December turned out to be a pretty busy month for me – here are some of the stuff I have been involved in/working on:

• FOSS.in: As always FOSS.in ‘09 turned out to be an amazing affair. Being someone who works remotely, this event is probably one of the best opportunities for me to have “real” interactions. It’s a place where I can simply sit down, have long face to face conversations, come up with new ideas, be inspired, and most importantly, have fun. My heartfelt thanks goes out to the people behind the event for making this possible. I have some photos in this Flickr photoset.
• Book reader: This month’s priority has been stabilizing the Sugarlabs/OLPC book-reader code, and a large number of important bugfixes landed during the last few weeks. More in this status report.
• Arduino: At FOSS.IN, thanks to the efforts of the ever enthusiastic Kushal Das, I managed to get hold of an Arduino clone board (it is terribly difficult to get hold of one in Kolkata). I had heard of Arduino before and wanted to get one, and the session on it at FOSS.in by Russell Nelson finally served as the “kick” which made Kushal and me call up the local distributor and get a couple of boards for ourselves. I have been playing around with sensors support in Sugar for sometime (I helped make the Measure activity work on XO 1.5 hardware), and realized that this would be yet another interesting way to connect Sugar with the “real” world. So after a couple of weekends worth of work, I got Arduino support in Turtle Art.
  
  
  
  
  
• XO keyboards: There may be a new AZERTY keyboard for the XO laptops very soon. See this wikipage for details.
• Pootle: The Pootle developers have released version 2.0, which is a vastly improved edition compared to the previous releases. I have been testing it out with plans to upgrade the Sugarlabs/OLPC translation server soon. While testing, I added a quick (and ugly) hack to implement msgfmt –check style syntax checking in Pootle. This would definitely make the process of integrating the translations with the upstream code much less painful – and here’s a screenshot (click on it for a larger version):
  
  
  

Its all over the web now – the Internet Archive has opened up over 1.6 million books for the OLPC XO laptops and in general, any machine running Sugar. Before going into anything else, it makes sense to provide a more specific meaning of “opening up” here – it involves two main objectives completed at the Internet Archive end:

• Making sure that the books are readable in the XO, keeping in mind its relative low-end hardware specs and disk-space limitations
• Ensuring that the books are available via a standardized catalog format, so that one can find, browse and download books easily using a tool more tuned for the purpose (think of feed-readers versus blog-entries in a web-page)

Now that the books are available (not just from the Internet Archive, but from a number of other sources as well), the next step is to figure out the best possible ways to actually make these books available to the XO and Sugar users. The major constraining factor is bandwidth, we do have deployments with zero, or very limited Internet connectivity, and perhaps these are the deployments which need access to these books the most. I spent most of this week working on implementing a feature in the Get Books activity which would allow books to be distributed via what has been jokingly called a sneaker-net (or sandalnet/chappalnet, if you prefer those forms of footwear). The idea is very simple – at a centralized location with Internet access, choose a few thousand books (size of a typical book is usually a few hundred KB or less), put them in a USB pen-drive and add a OPDS catalog to the mix. Make copies of the drive, and send them to the schools without connectivity. The latest version of Get Books would recognize the drive, and let the student browse through the collection, search for books, and add whatever she wants to the Sugar Journal. Once a book is in the Journal, it can be shared among all the students using the Journal object transfer support in Sugar, or via the Read Activity directly. So essentially, you get a Library on a Stick, with thousands of books, something which, till now, in its physical form, has been largely restricted to better equipped (and usually richer) schools.
Of course, even larger collections can be distributed if a School Server (XS) is present in the mix (due to the fact that the school server can have a larger disk in it), and support for this type of distribution method involving the XS would hopefully appear within the next few releases of Get Books.

Articles and posts like this (and subsequently this) underline the need for a status report about ebook-reading in Sugar and in the XO laptops. For the past few months, apart from my usual duties, I have been working on the book-reading stack for OLPC and Sugar, and this may be viewed as a progress report of the things I have been doing.
I have been mostly working on the Read Activity in Sugar, which is supposed to do the most heavy lifting as far as book-reading goes – though there is also ReadEtexts by Jim Simmons, which primarily handles plain text files from Project Gutenberg (the latest version of ReadEtexts supports RTF files as well). Currently, the ebook formats that are supported in Sugar include

• Epub
• PDF
• DJVU
• Plain Text (specifically the format used by Project Gutenberg)
• Postscript
• CBZ
• RTF

There also exists a sugar-ified FBReader, with support for more formats (such as plucker and non DRM’ed mobipocket).
With the last major release of Read (a part of Sugar 0.86), apart from the addition of Epub support, there has been usability improvements and tweaks (particularly for the full-screen mode), as well as support for bookmarks (notes can be associated with each bookmark).

For the next major release, I have started to work on support for highlighting text (at least in Epub files) and better usage of the XO “game-keys” in fullscreen mode (so that the overall experience in tablet mode of the XO laptops become smoother). Interestingly, highlighting text did not work out as I had planned, since the highlights became almost invisible in the grayscale reflective mode of the XO laptops. So instead of highlighting, Read would probably support underlining of text (when I was a kid, we often shared books, especially school books, and I was told it is always better to underline with a pencil than to use a marker pen to highlight .

Of course, Read is only one part of the book-reading puzzle. There has to be a system in place for book acquisition as well (from the Internet as well as from a local schoolserver, if available). In a previous blog post, I mentioned Open Publication Distribution System, which is built upon the Atom syndication format to allow online book distributors to publish their catalog. I extended Jim Simmon’s Get Internet Archive Books activity to support OPDS, and now, apart from the Internet Archive, the preview version that I have can also retrieve books from Feedbooks. Here’s a video of the activity in action:

The next major step would be to implement a server side OPDS implementation in the School Server (XS), as well as some kind of caching mechanism to conserve bandwidth (if a copy of a book is found in the school server, it should be downloaded instead of the online version).
To keep up with the progress, you can either subscribe to the sugar-devel list or the more specialized (and low volume) olpc-bookreader list.