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December 2008 - Posts

The Second Kindle Post

posted Saturday, December 27, 2008 10:21 PM by hussain

It's been slightly over a year since I got my Kindle and I've really had a great time with it - I pretty much carry it everywhere and I almost always have something to read. Almost. I do buy books from Amazon via their built-in whispernet service which downloads $10 ebooks in 20 or so seconds and I receive the Wall Street Journal daily (except Sundays).

I really like the fact that I can convert pdfs, html, txt, and even word docs to the Mobipocket format that the Amazon reader accepts via the Mobipocket Creator software. That takes time, though, to find and even format the documents into HTML (that's what the mobipocket "mobi" format is) that's readable and flows correctly. Sure, you can accept all the default settings and go, but PDFs tend to come out strangely. Lazy as I am, this leaves me with Amazon-sourced info.

Recently, I've wanted to have more than just the Amazon-offered publications. One of my favorites, Foreign Affairs, doesn't come in a digital format (I've asked), so I get my subscription bimonthly and carry it around for a while. Since most articles on the web (even this one) have a "print" format, I figured it's time to whip up a quick web page to prc (that's Amazon's synonym extension for "mobi") converter

It's a Windows UI ontop of Mobipocket's mobigen.exe (their command-line converter).

Once the mobigen.exe is downloaded and extracted, using KindleConverter is straightforward - set the mobigen.exe location in the preferences, point to a url, such as http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070701faessay86401/barack-obama/renewing-american-leadership.html?mode=print, and convert.

KindleConverter.zip (Read Me)

As always, use with care and note the copyright usage of the sites whose articles you convert.

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App-a-Weekend: What's in this build?

posted Sunday, December 07, 2008 9:25 PM by hussain

It's usually a nagging question at work or a random idea that gets me writing these app-a-weekends. This one's partially in response to the question I get from QA folks (and business people) - "What's in this build?"

Towards generating "Change Log" notes, here's yet another winforms app - this time to view svn logs. The interesting thing about this one is that I sort of used a scrum-of-one for it: I defined backlogs, defined tasks for those backlogs and have been executing on them.

First, the app's goal: to make a stand alone svn log viewer that could output comments nicely to produce the beginnings of a "Change Log" for various apps. It needs URL persistence and the ability to display svn's logs nicely. Apart from the "Change Log" generation, QA folks at work want to know what's in different builds.

To perform the actual svn log command, the app calls out to the command line svn.exe, which I downloaded from Collabnet.


  1. List log differences btw svn revisions
    1. call svn
    2. toggle verbose
  2. Manage list of svn repositories
    1. add repository urls and nicknames
    2. save
    3. recall
    4. view in grid
    5. edit
  3. Display nicely
    1. raw text format
    2. as grid view
  4. Export nicely
    1. save as text
    2. save as Word 2007
    3. save as Excel 2007
  5. Tie up loose ends
    1. warn if svn.exe is missing

Over the weekend I started the app, did all of 1 (1.1, 1.2), some of 2 (2.1, 2.2, 2.3), and 3.1.

Tonight I did 2.4.

My backlog is:
3. 2. Display : In Grid
4. 1. Save : As Text
5. 1. Loose: Check for Svn
2. 5. Svn List: Edit

If I really wanted to push the "app-a-weekend" thing, I could throw in an msi and a chm help file. Other things that would make this a more useful concept are if this was tied in to a particular projects tag-numbering scheme and if it was a webpage, so that the users didn't need to install an app. Refactoring the final product into libraries for use in a web app should do the trick.

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