindle Store, free of both direct cost and delivery charge, is in my opinion a great step to distribute knowledge and culture. As my nephews (blood-related and otherwise) start reaching reading age, I’m sure that what I will give them as presents is going to be Kindle readers, because between having access to this wide range of free books, and the embedded touch-on dictionary, they feel like something I’d have thoroughly enjoyed using when I was a kid myself.

Unfortunately, this is not all roses. the Kindle Store still georestrict some books, so from my Kindle Store (which is set in the US), I cannot download Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in Italian (though I can download the translation for free, or buy for $0.99 a non-Project Gutenberg version of the original Italian text). And of course there is the problem of coverage for the various languages.

Italian, as I said, appears to be a pretty bad one when it comes to coverage. If I look at Luigi Pirandello’s books there are only seven entries, one of which is in English, and another one being a duplicate. Compare this with the actual list of his works and you can see that it’s very lacking. And since Pirandello died in 1936, his works are already in the public domain.

Since I have not actually being active with Project Gutenberg, I only have second hand knowledge of why this type of problem happens. One of the thing I remember having been told about this, is that most of the books you buy in Italian stores are either annotated editions, or updated for modern Italian, which causes their copyright to be extended do the death of the editor, annotator or translator.

This lack of access to Italian literature is a big bother, and quite a bit of a showstopper to giving a Kindle to my Italian “nephews”. I really wish I could find a way to fix the problem, whether it is by technical or political means.

On the political side, one could expect that, with the focus on culture of the previous Italian government, and the focus of the current government on the free-as-in-beer options, it would be easy to convince them to release all of the Italian literature that is in the public domain for free. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t even know where to start to ask them to do that.

On the technical side, maybe it is well due time that I spend a significant amount of time on my now seven years old project of extracting a copy of the data from the data files of Zanichelli’s Italian literature software (likely developed at least in part with public funds).

The software was developed for Windows 3.1 and can’t be run on any modern computer. I should probably send the ISOs of it to the Internet Archive, and they may be able to keep it running there on DosBox with a real copy of Windows 3.1, since Wine appears to not support the 16-bit OLE interfaces that the software depends on.

If you wonder what would be a neat thing for Microsoft to release as open-source, I would probably suggest the whole Windows 3.1 source code would be a starting point. If nothing else, with the right license it would be possible to replace the half-complete 16-bit DLLs of Wine with official, or nearly-official copies.

I guess it’s time to learn more about Windows 3.1 in my “copious spare time” (h/t Charles Stross), and start digging into this. Maybe Ryan’s 2ine might help, as OS/2 and Windows 3.1 are closer than the latter is to modern Windows.

Discovering new writers

I’m a book nerd among others. I love reading, although the time sometimes is lacking and I’m quite far off from the end of my queue of books to read. In particular, just before leaving for Dublin I got the collection of Ian Fleming’s novels for $2/each through Amazon and their Amazon Local deals. But while I have quite a few authors that I absolutely love, and to which I turn when I want to have an enjoyable read, I also like discovering new authors and new series.

Once upon a time, I used to listen to a BBC books podcast; that podcast is no more nowadays, but it made me discover one of my favourite books ever, The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway — and the author of the book as well, since I also loved his Angelmaker which I bought as soon as it came out. I also read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which I did not like as much but was not a bad read.

Unfortunately the podcast is now gone. I tried a few alternatives but none seems to be the kind of not-too-heavy and interesting programme that I used to listen to. So I needed a different source for discovering new authors and series. Suggestions by readers and other friends are obviously quite useful, but that usually bring me to fill my wishlist with new books that I haven’t bought yet.

What did help me last time to discover something new has been The Humble eBook Bundle which made me discover Mercedes Lackey, Invasion and the Secret World Chronicles — I look forward to read the second part, I’m trying to consume the rest of the queue before buying anything new.

It’s not just that buying the Bundle makes it cheaper – although I admit it does – but there’s also the fact that by mixing well-known authors together with newcomers, you know that you won’t be disappointed with the expense. In the case of the first bundle, I had the comics from penny Arcade, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and XKCD that I was very happy with getting, everything else would have been fine even if it completely sucked, luckily it didn’t though. With the second eBook bundle, I was happy with getting Doctorow’s book as well as Wil Wheaton. I haven’t gotten around reading them but I’m sure they are going to be quite the read.

Another, different approach is the one I tried to take with Amazon Local deals. I’m still subscribed to the Los Angeles deals, and it seems like every other month they come up with a “Get these Kindle titles at $1/each” kind of deal. Last time I decided to try some new authors, in the thriller/crime novel genre. Of these, I ended up buying a craptastic one which I’m going to recommend everybody not to read. It was unfortunate, at least it was only $1.

I’m still looking forward for more book recommendation — I really wish there was an alternative to Amazon’s “Recommended for you”, more like “Your friends read these books”, but even Anobii seems to be basically in non-maintenance mode. If you have some suggestions on podcasts to follow for new books coming out, I’m all ears (pun intended), so let me know in the comments!

Book review: Counting From Zero

I might be a masochist, I don’t know. Certainly I didn’t find it enjoyable to read this book, but at least I got to the end of it, unlike the previous one which I also found difficult to digest.

The book, Counting from Zero by Alan B. Johnson is one of the worst books I’ve read in a while, to be entirely honest. It’s another cyber-thriller, if we want to use this name, akin to Russinovich’s Zero Day (review) and Trojan Horse (review) which I read last year and found.. not so thrilling — but in comparison, they are masterpieces.

So the authors in both the Russinovich’s and Johnson’s cases are actually IT professionals; the former author works at Microsoft, the latter has been co-author of the ZRTP protocol for encrypting audio/video conversations. Those who had to deal with that and Zfone before are probably already facepalming. While Russinovich’s world is made up of nuclear plants running Windows on their control systems, and connecting it to Internet, Johnson’s a world that is.. possibly more messed up.

Let’s start with what I found obnoxious almost immediately: the affectations. The cover of the book already shows a Ø sign — while I’m not a typographer, and I didn’t feel like asking one of my many friends who are, it looks like a bold Bodoni or something similar. It’s not referring to the Scandinavian letter though, and that’s the sad news. In the whole text, the character zero (0) has been replaced with this (wrong) character. For a person who can get angry when he has to replace ò with o for broken systems to accept his name, this is irksome enough. The reasoning for this is declared in the second half of the book as all programmers write it this way to not mistake it for an ‘o’ vowel — bad news for the guy, I don’t know people who do that consistently.

Even if I’m writing a password where the letters and numbers can be mistaken – which is not common, as I usually use one or the other — my preferred note for zeros is a dot at the center. Why a dot and not the slash that the author so much like? It’s to not confuse it with the many similar symbols some of which are actually used in mathematics, where the zeros are common (and this is indeed something that my math teacher in high school convinced me of). Furthermore – as Wikipedia notes – the slashed zero’s slash does not go over the circle, for the same reason as me using the dot: it would be too easy to mistake for an empty set, or a diameter sign.

Once, the use of this fake slashed zero is cute, done as a sed replacement all over the book? Bleah.

It’s not the only affectation though, another one is that chapters have been numbered … in hexadecimal. And before somebody asks, no it was not 0x-prefixed, which would probably have made more sense. And finally, there are email quoted almost every chapter, and they have a “PGP” block at the end for the signature (even though it is left to intend that they are actually encrypted, and not just signed). I’m pretty sure that there is some meaning behind those blocks but I can’t be bothered searching. There are also a bunch of places where words are underlined like if they were hyperlinks — if they were, they were lost in translation on the Kindle Paperwhite (which I have bought last week after breaking my Keyboard), as they are not clickable.

Stylistically, the book stinks. I’m sorry, I know it’s not very polite to criticize something this harshly, but it really does. It reads like something I was trying to write in middle school: infodumps a-plenty – not only in computer stuff but even on motorbike details – and not in a long-winded, descriptive, “look how cool” kind of way, just in a paragraph of dumping info on the reader, most of which is really not important to the story – action driven, and repeating the subject, the protagonist’s name, every line – Mick did this. Mick did that. Mick went somewhere – and in general very few descriptions of environments, people, or anything at all.

But, style is an acquired skill. I didn’t like the first Harry Potter book, and I enjoyed the later ones. In Russinovich’s case, the style issues on the first book were solved on the second (even though the story went from so-so to bad). So let’s look into the story instead. It’s something already seen: unknowns find zero-days, you got the self-employed wizkid who gets to find a fix, and save the world. With nothing new to add there, two things remain to save a book: characters and, since this is a cyberthriller, a realistic approach to computers.

These should be actually the strong points of the book, standing to the Praise between ToC and Prologue — Vint Cerf describe it “credible and believable”, while Phil Zimmerman calls it a “believable cast of characters”. It sets the expectation high.

The main protagonist is your stereotypical nerd’s wet dream: young self-employed professional, full of money, with a crew of friends, flying around the world. This might actually be something Johnson feels he’s himself, given that his biography on both the book and Amazon points that he’s a “Million Miler” with American Airlines. Honestly, I don’t dream to travel that much — but you all know how I hate flying. Not only he’s a perfect security expert and bike rider, he’s also a terrific mechanic, a sailor, and so many more things. His only defect in the whole book? He only speaks English. I’m not kidding you, he doesn’t go as far as shouting at a woman in the whole book! Have you ever met a guy like that in a security or FLOSS conference? I certainly haven’t, including myself. Seriously, no defects… sigh… I like characters when they have defects because they need to compensate to become lovable.

Scratch the protagonist then. Given the continuous turmoil in the IT scene about sexism and the limited showcase of women in a positive light, you’d expect that somebody writing about IT might want to tip the scale a little bit in their favor — or at least that’s what I would do, and what I’d like to see. How many female characters are there in the book? The protagonist’s sister, and his niece her daughter; the protagonist’s “on-again, off-again”, a new woman joining the crew at the beginning of the book, and … spoiler … a one-off, one-chapter hacker that falls for one of the oldest tricks in the book (after being said to be brilliant — even though her solutions are said not to be elegant).

The on-and-off, who’s supposed to be one of the crew of security experts, is neither seen, nor said, doing anything useful at all in the story, beside helping out in the second chapter crisis where the protagonist and his friends save a conference by super-humanly cloning a whole battery of servers and routers in a few hours from scratch, dissect a zero-day vulnerability on a web server, fix it, and do an “anonymous commit” (whatever the heck that should be!). Did you say “stereotype!”, expecting the protagonist to be madly in love with his long-time friend? No, worse, she’s the one who wants him, but he’s just not there.

The newly-joining gal? Works for a company that would have otherwise been badmouthed at the conference, and has a completely platonic relationship with the protagonist all over the book. Her only task is to “push papers” from the protagonist to her company’s techs — Daryl from Russinovich’s books is more proactive, and if you read them, you know that’s a hard record to beat.

Family-wise … parents are dead sister is married with child. Said child, even if coming up many times during the book, is almost always called “Sam” — a play with a tomboysh girl? I’d say more like an interchangeable character, as it could easily have been a boy instead of a girl, for what the book’s concerned. The sister is, by the way, a librarian — this is only noted once, and the reason is to do yet another infodump on RFID.

If you want to know the kind of dump of infodumps this book is, the author goes on a limb to comment about “obsolete” measure units, including an explanation of what the nautical knots are modeled after, explains the origins of “reboot”, the meaning of “order of magnitude”, ranted about credit card companies “collecting databases of purchasing habits and data”, the fact that you use dig to run a “DNS trace”, the fact that Tube is the “unofficial name for London’s underground railway” (unofficial? TFL calls it Tube!), the fact that there is a congestion charge in London, the fact that Škoda is a Czech brand, and what the acronym RAM stands for!

If anything, the rest of the “crew” does even less than all these people, all the work is done by the protagonist… even though all the important pieces are given to him by others! Sigh.

Before closing the review (that you can guess is not positive at this point), let’s look at the tech side. Given the author is a colleague, and given the kind of praises coming from other people “in the scene”, you’d expect a very realistic approach, wouldn’t you? Well, the kind of paranoia that the protagonist is subject to (not accepting un-encrypted email, phone calls or video) is known to be rampant, although I found that this is often more common among wannabes than actual professionals.

But (and I did take notes, thanks to the Kindle), even accepting that in the fury of disconnecting a possibly infected or to-be-infected network from the Internet you can identify in a nanosecond which are the (multiple) cables to the internet and at the same time damaging them (without even damaging the connectors)… since when you need a “makeshift soldering iron to repair the broken Ethernet connector” ? If it was equipment-side, a soldering iron is not going to be enough; if it was the cable… WTF are you using a soldering iron for?!

Ah! At some point the protagonist is given by “an uncle in Australia” some “magnetic GPS trackers” to use against the bad guys. How the uncle could have guessed that he needed them is already a good question. The fact that the ones used toward the end are for no use at all, is something I don’t want to spend time on. My question is going to be do you call realistic a throwable magnetic bug that receive GPS signal on the underside of a car *and can be traced by a cellphone in real-time*?

Oh and of course, this is the world-famous, filthy-rich security expert who only has one password for every service and changes it every week. If somebody thinks this is a good idea, let me remember that this extends the surface on which you’re vulnerable to MITM or sniffing attacks on in an incredible way! And they even steal his private key, not once, but twice! It seems like he knows everything about PGP and encryption but not about the existence of SmartCards.

Even though the guy has an impressive collection of SIM cards and mobile phones that work all over the world, including in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. And when he buys a new phone, he can just download and compile the operating system. And we have to fight to get Android sources for our phones…

Okay the review is getting longer than I expected, so I’ll just note down that the guy “performed a disk wipe on the solid state storage” — and yes he’s referring to the 37-or-however-much-that-was wiping that was debunked by the paper’s author, as most people misinterpreted it altogether. And that is completely irrelevant to solid state storage (and most modern non-solid state storage as well!). Oh and he doesn’t buy off-the-shelf systems because they could have keyloggers or malware in them, but trusts computer parts bought at the first store he finds on his phone.

Of course he can find components for a laptop in a store, and just fit it in his custom CNC case without an issue. He can also fit a state-of-the-art days-long battery that he was given earlier, without a charger design! Brilliant, just brilliant. Nothing for a guy who “did a mental calculation of how much lighter it would be in a titanium case… and how much more expensive”. I don’t even know the current price of dollars, he can calculate the weight difference and price of a titanium case in his mind.

Last pieces before the bombshell: the guy ends up in the TSA’s No-fly List; they actually spell the full TSA name. Then he’s worried he can’t take a plane from London to Kiev. Message for somebody who spent too much time in the USA even though he’s Australian (the author): TSA’s competence stops at the US border! And, even in the situation where somebody left their passport in the side pocket of somebody else’s carry on bag (so fortunate, deus ex machina knows no borders!), you don’t have to find the same glasses he had on the photo… they let you change glasses from time to time. And if you do have to find them you don’t need to find real glasses, if they give you headaches.

Sorry, I know, these are nitpicks — there is much more in the book though. These are just the ones that had me wondering out loud why I was still reading the book. But the bombshell I referred above is the following dialogue line:

“Sir, he uses ZRTP encryption for all his calls, and strong encryption on all his messaging. We know who he communicates with but we haven’t been able to break any yet…”

Thanks, Randall! XKCD #538

I know the guy is a co-author of ZRTP. But…

eBook distribution woes

So in my previous post I noted that Lulu published my eBook immediately and it has been for sale right away, while Kobo and Google Books are still reviewing it (even as I write this!). Turns out that this is the only positive side with Lulu.

When I first added the book, I noted that they have the option to revise a project (book) so that you can update/change it later. I assumed that buyers would always get the latest revision when downloading, even though they bought it at an earlier date (which is the case for Amazon, nowadays) — turns out that is not the case. Luckily, only three people bought the book from Lulu so I was able to reach them and provide them with the updated ePub (and I’ll keep sending them the updated revisions).

But I have more to say about Lulu — their support sucks. First of all, most of the documentation for publisher they have on their website is a support forum, which means that unless somebody already asked about something similar, you can’t find it. When you send them an inquiry by email (with a website form of course, there’s no email address on the website, and finding a “Contact Us” page is not possible), they first send you a list of FAQs that have nothing to do with your inquiry — and if you don’t reply to that with “no this did not solve my issue, get me a real person”, they don’t even look into what you wrote! They even send you a survey asking how’s the support!

Now let me spend a few nice words for Amazon instead. First of all, even though they did a copyright check, publishing the book took less than half the week. Updates? Less than 24 hours! And they do let you download a new copy of the book with the updates. But that’s just the basic level. Somehow, searching Amazon.com (only the .com version) for either the title “Autotools Mythbuster” or for my name, does not show you my book at all — in the latter case, you actually find Bart’s book on Munin which I’m listed as a technical reviewer for. When I registered for the Author page it also didn’t show my book — it works fine on the UK page on the other hand.

When I contacted Amazon (which can be contacted via either email from the website, or livechat!), not only they gave me a very swift answer, but they followed up on it without feedback on my side, noting the problem is not fixed, and that they’ll escalate it to the technical department. I’ll be waiting for a solution — in the mean time the book is still available if you have a Kindle or a device compatible with the Kindle reading application (Android tablets are fine).

The situation now though, is that I lack a distributor for the clear, DRM-free ePub version — as I said I’m waiting for Kobo and Google Books, hoping that it’ll actually allow work in progress books to be published. I’ve been suggested to look into Leanpub but it does not allow me to provide an ePub already generated, it’s to write new content — and similarly for FastPencil which I had to register just to be able to find out what it does.

So if you have any suggestions, please let me know, as I’d like to be able to reach even the people who want to stay away from Amazon as much as they can.

The future of Autotools Mythbuster

You might have noticed after yesterday’s post that I have done a lot of visual changes to Autotools Mythbuster over the weekend. The new style is just a bunch of changes over the previous one (even though I also made use of sass to make the stylesheet smaller), and for the most part is to give it something recognizable.

I need to spend another day or two working on the content itself at the very least, as the automake 1.13 porting notes are still not correct, due to further changes done on Automake side (more on this in a future post, as it’s a topic of its own). I’m also thinking about taking a few days off Gentoo Linux maintenance, Munin development, and other tasks, and just work on the content on all the non-work time, as it could use some documentation of install and uninstall procedures for instance.

But leaving the content side alone, let me address a different point first. More and more people lately have been asking for a way to have the guide available offline, either as ebook (ePub or PDF) or packaged. Indeed I was asked by somebody if I could drop the NonCommercial part of the license so that it can be packaged in Debian (at some point I was actually asked why I’m not contributing this to the main manuals; the reason is that I really don’t like the GFDL, and furthermore I’m not contributing to automake proper because copyright assignment is becoming a burden in my view).

There’s an important note here: while you can easily see that I’m not pouring into it the amount of time needed to bring this to book quality, it does take a lot of time to work on it. It’s not just a matter of gluing together the posts that talk about autotools from my blog, it’s a whole lot of editing, which is indeed a whole lot of work. While I do hope that the guide is helpful, as I wrote before, it’s much more work for the most part that I can pour into on my free time, especially in-between jobs like now (and no, I don’t need to find a job — I’m waiting to hear from one, and got a few others lined up if it falls through). While Flattr helps, it seems to be drying up, at least for what concerns my content; even Socialvest is giving me some grief, probably because I’m no longer connecting from the US. Beside that, the only “monetization” (I hate that word) strategy I got for the guide is AdSense – which, I remind you, kicked my blog out for naming an adult website on a post – and making the content available offline would defeat even the very small returns of that.

At this point, I’m really not sure what to do; on one side I’m happy to receive more coverage just because it makes my life easier to have fewer broken build systems around. On the other hand, while not expecting to get rich off it, I would like to know that the time I spend on it is at least partly compensated – token gestures are better than nothing as well – and that precludes a simple availability of the content offline, which is what people at this point are clamoring for.

So let’s look into the issues more deeply: why the NC clause on the guide? Mostly I want to have a way to stop somebody else exploiting my work for gain. If I drop the NC clause, nothing can stop an asshole from picking up the guide, making it available on Amazon, and get the money for it. Is it likely? Maybe not, but it’s something that can happen. Given the kind of sharks that infest Amazon’s self-publishing business, I wouldn’t be surprised. On the other hand, it would probably make it easier for me to accept non-minor contributions and still be able to publish it at some point, maybe even in real paper, so it is not something I’m excluding altogether at this point.

Getting the guide packaged by distributions is also not entirely impossible right now: Gentoo has generally not the same kind of issues as Debian regarding the NC clauses, and since I’m already using Gentoo to build and publish it, making an ebuild for it is tremendously simple. Since the content is also available on Git – right now on Gitorious, but read on – it would be trivial to do. But again, this would be cannibalizing the only compensation I got for the time spent on the guide. Which makes me very doubtful on what to do.

About the sources, there is another issue: while at the time I started all this, Gitorious was handier than GitHub, over time Gitorious interface didn’t improve, while the latter improved a lot, to the point that right now it would be my choice to host the guide: easier pull requests, and easier coverage. On the other hand, I’m not sure if the extra coverage is a good thing, as stated above. Yes, it is already available offline through Gitorious, but GitHub would make it effectively easier to get offline than to consult online. Is that what I want to do? Again, I don’t know.

You probably also remember an older post of mine from one and a half years ago where I discussed the reasons why I haven’t published Autotools Mythbuster at least through Amazon; the main reason was that, at the time, Amazon has no easy way to update the book for the buyers without having them buying a new copy. Luckily, this has changed recently, so the obstacle is actually fallen. With this in mind, I’m considering making it available as a Kindle book for those of you who are interested. To do so I have first to create it as an ePub though — so it would solve the question that I’ve been asked about the eBook availability… but at the same time we’re back to the compensation issue.

Indeed, if I decide to set up ePub generation and start selling it on the Kindle store, I’d be publishing the same routines on the Git repository, making it available to everybody else as well. Are people going to buy the eBook, even if I priced it at $0.99? I’d suppose not. Which brings me to not be sure what the target would be, on the Kindle store: price it down so that the convenience to just buy it from Amazon overweights the work to rolling your own ePub, or googling for a copy, – considering that just one person rolling the ePub can easily make it available to everybody else – or price it at a higher point, say $5, hoping that a few, interested users would fund the improvements? Either bet sounds bad to me honestly, even considering that Calcote’s book is priced at $27 at Amazon (hardcopy) and $35 at O’Reilly (eBook) — obviously, his book is more complete, although it is not a “living” edition like Autotools Mythbuster is.

Basically, I’m not sure what to do at all. And I’m pretty sure that some people (who will comment) will feel disgusted that I’m trying to make money out of this. On the whole, I guess one way to solve the issue is to drop the NC clause, stick it into a Git repository somewhere, maybe keep it running on my website, maybe not, but not waste energy into it anymore… the fact that, with the much more focused topic, it has just 65 flattrs, is probably indication that there is no need for it — which explains why I couldn’t find any publisher interested in making me write a book on the topic before. Too bad.

IPv6 in the workplace

I noted last week that for some reason I couldn’t understand, for some website the access time was quite lower on IPv6 than it was on IPv4. This seems to be consistent within the network as well, even though I’m still not sure if it’s a matter of a smaller overhead incurred in IPv6 itself, or if it’s mostly because the router in that case doesn’t have to do the same level of connection tracking for NAT and PAT.

But it’s not all clear this way: while NetworkManager is pretty happy with finding out both the address and the DNS server advertised with radvd, neither Mac OS X (10.5, 10.6 and 10.8) nor Windows (7) could get the DNS server. This is known and the only solution for this is to use a hybrid network with the stateless autoconfiguration (radvd) and DHCPv6 for extra information (NTP and DNS servers, among others).

So I first tried to set up ISC DHCP to serve out the v6 information, since that was the DHCP server I was using already. But this is extremely cumbersome. The first problem is that you can’t actually have one single dhcpd process running and serve both DHCP and DHCPv6, even though they use different ports, so you have to make use of dhcpd’s init script multiplexing support. Okay, not that big a deal is it? Strike two is that the configuration file can’t be shared either, even though the option names are different between the two implementations. What?

Okay so multiplexed init scripts, and separate configuration files. Is that all? It should, but honestly I’ve been unable to get it to work. I’m not sure if I just screwed up the configuration or what else, but it was trouble. Add to that that you have no way with the current init script to just reload the configuration, but you actually have to restart the service (and there is no configuration check on stop, which means you might take your DHCP down), and the fact that the man page for dhcpd.conf does not list most of the IPv6 options and I got tired.

Luckily for me, net-dns/dnsmasq (which we’re already using to serve as local DNS — I used unbound before, but in this case it seemed much easier as we need local hostnames, whereas at my house I simply used public IPv6 addresses) supports both DHCP and DHCPv6, responds to both with the same process, and supports a reload command. More interestingly, it seems like it could take over the job that right now is handled by radvd for router advertisement, but I haven’t tried that yet.

With this change, finally, I was able to get Windows 7 and Mac OS X to make DNS requests to the router’s IPv6 address, in the hope that this improves the general network’s responsiveness (at a first glance it seems to be working). So I started checking over the various systems we have in the office what supports what, testing also with test-ipv6

  • Windows 7 now gets both IPv6 addresses (temporary and mac-based) and DNS servers; test results 10⁄10;
  • Mac OS X Mountain Lion gets the stateless IPv6 address as well as the DNS server; test results 10⁄10;
  • Mac OS X Snow Leopard gets the IPv6 address but doesn’t see the DNS server, in either way; test results 10⁄10;
  • Linux gets the IPv6 address and the DNS server; test results 10⁄10;
  • Windows XP (after adding the protocol manually, of course) does not let you see which IP addresses it has, so I don’t know if it gets the DNS right, but it seems to work; test results 10⁄10;
  • Kindle Fire (first generation) does not show you the addresses it got, but tests pass 10⁄10 so I assume it’s working;
  • iPhone, running iOS 5 (colleague of mine) doesn’t show the addresses but tests also pass 10⁄10;
  • iPad, running iOS 6 (mine) shows the IPv6 DNS address, but tests don’t pass, 0/10;
  • Desire HD (CyanogenMod 7) doesn’t show any address, and tests don’t pass 0/10.

Something seems to be extremely wrong with these results honestly, but I’m not yet sure what.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to experiment with Flash and Red5 to see if there is any reason why we should work on supporting IPv6 in our products yet (if those two components don’t support it yet, there’s no real reason for us to look into it for now), but in the mean time, the advantages to start moving to IPv6 start to show themselves pretty clearly..

The problem with eBooks

If you follow my blog, you know already I generally like eBooks, although I have found some technical issues with many of them (beside the obvious problem with DRM). But in general I keep preferring them over the dead-tree variant; if anything because they don’t require me to choose between leaving them in Italy, or spending a vast amount of money to have them back here.

But what I have here is probably more of a social problem than a technical one. I’m currently in the outskirts of Los Angeles, knowing almost nobody outside of the office in this area (Pesa is far enough), and too shy to go out the night alone. What I have spent most of my weekends doing here is reading: on the Pier and in the local Starbucks. Which is good, to be honest, as I like to read, and I used not to find enough time to. This is the part I like about travelling: I find time to read.

Anyway, I wouldn’t mind meeting people around here, and with people I don’t necessarily mean girls, to be clear. I would just prefer not to feel so … isolated in the crowd as I feel now. I guess being a geek in the surfer’s paradise is not that great a situation. But what has this to do with eBooks? Well, one thing that seemed to help for me the few weeks I spent in university was greeting people who were going around with books that I read before (and the other way around).. but it’s hard to do so when you move around with an Amazon Kindle, as it shows no book cover!

Okay, it’s true I did talk for a little while with a guy who was curious about the reader itself, but it still takes away all the people who know already the Kindle, and who might already have one. Maybe eBook readers should have two screens, one on the backside where it can keep displaying the cover of the book you’re reading, so that you can break the ice with new people. But most likely I guess this is one less thing people can rely upon to break the ice.

I guess it’ll take me quite longer to actually get to meet people around here then. Next thing to try? Getting a real deck of Magic: The Gathering and finding out where the nearest place to play is.

Texinfo to Kindle, an odissey

This should be my last week in Los Angeles for the moment. Tomorrow Excelsior will be connected directly to the Internet, with its own IP (v4) and an IPv6 tunnel ready. I’ll catch a plane next week to go back to Italy to take care of a few things, while it crunches numbers.

Since I’m expecting long plane rides in my future, I hope to be able to read much more. In particular, I want to finally find the time to learn enough Elisp to write my own Emacs modes. I really miss a decent ActionScript mode while I’m working on Flash code (don’t ask).

So I set myself out to find a way to produce a standard ePub file — from that, converting to a Kindle-compatible Mobi file, is just a matter of using Calibre.

I found this post from one and a half years ago, which describe the situation pretty nicely.. while I’m currently ignoring the issue with the TOC that the author is describing (probably simply because I haven’t been able to load this on my Kindle and judge it yet), I found a different one: makeinfo will generate invalid XML.

The problem lies in the id= attribute of XML, which is tightly specified by the language to have a given format (has to start with only certain characters, and then only a few more are allowed — it can’t start with a number for instance, nor it can contain a slash character). While makeinfo already had a function to (partially) escape an XML id, it wasn’t using it for the docbook output. The function itself, then, wasn’t considering all the escapes, and thus even when calling it, the output would still be invalid, if the texi sources contained non-alphanumeric characters.

So now I have a patch for texinfo which should work; too bad I also have to get a copyright assignment for this as well, and I don’t know if I’ll have to wait till I get home to sign and send it back or not. The important part is having the patch though. I also fixed the issue with setfilename being added to the output when creating docbook.

Then there is another issue: the dbtoepub script. In Gentoo this script is installed by docbook-xsl-stylesheets and docbook-xsl-ns-stylesheets within /usr/share — the problem is that it was never mad easy to execute, and its dependencies weren’t considered. I took the chance of a bump of the stylesheets to add an USE flag for Ruby to the package (the script is written in Ruby) that will either remove the script or also install an executable wrapper so that it can be executed.

Actually, while I was at it, I made sure that the two ebuilds, which install two variants of the same basic content, will be almost identical just changing the directory where the content is installed, and making the remaining changes happen depending on $PN (an exception being the keywords as the namespaced version is not used so much, it’s just me liking them most of the time).

After I got the epub file, it was time to make sure it was complying with the specs; I’ve been burnt before by invalid or simply non-standard epub files. Luckily, Adobe of all people released an open source (BSD-licensed) tool to audit the files; epubcheck version 1.1 is now in tree as app-text/epubcheck. I’m hoping somebody who knows more Java than me can get a new version of jing in tree so I can bring epubcheck 3 into the tree — they use a quite newer one than is available right now, and that’s bad. The new version is designed to support the new version of the epub standard (which is supported by the 1.77.0 release of the stylesheets as well, and should be relatively easy to use even without Ruby), so I’m fine with version 1.1 right now.

Anyway all the tools I’ve been using should now be in tree (I’m testing the texinfo patch as we speak), and soon enough I should be able to start reading that manual on my Kindle.. expect some Emacs modes from me, afterwards.

Artificial Regions Redux

It’s now over two months ago that I landed in the US with the idea of doing my job, do it well, and then consider moving here if the job was right. And two months ago I wrote about some stupid limitations of services based on where you were when you registered.

Now, even though I’m not here stable yet, I’m getting there: I have a bank account and a check card, and I have some billing address that I can use. So finally for instance I got access to Amazon’s App Store, which is not enabled even if you’re paying for Amazon Prime, as long as you don’t set your primary form of payment to a credit card (and address) in the US.

This should be easy, shouldn’t it? Not really; as it turns out, once I switched that around, Amazon stopped letting me buy Italian Kindle books…. which sounds silly given that they let me buy them before, and I haven’t removed my Italian credit cards, just not set them as default! Furthermore I’m not stopped from accessing them if I had them before.

The absurdities don’t stop here though; since I now have a check card in the US, I moved my iTunes Store account over… this actually enabled a few more functionalities, such as the “iTunes in the Cloud” and the fact that I can now re-download my purchased music as well as Books and Apps (which is the only two items that can be re-downloaded in Italy), but on the other hand, it threw off the previous purchases, showing all my purchased Apps as not available. While I was neither expecting nor hoping that my previous music purchases were available, I was pissed by the fact that it asked me to purchase again the software, especially things like TeamViewer, which is quite expensive. Luckily Apple’s tech support solved the issue relatively quickly.

So there you move to Android Market Google Play, that actually enabled me access to the US software simply by popping in the AT&T SIM card… well, while they did enable access to the US software, they still thought better to keep me off the Google Play Music store, as I was still registered in Italy. And while at it, when I actually purchased an App there… it ended up being charged in euros instead of dollars — this might sound strange, but it means that you pay more for it simply because the bank is going to ask you extra money for the currency exchange. Technically, the MII should tell them which currency the card is using by default, but instead of relying on that, they rely on your billing address… which they also don’t validate against the bank (as Newegg does instead).

Oh well… at least things seem to be more or less sane by now: most of the Italian books I had in my Amazon wishlist are available through the publishers’ group webshop which also provide most of them without DRM. Looks like Amazon is making it much nicer for everybody to buy eBooks now. Not all of them of course, but it’s still a step in the right direction.. and at the same time I’m very happy with buying them on the Kindle if I’m on the go, as I’m sure they are not going to kick me in my balls like Kobo did with The Salmon of Doubt (which I’m currently reading, after buying it again).

The misery of the ePub format

I often assume that most of the people reading my blog have been reading it for a long enough time that they know a few of my quirks, one of which is my “passion” for digital distribution, and in particular my liking of eBooks over printed books. This passion actually stems from the fact I’d like to be able to move out of my current home soonish, and the least “physical” stuff I have to bring with me, the better.

I started buying eBooks back in 2010, when I discovered my Sony Reader PRS-505 (originally only capable of reading Sony’s own format) was updated to be able to read the “standard” ePub format, protected with Adobe’s Digital Editions DRM (ADEPT). One of my first suppliers for books in that format was WHSmith, the British bookstore chain. At the end I bought six books from them: Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World (which I read already, but wanted a digital copy of, after giving away my hardcopy to a friend of mine), and four books of The Dresden Files.

After a while, I had to look at other suppliers for a very simple reason: WHSmith started requiring me a valid UK post code, which I obviously don’t have. I then moved on to Kobo since they seemed to have a more varied selection, and weren’t tied to the geographical distribution of the UK vendor.

Here I got one of my first disappointments with the ePub “standard”: one of the books I bought from Kobo earlier, Douglas Adams’s The Salmon of Doubt I still haven’t been able to read!

(I really wish Kobo at least replaced the book on their catalogue, since even their applications can’t read it, or otherwise I would like some store credit to get a different book, since that one can’t be read with their own applications.)

Over time, I came to understand that the ePub specifications are just too lax to make it a good format: there are a number of ePub files that are broken simply because the ZIP file is “corrupted” (the names within the records don’t match); a few required me to re-package them to be readable by the Reader; and a few more are huge just because they decide to get their own copy of DejaVu font family in the zip file itself. Of course to fix any of these issues, you also have to take the DRM out of the picture, which is luckily very easy for this format.

Today, Kobo is once again the protagonist of a disappointment, a huge one, in terms of digital distribution; together with WHSmith. But first let’s take a step back to last week.

While in the United States with Luca, I got my hands on a Kindle (the version with keyboard); why? Well, from one side I was starting to be irked by the long list of issues I noted earlier about ePub books, but on the other hand, a few books such as Ian Fleming’s classic Bond novels were not available on Kobo or other ePub suppliers, while they were readily available on Amazon… plus a few of the books I could find on both Kobo and Amazon were slightly cheaper on the latter. I already started reading Fleming’s novels on the iPad through Amazon’s app, but I don’t like reading on a standard LCD.

Coming back home, we passed through London Heathrow; Luca went to look for a book to read on the way home, and we went to the WHBook shop there… and I was surprised to see it was now selling Kobo’s own reader device (the last WHSmith shop I was at, a couple of years ago, was selling Sony exclusively). This sounded strange, considering that WHSmith and Kobo were rivals, for me in particular but in general as well.

I wasn’t that far off, when I smelled something fishy; indeed, tonight I received a mail from WHSmith telling me they joined forces with Kobo, and that they will no longer supply eBooks on their webshop. The format being what it is, if they no longer kept the shop, you’d be found without a way to re-download or eBooks, which is why it is important for a digital distributor to be solid for me.. turns out that WHSmith is not as solid as I supposed. So they suggest you to make an account at Kobo (unless you have one already, like I did) so that they can transfer your books on that account.

Lovely! For me that was very good news, since having the books on my Kobo account means not only being able to access them as ePub (which I had already), but also that I could read them on their apps for Android and iPad, as well as on their own website (very Amazon-y of them). Unfortunately there is a problem: out of the six books I bought at WHSmith, they only let me transfer… two!

Seems like that, even though WHSmith decided to give (or sell) its customers to Kobo, as well as leaving them to provide their ebook offering instead, their partnership does not cover the distribution rights of the books they used to sell. This means that for instance the four Dresden Files novels I bought from WHSmith, that were being edited, even digitally, by the British publisher, are not available to the Canadian store Kobo, who only list the original RoC offerings.

This brings up two whole issues: the first is that unless your supplier is big enough that you can rely on it to exists forever, you shouldn’t trust DRM; luckily for me on the ePub side the DRM is so shallow that I don’t really care for its presence, and on the other hand I foresee Amazon’s DRM to be broken way before they start to crumble. The second issue is that even in the market of digital distribution, which is naturally a worldwide, global market, the regional limitations are making it difficult to have fair offerings; again Amazon seems to sidestep this issue, as it appears to me like there is no book available only on one region in their Kindle offerings: the Italian Kindle store covers all the American books as well.