[huskerlug] Re: Why I can't contribute to Open Source

        Carl, 

                That's why they invented assasins...kill your opponents
and the open source community (and all of the girls that go along with it)
are yours. 

                ;-)

        *******************************************************
        *           Benjamin Rush (brush@xxxxxxxxxxx)         *
        *               http://cse.unl.edu/~brush/            *
        *         Undergradute Computer Scientist @ UNL       * 
        *******************************************************


On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Carl Lundstedt wrote:

> 
> Hey all,
> I wanted to share with you all my most recent experience with open source and 
> tell you why I really can't contribute anything new to this massive movement.
> 
> I recently wanted to read a very popular book that isn't out in paperback yet 
> (I'll certainly buy it when it goes paperback).  A friend had loned me his 
> copy, but needed it back before I had finished. Now I was really stuck, I 
> wanted to finish the book.  SO I went to "the internet lending library", i.e. 
> gnutella, and low-and-behold some dude in Germany had the book in .txt 
> format.  I didn't want to read the book off a computer screen, so I loaded it 
> up into emacs and stripped it, chapter by chapter into my PalmPilot's memo 
> area (using J-pilot).  It took alot of time, and I thought "wouldn't it be 
> cool if I wrote a program that stripped a book down, chapter-by-chapter and 
> fed it to a palm pilot".
> 
> Guess what, with all the cool tools that are out there already, its ALREADY 
> BEEN DONE!  I did write a small PERL script that stripped the book by chapter 
> (this is super easy), then all I had to do was run the palm utility called 
> "install-memo" (which was installed with the palm-tools package).  Now, what 
> took me nearly a half an hour of cut and paste, took me no-time at all. (Take 
> care about the 4k limit of the palm memos.  You may have to do some size 
> checking before slamming the files into a Palm.)
> 
> Now I just
> a) get book.txt (there are some places on the net to get public domain books)
> 
> b) run my PERL stripper to create text files called Chapter_1.txt, 
> Chapter_2.txt...etc
> >chapter_break.pl book.txt  
> (see end of message)
> 
> c) run install-memo, i.e.
>   > install-memo -t -p /dev/ttyS0 chapter_* 
> 
> Done.  Of course a call to install-memo could be tacked into the PERL script 
> and just be done with it in one go....
> 
> My conclusion, if you want it done, you aren't the first and someone has 
> already made it real easy.  Thus how can I contribute to Open source when it 
> seems like all the easy stuff has been done?
> 
> --==--
> FYI, here is the PERL code that used to strip the chapters, edit as needed 
> (Chapter_0.txt will contain only text located before chapter 1 (such as 
> title, author etc)  Make sure you strip off any table of contents before 
> running,  also make sure that each chapter in the text file starts with a 
> "Chapter" line, or make the code smarter to handle any such things....:
> 
> #!/usr/bin/perl
> use FileHandle;
> $i=0;
> $doc="Chapter_$i.txt";
> open(CHAPTER, "> $doc");
> while(<>){
>     split;
>     if($_[0]=~m/Chapter/x){
>         close(CHAPTER);
>         $i++;
>         $doc="Chapter_$i.txt";
>         open(CHAPTER, "> $doc");
> }
>         print CHAPTER ($_);
> }
> close(CHAPTER);
> 
> Carl
> -- 
> ===========
> In a display of perverse brilliance, Carl the repairman mistakes a room
> humidifier for a mid-range computer but manages to tie it into the network
> anyway.
>               -- The 5th Wave
> 
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> 


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