[Tellico-users] KDE3 and secret key

[cosmodusel-tellico]

Hi,

will there be no further version for KDE3 that can use Amazon queries?
Yesterday I recognized that the Amazon search is offline and found the
reason in the mailing list archive. So I wanted to install the pre
release, because it is the only version that works for the new  secret
key, but then I saw just in time, that the pre-release is only working
with KDE4 and 1.3.5 is last release of Tellico for the KDE3 Desktop. Or
is the secret key counted as a bug, so that there will be another
release? ;-)

I suggest a big message on the hompage, since the reason for the empty
responses from amazon.com are not given by tellico (just empty results)
and not easy to find on the homepage!


I am using OpenSuse 10.3 with KDE3.

Cosmo




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[robbystephenson]

On Wednesday 19 August 2009, cosmodusel-tellico@... wrote:
> will there be no further version for KDE3 that can use Amazon queries?
> Yesterday I recognized that the Amazon search is offline and found the
> reason in the mailing list archive. So I wanted to install the pre
> release, because it is the only version that works for the new  secret
> key, but then I saw just in time, that the pre-release is only working
> with KDE4 and 1.3.5 is last release of Tellico for the KDE3 Desktop. Or
> is the secret key counted as a bug, so that there will be another
> release? ;-)

The signing needs the qca2 library, which is qt4. I'm not sure if the qt3
version of that supports the kind of signing that Amazon requires.

So I don't plan to update the KDE3 version of Tellico to account for
Amazon's changes. It's the same situation as if IMDb had changed their
layout again, making that search not work. Right now, just too much to
support and since I don't consider Amazon searching an integral part of
Tellico, I'll just let it go. :)

> I suggest a big message on the hompage, since the reason for the empty
> responses from amazon.com are not given by tellico (just empty results)
> and not easy to find on the homepage!

Probably a good idea. I'll do that.

Robby
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[Bob Apthorpe-2]

Hi,

Robby Stephenson wrote:
> On Wednesday 19 August 2009, cosmodusel-tellico@... wrote:
>
>> I suggest a big message on the hompage, since the reason for the empty
>> responses from amazon.com are not given by tellico (just empty results)
>> and not easy to find on the homepage!
>
> Probably a good idea. I'll do that.

My related question is how to log or debug the search traffic so I can
tell why a search gives no results. If I have to, I'll tweak code to
make searches work and pass back the code changes (it's only fair) but
before I can do that I need to know where the disconnect lies. Right now
I can't tell if a search failed because the query is misformulated, the
response isn't properly parsed, or that the query and response were fine
but there are no results. Search logs or debug mode would help as would
some guide to which search providers I should expect to fail.

FWIW, I just started working with Tellico with an eye toward populating
collections with a UPC/EANs slurped in via barcode scanner, alternately
by ISBN. I really don't want to spend the time doing a lot of data entry
so lookup by UPC & ISBN is pretty important to me. While I'd really like
a web-based app that I can access from any machine & share with others,
none of the web apps I've evaluated do what I want. And I don't want to
use an online service because having worked for a dot.com, I don't trust
what they'd do with my data. I bit the bullet on trying a desktop app
because I figured that once all the collections were stored in some form
of database, I could web-enable it later.

Again, thanks for the time and effort put into Tellico; it's appreciated,

-- Bob
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[Matthew Soffen (tellico)]

> Hi,
>
> Robby Stephenson wrote:
>> On Wednesday 19 August 2009, cosmodusel-tellico@... wrote:
>>
>>> I suggest a big message on the hompage, since the reason for the empty
>>> responses from amazon.com are not given by tellico (just empty results)
>>> and not easy to find on the homepage!
>>
>> Probably a good idea. I'll do that.
>
> My related question is how to log or debug the search traffic so I can
> tell why a search gives no results. If I have to, I'll tweak code to
> make searches work and pass back the code changes (it's only fair) but
> before I can do that I need to know where the disconnect lies. Right now
> I can't tell if a search failed because the query is misformulated, the
> response isn't properly parsed, or that the query and response were fine
> but there are no results. Search logs or debug mode would help as would
> some guide to which search providers I should expect to fail.
>
> FWIW, I just started working with Tellico with an eye toward populating
> collections with a UPC/EANs slurped in via barcode scanner, alternately
> by ISBN. I really don't want to spend the time doing a lot of data entry
> so lookup by UPC & ISBN is pretty important to me. While I'd really like
> a web-based app that I can access from any machine & share with others,
> none of the web apps I've evaluated do what I want. And I don't want to
> use an online service because having worked for a dot.com, I don't trust
> what they'd do with my data. I bit the bullet on trying a desktop app
> because I figured that once all the collections were stored in some form
> of database, I could web-enable it later.
>
> Again, thanks for the time and effort put into Tellico; it's appreciated,
>

One major question I have about forcing people to sign up for their "free"
AWS account (per the post from <a
href="http://alexandria.rubyforge.org/news/2009-08-15--amazon-support.html">Alexandria</a>)...
 Will Amazon start charging people for using their search
feature/capabilities ?

Matt


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[Bob Apthorpe-2]

Hi,

Matthew Soffen (tellico) wrote:
> One major question I have about forcing people to sign up for their "free"
> AWS account (per the post from <a
> href="http://alexandria.rubyforge.org/news/2009-08-15--amazon-support.html">Alexandria</a>)...
>  Will Amazon start charging people for using their search
> feature/capabilities ?

My guess is that unless you're pounding their API or making money, they
won't care. Unless they start losing money and it's more profitable to
charge for API calls compared to turning off the public API to save
bandwidth charges. And even then, if that happened people would probably
go back to screen-scraping their web pages.

I don't mind signing up for API access, though I'd much rather get LoC
data via a Z39.50 gateway (I learned about those when messing with Koha.)

-- Bob
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[robbystephenson]

On Thursday 20 August 2009, Bob Apthorpe wrote:
> My related question is how to log or debug the search traffic so I can
> tell why a search gives no results. If I have to, I'll tweak code to
> make searches work and pass back the code changes (it's only fair) but
> before I can do that I need to know where the disconnect lies.

There's rudimentary support for each search type to report errors to the
user in the form of message() calls. Some of the sources use it more than
others. :) For debugging, most of them have sections where intermediate
files are written out so I can check them, and those sections are just
commented out unless I'm debugging. There's no real logging or anything like
that.

A lot of the external scripts write to stderr when they hit an error, which
gets shown to the user.

> Search logs or debug mode would help as would
> some guide to which search providers I should expect to fail.

I'm also gradually writing unit tests for all the search providers. If one
doesn't work for you, then I can add that search to the test, as well.

Robby



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[robbystephenson]

On Thursday 20 August 2009, cosmodusel-tellico@... wrote:

> Am 20.08.2009 15:43, Robby Stephenson schrieb:
> > (...) Right now, just too much to
> > support and since I don't consider Amazon searching an integral part of
> > Tellico, I'll just let it go. :)
>
> Amazon searching might not be an integral part but for me searching
> itself is integral. So I can avoid filling out all the informations by
> hand. ;-)
> For german books unfortunately Amazon was the only search that worked
> sufficiently. Maybe I do something wrong!?

So maybe we quibble about my use of "integral" ? :) I realize Amazon is the
most useful and most widely used search provider. I just mean, if it went
away tomorrow, it wouldn't mean that Tellico is useless for me. :) And
remember, that's why I wrote Tellico in the first place, to be useful to me.
:) But I get your point, there aren't many other useful providers,
especially for things other than books and in lnguages other than English.

> If not, what do you need to add the searches of other websites to
> Tellico? Or could there be a future function to add own searches? Maybe
> by adding the possibility for users to do a test search (after they added
> a book related website url) and than they only need to relate the right
> fields with the results by some clicks?

I've tried that once or twice, basically a generic regexp search for HTML
scraping. Never made much progress. One thing I will say is that GCstar
seems to have many more website providers, and Tellico can use GCstar to do
its searching, if you have it installed.

Robby
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[robbystephenson]

On Thursday 20 August 2009, nelamvr6@... wrote:
> I have to respectfully disagree.  I really appreciate all the work you've
> done making this wonderful program.  But I think that the ability to
> search Amazon is a HUGE part of the functionality of this program.

Sure, I agree with that. I just mean "integral" as in "Tellico doesn't work
if you don't have it", and I don't consider Amazon searching indispensable.

> I believe that you are seriously underestimating how important this is to
> your users, Tellico is essentially crippled for me now.  I use it to
> catalog all sorts of things.  I could handle typing in the title and
> author if all I was cataloging was books, but typing in each track on my
> CD collection would be far too time consuming.  Likewise my video
> collection requires more that simply a title, typing in the names of the
> director, cast members  etc. would take forever! Whereas with the ability
> to search Amazon all of this is accomplished automatically, as I'm sure
> you're aware.

Do the Discogs and IMDb searches work for you?

> It has become clear to me now that a large portion of the Internet is
> perhaps too dependent on Amazon.  This is troubling, and should
> definitely be addressed somehow, but at present there really is no other
> source that provides the information needed.

Well, yeah, but I'm not holding my breath. People have been saying that
since Amazon started their API.

> I respectfully urge you to reconsider backporting this capability, or if
> that is just out of the question then I would respectfully urge you to
> release the next version just as soon as possible.

I did find a simple implementation of the authentication scheme used for the
amazon request. That might make it easier to backport to the KDE3 version.

Robby
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[Bob Apthorpe-2]

Hi,

Robby Stephenson wrote:
> On Thursday 20 August 2009, nelamvr6@... wrote:
>> I have to respectfully disagree.  I really appreciate all the work you've
>> done making this wonderful program.  But I think that the ability to
>> search Amazon is a HUGE part of the functionality of this program.
>
> Sure, I agree with that. I just mean "integral" as in "Tellico doesn't work
> if you don't have it", and I don't consider Amazon searching indispensable.

It's an important function for minimizing data entry but, I agree, once
collections have been populated, search functions don't matter. Maybe
that's a hair-splitting theoretical argument (in that I'm going to keep
adding to my collections), but I see your point.

It's kind of like not having beer vs not having oxygen - in the former
case life may seem unbearable; in the latter, impossible. :)

-- Bob
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