- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

monday morning quarterback -- a new weekly series
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Feb '06

27 Feb '06

later today, when i get comments back from reviewers, i will debut a new weekly series called "m.m.q.", or "monday morning quarterback"... m.m.q. is a series where i politely tell all of you good people working here at project gutenberg and distributed proofreaders how you _should_ be doing your jobs... :+) i'll let you know when it's posted, and where. and that's not all the good news i have, either! i've also picked up a smidgen of perl, lately, and you know what they say about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. yes, that's right, folks, bowerbird is now something of a script kiddie... imagine that! better lock down the web soon, or you don't know what damage i might cause... ;+) -bowerbird

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Random mention of Project Gutenberg
by Andrew Sly 25 Feb '06

25 Feb '06

Here is an interesting mention of Project Gutenberg that I found in the group alt.books.david-weber The context is a discussion of the character Ludmilla, travelling back in time from a technologically advanced future. "Also given molecular density storage its quite possible that Ludmilla's suit and/or the escape capsule has an awful lot of eBooks onboard. The twenty fifth century version of Project Gutenberg would fit on something microscopically small, and would probably contain designs for early versions of the phase drive and related tech, or at the very least books relating to their development." Andrew

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Re: [gutvol-d] clearing the decks
by Joshua Hutchinson 24 Feb '06

24 Feb '06

(I'm bored, so I'm responding to the troll today. This is a one off ... it'll be out of my system after this) > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Bowerbird(a)aol.com > > yet a mere 2 out of the 10 reported errors were actually fixed! wow! > is that a performance that you all believe that you can feel proud of? > Did you actually send that to the errata e-mail address on PG? Or just post it here where everyone has learned to tune you out? unless you send it to the errata email, no one is going to act upon it. The 2 that were fixed were very likely fixed because someone else DID forward them to the correct place. If you yell out of your front door, it is unlikely that Congress will hear and pass a new law. If you point out errors in books to people OTHER than the ones who fix it, it is unlikely that the right people will hear about it and fix the issues. > p.s. if jim's thinly-veiled insults persist over at d.p., > i'll have to start posting in those forums in response; > is that _really_ what you guys want? think about it... > Who's veiling the insults? We insult you quite openly when you deserve it. The problem is you're like a demon. Saying your name invokes the evil to appear. Josh

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clearing the decks
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 24 Feb '06

24 Feb '06

ok, let's see if i can clear the decks here, so i can get to some serious work next week... *** a while back, michael intimated that i was talking out of my ass when i speak of errors in the p.g. library, and that i should have sent _him_ the reports, so here is supporting data... *** first is a piece i wrote on errors in the p.g. copy of "swiss family robinson", _still_ all uncorrected... > http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/2005cleanup/on_swiss_family_robinson (this error-report was posted two full months ago.) *** second is a new review of the "fixes" in "the secret garden": > http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/2005cleanup/the_secret_garden_fix_an… this was a "re-do" of a book that was already in the p.g. library, so i was able to test my ideas on comparing dual digitizations... i have previously written on this project, in a gutvol-d message that was sent december 27th, shortly after the e-text was posted. in that message, i praised the accuracy, and noted 10 errors... this new post examines subsequent treatment of those errors. error-reports like this tend to get _very_ specific, so i've also posted the page-images online to help outsiders negotiate: > http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/2005cleanup/page000.jpg replace "000" in that u.r.l. with the page-number (zero-filled to 3 digits) to see the image-scan of each page as it's discussed in the error-report... in a nutshell, though, i reported 10 errors, and just 2 were fixed! this in response to a carefully-prepared error-report that gave you the page-number, the incorrect text, and the necessary correction, written only after i had taken a _very_ close look at each page-scan... how many error-reports will you get that are so well-documented? yet a mere 2 out of the 10 reported errors were actually fixed! wow! is that a performance that you all believe that you can feel proud of? *** third, i talked about how "alice in wonderland" was _very_close_ to z.m.l. compliance, but _not_there_... sorry, my memory was just a little wrong, there are _3_ excessive linebreaks in alice30.txt (not just one, as i had reported), one before each of these lines: > CHAPTER I > CHAPTER II > `Thank you, it's a very interesting dance to watch,' said of course, a linebreak that is "excessive" by z.m.l. standards is probably not something the _whitewashers_ will consider as an "error" that they need to "fix", but michael said that he wanted to know about such things, so i have told him... *** my messages were written in the course of ongoing threads, the first over on the bookpeople listserve, the second two right here. so all of these reports hit michael's e-mailbox. if you have any questions, do please feel free to ask them. otherwise, i will just sit back and wait for y'all to make these corrections... no need for a flame-war, though. i am convinced that you'll never build a better error-correction system, so somebody else (like me) will have to build one instead, and i'm prepared to do that... so save your energy... *** you will hear more from me starting on monday. which is appropriate, since tinsley likes to call me a "monday morning quarterback". heck, over on the d.p. forums, he's got it down to its acronym... get used to it, jim, you'll be hearing a lot from me, with _extensive_ demos, starting real soon now... -bowerbird p.s. if jim's thinly-veiled insults persist over at d.p., i'll have to start posting in those forums in response; is that _really_ what you guys want? think about it...

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Re: [gutvol-d] web site link not working
by Joshua Hutchinson 22 Feb '06

22 Feb '06

Working here for me. > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Greg Weeks" <greg(a)durendal.org> > To: "Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion" <gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org> > Subject: [gutvol-d] web site link not working > Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 08:38:17 -0500 (EST) > > > > I looked for a email address on the web site to send this to and didn't find > one. > > The link http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17355/17355-h/17355-h.htm from > http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/17355 doesn't work. > > -- Greg Weeks > http://durendal.org:8080/greg/ > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d >

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web site link not working
by Greg Weeks 22 Feb '06

22 Feb '06

I looked for a email address on the web site to send this to and didn't find one. The link http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17355/17355-h/17355-h.htm from http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/17355 doesn't work. -- Greg Weeks http://durendal.org:8080/greg/

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Re: question re copyright
by NWolcott 20 Feb '06

20 Feb '06

It means that someone has filed a renewal application. Whether it is a valid renewal depends on a number of things, includindg the right of the "renewer" to claim copyright. For example a copyright cannot be filed in the name of a deceased person. The estate of such person could claim copyright, however, assuming they were the legal representatives etc. If a book has not been renewed the illustrator could claim copyright for his illustrations etc. They might even have precedence over the author's estate. The legal niceties are enormous. nwolcott2(a)post.harvard.edu ----- Original Message ----- From: Gutenberg9443(a)aol.com To: nwolcott2(a)post.harvard.edu Sent: Monday, February 20, 2006 12:05 PM Subject: question re copyright I've never done a copyright search, so want to be sure I am right. I take it that ODAT means original registration, RREG means reregistration, and the book is under copyright. Is that correct? ODAT: 24SSep26 OREG: A950565 DREG: 24Sep53 RREG: R118070 RCLM: Howard Pease Anne

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Copyright searches, speeding
by NWolcott 20 Feb '06

20 Feb '06

In processing a request for copyright clearance for non-renewed copyrights, the PG rules require searching manually the renewal records for the 3 years surrounding the date of expiration for the author, title, publisher, etc. This can be a time consuming process if it is eventually found to have been renewed. I have found the following Rutgers site a quick way of determining if a book has been renewed, thus sparing much effort: http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~lesk/copyrenew.html A quick search on names titles etc will stop you from wasting a lot of time. I don't think it covers magazines. For example a quick search on Frank Harris revealed that all of his major works have been renewed. Likewise Albert Payson Terhune But Margaret Armstrong "Trelawney" showed no renewal, so a manual search is now being done to clear this for PG. nwolcott2(a)post.harvard.edu

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Re: [gutvol-d] Language free version of guiguts?
by Dave Fawthrop 18 Feb '06

18 Feb '06

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 20:19:33 -0500, Jim Tinsley <jtinsley(a)pobox.com> wrote: |On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 11:44:46 +0000, Dave Fawthrop <hyphen(a)hyphenologist.co.uk> wrote: | |>On Mon, 16 Jan 2006 15:54:37 -0500, Jim Tinsley <jtinsley(a)pobox.com> |>wrote: |> |>|On Mon, 16 Jan 2006 17:13:12 +0000, Dave Fawthrop <hyphen(a)hyphenologist.co.uk> wrote: |>| |>| |>|>I am told by the whitewashers that it is *essential* that all text for PG |>|>pass guiguts. Because this assumes that the language scanned is American |>|>it gives 90% plus false positive errors, on my books, which is totally |>|>unsatisfactory for any piece of test software. |>|> |>|>Is there a language free version of Guiguts? |>| |>|I'm not quite sure which question you're asking, and about which |>|checking tool, but I think there is some confusion somewhere, of |>|emphasis if not of fact, and I'm continually surprised by people who |>|don't know the origins of really quite recent procedures I remember |>|vividly, and I've had several threads recently about this general |>|subject of checking, so please bear with me while I regurgitate |>|history. I hope you'll find a satisfactory answer in here somewhere. |> |>I could only find one tool which shows on my Win XP computer that is |>guiguts. This as far as I can ascertain has various subroutines which |>are very badly tied together, and in no way at all follow the Windoze |>interface. |> |>|Anybody can use any programs they like to make texts, and different |>|people do use different tools, according to their own needs or the |>|needs of the individual texts. Considering that we get French and |>|German and Esperanto and Chinese texts, not to mention older English, |>|there is no one-size-fits-all solution for language. |> |>To get things past whitewashers one apparently must use this, or things get |>rejected. Your assertion is therefore clearly theoretically correct, but |>in reality absolutely wrong | |Now, this I can flatly deny. There is no such thing as a standard without a test to show that the test has been passed. Schools teach to the exam, which some think wrong, but it happened to me and judging by the media Brouhaha still happens in the UK. I was an Engineer, and there a draughtsman who failed to put a test (tolerance) on anything in a drawing, was exposed to public ridicule. If such a drawing got onto the shop floor the production departments would deliberately fail to follow any reasonable tolerance. | I can think of half-a-dozen people |offhand, regular producers, who don't use gutcheck in any form. |They don't need to. Their quality standards are high enough that |it won't find any real errors. I do run it on their texts, as a |matter of form, but I know in advance what the result will be. |For all I know, there are others, equally good, but I don't know |that they don't use gutcheck because the subject never comes up. |Most of us, of course, are not that good. You have just admitted that gutcheck is the standard on PG. | |Bill Flis, who wrote the GutWrench package, uses his own checkers |exclusively, and I know equally well that I won't find any errors |that can sanely be caught by automation in his texts either. You can |find them, if you're interested, at http://www.pgdp.net/tools/GW.zip | |>|Once, there were no checking tools at all, except for spellcheckers |>|built into Word Perfect and Word, which is what most people used, and |>|I could tell you some stories about having to convert those! |>| |>|David Price and Martin Ward and I made checkers that we used for |>|ourselves. There may have been others, but those are the ones I'm |>|aware of. Everything else was Mark One Eyeball. |>| |>|I had done a lot of cleaning-up work on a lot of texts for various |>|people, and I would then send those on to Michael for posting. They |>|would commonly take hours of work each. In self-defense, I wrote a |>|checker I (later) renamed to gutcheck. When the WWs were formed in |>|2001, I brought gutcheck with me, and we all used it to find errors |>|quickly in incoming texts. |> |>But gutcheck gives 90% plus false positive errors, many hundreds on my |>texts in Yorkshire Dialect, mostly poems. It enforces the American |>language, and American punctuation conventions. It objects to most |>Yorkshire abbreviated words such as t' which occur dozens of times |>in the poems I work on. It also objects to non standard punctuation |>which occur in my texts as an example "? whereas American convention |>apparently is ?" . |> |>Writing as one who has designed, written and sold language software for |>some 20 years (see my web site). The *first* stage in the design of any |>software involving language is how other languages will be treated. This |>is usually done by putting all the features of one language, in a specific |>data structure(s) and/or subroutine(s) which can be used or not as |>required. |> |>All I asked for was a copy of gutcheck with the features specific to |>American removed which should be a very short editing and recompiling job. | |I'm not sure how you define "American", but ALL gutcheck features are |language-specific, one way or another. You really appreciate this when |checking Hebrew or Tagalog! Even the relatively familiar French, |German and Spanish have various punctuation features quite |incompatible with gutcheck's assumptions. I'm talking with various |LOTE producers about language-specific versions, but have not yet |decided to take any action. Then gutcheck should be modified to have versions for many languages. If you read the Subject of this thread, you will find: "Language free version of guiguts?" | |>Worse the only way to view output is on a screen. Copy does not work so it |>is impossible to copy the output to a text file and edit the repeated false |>positives out of the list. It is totally unacceptable to distribute a GUI |>program where the standard Copy and Paste functions do not work |> |>Worse still and absolutely ***unforgivable*** in any GUI program the |>settings places the settings file on ***THE DESKTOP***. Deleting it loses |>all settings. |> | |I can't comment on GuiGuts. As a command-line guy, I don't use it all |that much, except sometimes, when I find some specific feature |invaluable. If you want to comment, the appropriate place is in the |GuiGuts thread of the Tool Development forum at DP, which Steve reads |and answers questions and requests in. |http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=13 I have asked the question here. I do not do forums. |>|Up till then, there was really no difference between DP and Other |>|texts, though because the people who mostly submitted from DP were |>|experienced, and because DP favored simple texts |> |>DP is by its nature not suitable for my texts, because the language is as |>different from American as say French. A non Tyke (yorkshireman) as has |>been shown in the past, has extreme difficulty understanding the text. | |Well, considering that they regularly do several languages, I doubt if |Yorkshire dialect would stand out much. Right now, in round 1, I find: |English, German (math, with LaTeX), Finnish, French with Scots, Middle |English, Middle French, Portuguese, English with Ancient Greek, |Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German, English with Breton, French, Tagalog, |Latin, and I just know there's some Esperanto around somewhere. I know |they've also done Irish (sean-litriú), because I had a hell of a time |finding all the correct characters for the UTF-8 version (and I'm |still not convinced about Tironian-et). Of course, if you want real |variety, you need to hit the European DP. | |>|And GuiGuts and gutcheck have accreted features ever since. If you |>|have GuiGuts, then you have gutcheck, since Steve bundles it with |>|GuiGuts -- and you also have a large number of other tools that may |>|or may not be useful for the particular text you're working on. |>| |>|There are many other checkers available as well, and I'd love to |>|ramble on about them, but this is too long already, and it doesn't |>|bear on your question. |> |>|This is how it comes -- by evolution, not by fiat -- |> |>Untrue! |>I am *forced* to use guiguts/gutcheck by the Whitewashers. | |I say again: not everyone does. Just eradicate all mistakes and nobody |will ever know what you used. | |>Gutcheck does not work on Windoze. | |It runs in a Win32 command prompt, but it doesn't have a GUI on any |platform. "You have to be joking MAN" | |>| that incoming |>|texts are checked with _several_ tools, according to what seems |>|appropriate for the text, but most commonly with gutcheck and/or |>|GuiGuts. |> |> |>Finally guiguts is as it stands unusable on my texts. No doubt I will find |>other equally drastic problems |> |>As all my work goes on my own web site, and gets copied from there onto |>many other sites, PG is just a nice add on and could be ditched if it were |>to take too much effort. |> |>The text which WW objected to so strongly has been on my site for a couple |>of years, and absolutely *nobody* has noticed the ?errors? People read it |>for the dialect, not the punctuation. I have however had several |>appreciative emails. | |Well, I'm very familiar with that condition, but that's a whole |'nother argument. A text does not have to be perfect to be valuable. |We have many older texts, especially, that have many errors. That |doesn't make them useless. I handle most of the errata reports for PG, |and nearly all of then express appreciation for the availability of |the text, along with their handful of reported errors. I may find |another hundred or so problems when I check the text out, but these |readers never noticed them. Two million downloads a month, with (I |estimate) about one million errors among 17,000 books, and we get |about one errata report per day. | |And there are many people who do want to make etexts but don't want |to live within the constraints of PG -- some don't want the |quality-checking, some complain that we don't quality-check enough, |some don't want to work in plain text, some don't want to go through |the clearance procedures, and so on. | |We have 40 to 60 submitted texts in the average week, and three WWs |active to take them at the moment. If everything in an incoming text |is perfect, one of us will spend about an hour on it. Plus a load of |time on other activities. We can't accommodate everyone on everything, |and there is no doubt that the quality gets higher as time goes on, |because of the processing that we do. This is what we have to do, |to keep the operation moving and the quality high. Not everyone is |going to be happy with the process. Some will choose not to send their |texts to PG. I'm sorry about that. | |>|(Now tell me that all you wanted was the -t switch. :-) |> |>I am not going back to the bad old Unix days, when each program had to be |>learned individually. Come back Bill Gates. All is forgiven. | |Well, I say again, if you don't want to use it, you don't have to; |not everyone does, and especially not everyone does for all texts. |It's essentially a collection of regexes, selected to give, on |average, the best results for the most common type of PG files. |Many |DPers who work on other types of texts just put together their own set |of regexes, and run them through GuiGuts or GutWrench or from a *nix |command line, whichever they prefer. I do not do windoze programming. You are essentially saying that a non programmer can work for PG. :-( Did you really mean that? You have agreed with me above that gutcheck is the standard which must be passed to get. I am just trying to find a version of that standard which will run on my machine, with the text As I understand it that answer to a perfectly reasonable request see Subject from PG was: ****************** ***GET STUFFED.*** ****************** I will look for a workaround. -- Dave Fawthrop <dave hyphenologist co uk> 17,000 free e-books at Project Gutenberg! http://www.gutenberg.net For Yorkshire Dialect go to www.hyphenologist.co.uk/songs/

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Beacon Lights of History on the top of the top 100 list
by David Starner 14 Feb '06

14 Feb '06

The Beacon Lights of History, Volume 11 by John Lord, rocketed to the top of the top 100 books yesterday, with 20,918 hits, which is totally out of range. (The #2 book got 400 hits, and the #2 book for the last 30 days got 10,000 hits.) Anyone know why this happened?

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