I am slowly moving most of the public projects and code over to github so that people can use it and change it more effectively.

This is exactly the lesson that this book tries to drive home. It goes through the different aspects of creating a product from the programming and support to the licensing and legal side. The book also includes several interviews with people who have already done that. Personally, I found the interviews the most enjoyable part of it all.

The interesting part, to me, in all of this is the applications described in those interviews were really boring. As a programmer, they’re not exactly the kind of work that we love to do. I mean come on, a product to manage a stable? Tracking horses and lessons? Zzzzzz…. Not exactly the kind of work that would keep you up coding all night long. However, the applications were a success because they helped people to do their job better. They eased the pain of doing those things manually and, who knows, maybe gave someone less stress and more time to spend with their family. That is certainly what computers and programs are meant to do. To help us do what we’re supposed to do. And we’re all here to do what we’re all here to do.(The Matrix reference)

It took me a while to learn that lesson. I first noticed it when, as a freelancer, I had to work on a few jobs just to pay the bills. The tasks weren’t enjoyable to me as a programmer, I was just doing it for the money. And as a programmer, a lot of those tasks were very simple to do. Yet the people who I worked with were very grateful that I helped. And, as a business and a person, there’s nothing like a happy customer.

On the cons side of things, this wasn’t exactly a page-turner. Don’t get me wrong, the book is interesting. But recently I’ve been reading a lot of books about entrepreneurship and starting a business. And aside from the inspiration, once you’ve read one, you’ve read them all.

Overall, I give this book 3/5 stars. You can get the book from From Program to Product: Turning Your Code into a Saleable Product (Expert’s Voice).

Does anyone else think that this is hideous? It’s a dictionary keyed by strings and holding lists of dictionaries keyed by strings and holding strings. And it is what you get when you have a statically typed language(C#) and no native dictionaries.

The code is trying to build a tree to encode as JSON to pass to javascript to represent as a tree widget…try saying that ten times.

I know what you’re thinking…and no, the code is no longer there, it only survived for a few mins before another iteration replaced it with something less icky..I tend to use evolutionary steps and refactor as i go.

The problem is that the books are provided via separate pdf files for chapters. I am not sure why they do that, I think to make it tougher to pirate the files? Although that doesn’t really make any sense. Regardless, it is a bit annoying and I’d like to have the books as one pdf to transfer over to my trusty Sony Reader(more about it later) to read them while on the go.

So i hacked up a python script to rename the individual files by their chapter number making it easier to join. I then hacked up another script that reads these files and joins them in correct order into one file. Sadly, the scripts are only tested on Linux and will probably only run there. The first version used pyPDF and was probably cross-platform, but it had some problems with the pdfs so i reverted to using pdftotext that, as far as i know, only runs under a GNU Linux system.

This is what the code looks like for the script that does the renaming.

#! /usr/bin/python
import os
import os.path
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
import glob
import sys
import re
import shutil

def main(argv):
    fullPath = os.path.abspath(argv[1])
    print "Looking at %s" % fullPath

    for fileName in glob.glob(os.path.join(fullPath, '*.pdf')):
        try:
            fullFileName = os.path.join(fullPath, fileName)
            print "Converting %s" % fullFileName

            pOpenCls = Popen(("/usr/bin/pdftotext", fullFileName, "-"), stdout=PIPE)
            convertOut = pOpenCls.stdout

            titleContent = ""

            for i in xrange(1, 6):
                titleContent += convertOut.readline()

            titleContent = titleContent.replace('\n', '')

            digitSearch = re.search('\d+', titleContent)

            if digitSearch != None:
                newChapterPdf = os.path.join(fullPath, digitSearch.group(0) + ".pdf")

                while os.path.exists(newChapterPdf):
                    newChapterPdf = newChapterPdf + "dup.pdf"

                shutil.move(fullFileName, newChapterPdf)

            else:
                print "File is not a chapter, checking if front or back"
                if fileName.find("front") != -1:
                    firstPdf = os.path.join(fullPath, "0.pdf")

                    while os.path.exists(firstPdf):
                        firstPdf = firstPdf + "0.pdf"

                    shutil.move(fullFileName, firstPdf)

                elif fileName.find("back") != -1:
                    lastPdf = os.path.join(fullPath, "9999.pdf")

                    while os.path.exists(lastPdf):
                        lastPdf = lastPdf + "9.pdf"

                    shutil.move(fullFileName, lastPdf)

        except OSError, ex:
            print ex
            print 'Failed', fullFileName

if __name__ == "__main__":
    if len(sys.argv) < 2:
        print "Supply directory as argument"
        sys.exit()
    main(sys.argv)

This is what the code looks like for the script that does the joining. pyPDF is needed for this to function.

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import glob
import os
import os.path
import pprint
from pyPdf import PdfFileWriter, PdfFileReader

def compareByActualNumbers(x, y):
    strippedX = os.path.basename(x)[:-4]
    strippedY = os.path.basename(y)[:-4]

    if not (strippedX.isdigit() and strippedY.isdigit()):
        return 0

    xInt = int(strippedX)
    yInt = int(strippedY)

    if xInt < yInt:
        return -1
    elif xInt == yInt:
        return 0
    elif xInt > yInt:
        return 1

def main(argv):
    fullPath = os.path.abspath(argv[1])
    outputFileName = os.path.join(fullPath, "fullBook.pdf")
    print "Looking at %s" % fullPath

    outputPDF = PdfFileWriter()

    pdfList = glob.glob(os.path.join(fullPath, '*.pdf'))
    sortedPdfList = sorted(pdfList, compareByActualNumbers)

    pp = pprint.PrettyPrinter(indent=2)
    pp.pprint(sortedPdfList)

    for chapPdf in sortedPdfList:
        pdfInput = PdfFileReader(file(chapPdf, "rb"))
        for i in xrange(pdfInput.getNumPages()):
            outputPDF.addPage(pdfInput.getPage(i))

    # finally, write "output" to document-output.pdf
    outputStream = file(outputFileName, "wb")
    outputPDF.write(outputStream)
    outputStream.close()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    if len(sys.argv) < 2:
        print "Supply directory as argument"
        sys.exit()

    main(sys.argv)

You can download the scripts from the My Projects section. The code will be licensed under the GNU GPL.

Note to publishers, you really should step into the 21st century. Especially for the technical books, I really don’t want to pay shipping costs that are more than the price of the book, the printing costs and all the other unneeded crap…I just want the content. This is especially true for technical books that get outdated very quickly such as books about frameworks.

We also all agreed that we need more barcamps, more meet ups and more gatherings like this. To facilitate collaboration between entrepreneurs, hackers, and geeks in general. Very exciting indeed…

I feel like a 90 year old today and I’m paying the price of all of yesterday’s excitement. So forgive me my uploading speed….next up, the photos.

I’d like to thank the organizers of BarCamp-Lebanon, especially David and Sami. If you’d like to know more about the barcamp, you can visit the wiki page at BarCamp-Lebanon.

Gathering ideas about this issue and getting feedback. Interesting. Presenter saying, “programming sucks”…really? I don’t think so.

Also talking that we should have meet ups for sharing knowledge…completely agree. Building up tech meet ups that are fun.

Somebody pitching something called lebgeeks in this session to get more feedback.
I am all in for it.

Basically, since the cost of digital distribution is going down, we should use that to promote our brands, our knowledge and even our education.

Discussion moving on towards piracy and why is it widespread in this part of the world. Somebody noted that it is actually a much bigger problem in Asia and is a big problem throughout the world. General consensus is that media distribution that is in place is broken…Having a broken system promotes sharing and some people took it further towards piracy.

Speaker promoting using creative commons for digital content…for non-commercial use. I am not sure about that. I am not against commercial uses, just the way the content is distributed and sold.

Talk about collecting societies, interesting idea…never head about it before. Still not sure. What is being said doesn’t really chime with what i think. Maybe because i write software instead of producing digital media.

I feel like listening to a soft Richard Stallman, “sharing is good”….

Would you say this is funny or sad?

Oh yeah, and say it with me folks. Its called Inter-process communication.

For people who don’t want to re-invent the wheel, we sure are manufacturing a lot of horse-driven carriages.