Project Gutenberg for SONY Reader!

Alright, our office went on a 2-day ski trip to Whistler (one of the Google perks), and since I'm not an enthusiastic skier, I stayed behind to finish up some work, play some Halo, and do other fun projects.

One of my recent fun projects is a proxy of Project Gutenberg web site that adds ability to translate to SONY Reader. I was playing with it for a while now, and it slowly shaped itself into ~1kloc of Java code that actually seems to work.

So I thought I'd throw it here to see what happens. Note that this is ALPHA code. There is a good chance that I will take it down soon to fix bugs. It is also a standalone program running embedded HTTP server - eventually it will migrate into a servlet on Apache. But right now it seems to be doing something useful, so feel free to play with it.

Several notes:

1. It is not intended to replace the official Gutenberg web site. Please go to http://www.gutenberg.org directly if you need to download stuff other than SONY books.


2. This is running off my DLS connection. Please please please do not be a bandwidth hog. Absolutely no crawlers! Robots.txt is set accordingly, and there are abuse counters, so if you crawl, YOU WILL BE BANNED. FOREVER! Worse, crawling may trigger P. G. abuse logic, and then the web site will be down, because I won't be able to get to them.


3. This is ALPHA. This means bugs, potentially, a lot of them. Please be a good member of community, and if you do find a bug, leave a note with repro steps, a URL that did not work, etc. in comments section to this article. Please take a look at previous comments, the problem may have already been reported.


4. If you are a hacker - you can probably hack this machine. But its image gets wiped every so often, and there is absolutely nothing else on that PC. And it's physically outside my home network, on its own IP. So your triumph will be hollow and short-lived.

Alright, without further ado, here's the link:

http://www.solyanik.org:9000

Give it a whirl!

UPDATE 02/03/08

I've fixed a ton of bugs in it today - I am actually feeling quite good about the code now. So I am upgrading it to ALPHA! I could use some feedback from users though - so if you did use it, please tell me how it went!

Known issue: makelrf which I use to translate the texts crashes on some files. When this happens, you get a 403 page.

TODO:

1. Move to Apache running as a servlet from current embedded web server.


2. Move to a newer translation technology from makelrf.

When this is done, I will call it a BETA.

UPDATE 02/05/08

I've found and fixed the problem with crashing makelrf. It had static buffers for title, author, and description, which was not so big - 40-something characters for title, for example. It was frequently overflowing and crashing.

I've made my software limit the strings to the sizes that makelrf supports. If you tried to download a Reader book from the site but failed, try again. It should now work. In my own testing, the site has been quite reliable recently.