Getting off my arse

[mdlbear]

I finally seem to have broken through a creative logjam that has lasted for almost a year: I'm actually making progress on some projects. My evidence for this is not only the recording and editing I did over the weekend, but the fact that I've actually gotten some real programming done at work. Not a huge amount, mind, but it's interesting and will result in something I can demo.

The goal is a fast, efficient e-book reader that will run on tiny processors with limited memory (like the 200MHz ARM in my Nokia 770, or my ancient 386-based IBM tablet at home). The general idea is to use a suitable makefile to bust a PDF file up into a directory full of page images in pgm or ppm format, which is about as close as you can get to a pure raster file. Along the way you crop off as much of the margins as you can get away with, and rotate the images so you can show them in portrait orientation.

The second part is a trivial browser/reader in the form of a shell script. It uses four buttons (next, previous, up, and down) to navigate the directory tree, representing each subdirectory (book or chapter) with its first image, and keeping track of the current position in each directory using an index file. Oh, yes: hitting the "previous" button when you descend into a directory takes you to the page you were reading when you left it.

With any luck I'll have it done tomorrow or Thursday. And of course I still have some writing to do, to which this is only tangentially related. But still, progress is progress.