01:16 am - On D-BUS
Spent the weekend (yes, I have no life at all) porting a work application over to D-Bus. I'd finally become sick and tired of Bonobo, so used D-Bus plus GtkPlug and GtkSocket to replace it. I'm mostly writing this paragraph as a reminder to myself to blog something about how I did it in case it's useful to others; managed to avoid using D-Bus activation and came up with a few other tricks.
Actually, what'd be really nice is for the intro-to-dbus-glib documentation to be just a bit more helpful. I figured out what I needed to know, but there were a few times I was stumped by just-plain-wrong stuff in the dbus tutorial, so this is also a reminder to fix that!
Oh, and on eBooks, I did find out that HarperCollins will sell you eBooks in ePub format (with DRM), direct from their US website. I bought one of them (Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson) to try it out. Amusingly, the document opened fine in Adobe's ePub viewer but didn't work on the Sony PRS-505. Turns out that in an ePub document no chapter is meant to be > 100K; if it is, you are meant to break it into two chapters. This is so that small devices don't have to cope with huge chapters; a bit lame. Anyway, the Sony Reader enlighteningly gives you a "Page error" message, leaving you wondering if something has gone with the DRM stuff.
Managed to convert the book into BBeB format, thanks to a couple of Python scripts I found by Googling. Still more than a little depressing; you could hardly expect someone without computer skills to sort that mess out. I wonder if we'll ever get the Kindle in Australia?