tdaxp

NetLibrary is an online book resources that universities or other individuals pay to supply them with virtual copies of books. These books are available online, and can be searched, downloaded, and saved. The catch is that NetLibrary's interface limits you to viewing (in horribly slow Acrobat reader) one page at a time. Given how unresponsive Acrobat makes many computers, this can make printing out a long book take hours.

Therefore, I took the effort to figure out how to batch download a book from NetLibrary, saving me valuable time.

My solution uses a combination of Firefox and Perl, but other solutions are of course available.

After I loaded up the first true page of the book in the NetLibrary interface, I gave the frame with the PDF its own Window used Firefox's Tools | Page Info | Media properties dialog box to determine the URL of the embedded PDF file. It turns out it's a call to a program named nlReader.dll, but it takes a book identification number and page number as arguments:

http://0-www.netlibrary.com.library.unl.edu/nlreader/nlReader.dll?BookID=BOOKIDGOESHERE&FileName=FILENAMEGOESHERE

Obviously, the library.unl.edu part requires my university proxy. For normal pages, the filename was in the format of Page_1.pdf, Page_2.pdf, etc. So I wrote a perlscript to create hyperlinks to pages 1 to 499, saved the output to HTML, used the DownloadThemAll! Firefox extention to get them, and...

Then Acrobat crashed trying to print out those hundreds of PDFs. Boo! Fortunately, Perl came to my rescue... I used ppm to install the module Perl::Reuse, then wrote a script to append all those pdfs into one. The final product is about 500 pages ans 70 megs, but quite easy to store, print out, etc.

Thanks, NetLibrary!

I've been using Blackboard's discussion board feature as part of my reasearch assistantship these past few days. Anyone who has used the software knows just what a joy that is.

There's a silent eror when using firefox browser. "Sort by date" under discussion collections myseriously scrambles the dates. This problem does not appear under Internet Explorer.

As I'm on all three, I think I can say this safely:

Facebook: For when you're too smart for MySpace, but too dumb for LinkedIn.

Heh.

More seriously, I've only ever used (as opposed to played with) only two of the web 2.0 properties: LinkedIn and del.icio.us. Of the two, delicious is far more useful. It's tagging and search capabilities, especially in the del.icio.us for Firefox extension, would be worth it even if there was no "social" aspect at all. I find "popular tags" to be particularly useful, because it saves me those mental clicks in deciding how to categorize a useful page.

I sometimes use ScribeFire to blog from Firefox. It's a nifty tool, but I often find it's as easy to open wordpad off to the browswer's side than to have ScribeFire's dialog box take up the bottom half of the screen.

Delicious, by contrast, is almost a perfect blog editor for me. It's plain text, it's fast, and it can be moved around. del.icio.us's main drawback, however, is that the "description" has to be short... as can be seen below, I can't even fully describe my own blog in it's description field:

What I want is a Firefox extension that allows me to blog like ScribeFire, but is as lightweight as del.icio.us. I don't care about fancy editing, wysiwyg, or other capabilities. If I can add a title, descriptoin, and tags, and have it post the hyperlinked title and my description, I'd be as happy as a clam.

Any suggestions?

PS: I checked my delicious network today, and saw that BobbyZero of Biro Sketchbook sent it Tom's Ancient professions always suffer when globalization embraces a natio. Thanks BobbyZero! You're now part of del.icio.us net!

A review of Firefox from a very non-technological relative.

We've been using Firefox on new computer. Is SO slick to have high speed! Is going to be a HUGE timesaver! Just looking at photos my mom sent last night--didn't have to wait 10 sec. or more for each photo to load--was instantaneous! What a relief!