devastation on three fronts in japan...

and american soldiers on three fronts in the middle east...

so what is the project gutenberg list doing to distract itself?

having a discussion about d.r.m., of course.  _of_course._

***

anyway, i sure can't help in japan, or the middle-east,
but nonetheless i refuse to waste any time on d.r.m.

so how about a quick overview of the common purpose?

project gutenberg is tooling along at around e-text #35650.

notable recent entries include #33333, "the statute of anne",
produced by michael hart.  page-images were included, and
this e-text retains the line-breaks from those original pages,
even including the end-of-line-hyphenates.  what a surprise.

#34567 is "paradise bend", and it was produced by al haines.

***

the "progress" of restructured-text through d.p. continues to
be tortuous...  it looks like rfrank has defected to pg-canada,
where they don't have to pay the epubmaker toll to marcello.

meanwhile, one person has created a "dp2rst" python script.
i guess if you patch enough scripts into the workflow, you
just might get something that provides a smooth transition.
well, either that, or you just get a truly botched workflow...

either way, d.p. seems to have chased away all the p1 people,
yet it still has a hard time keeping text in that queue, which
is something of a mystery.  but there have ceased to be any
discussions of any backlogs in the forums, so i guess they've
solved all of those problems...  i'm not sure how they did it.
maybe someone there will record the solution for posterity.

***

all joking aside, distributed proofreaders is closely upon its
20,000 title...  it will come along in the next few weeks, and
stands as a testament that d.p. is more interesting in doing
new digitizations than fixing the errors in the existing ones.

to think that i first suggested reviewing old titles and fixing
the errors in them way back in december of 2003, when p.g.
was celebrating its 10,000th title.  little did i know then that
the library's quality would seemingly _never_ be a concern...

i made the suggestion again at #15,000, and then at #20,000,
after which i realized it was fruitless, and basically gave it up.

oh well, this is a volunteer organization, and the volunteers
make the decisions as to where their priorities are, and if _i_
don't like it, then i should just get up off of my fat ass, right?

right.  so that's what i'm gonna do, go for a nice little walk...

after all, it's a lovely spring day here in santa monica...      :+)

-bowerbird