O’Reilly Has Released A Ton Of Books To The Android Market [Updated 12/30]
I'm not quite sure when this happened, but O'Reilly (in partnership with Aldiko) has released quite a number of books to the Android market. Not only is there a pretty vast selection, but these books are priced extremely well, ranging from $2.99 to $5.99 for complete books.
I picked up the Java Pocket Guide for three bucks and it was well worth the money. Near as I can tell, these are complete versions of the books at hand, and they're all running with the very slick Aldiko UI, which has many configuration options for font sizes and other reading preferences, as well as the ability to bookmark and view a table-of-contents and other things.
For those of you that have a debug or rooted phone (or the ability to pull APKs off your phone via ADB), you'll find that the files are also just split up via HTML, with an XML-based table-of-contents. I've created a quick XSLT file you can use to transform the TOC into a basic HTML file so you can browse the book on your computer if you want. You'll need to make one change to the toc.ncx file, right below the <?xml?> tag:
Then put this file in the same directory and name it 'toc.xslt' (note that I haven't used XSLT or much Javascript in like 8 years, so this may suck). I've updated it to include some basic javascript for easier navigation between the pages!
I've admittedly only tried this with one book, but I can't imagine the rest use a different format.
Aldiko Book Reader:
Java Pocket Guide:
WHS: Backing Up To A Partitioned External Drive
This past Christmas, I received a nice big external USB hard drive that I planned on using to store off-site backups of my Windows Home Server and PS3. The PS3's backups require a FAT32 partition, whereas the WHS will obviously work best with an NTFS file system, so I decided to partition the hard drive with two partitions for each of the systems. (For anyone who cares, I used GParted via a VirtualBoxed version of Ubuntu I use since the default Win7 partition manager won't create FAT32 partitions.)
The PS3 backup detected the correct partition and backed up like a charm. The WHS, however, didn't. Instead, it detected the PS3 partition I had created. It would correctly display the full size of the hard drive in the Server Storage tab, but when adding a new drive, it would only detect the PS3 partition (which was much, much smaller).
After some fiddling around (and accidentally reformatting the PS3 partition to NTFS, whoops!), it seems like the WHS will basically just take whichever drive has the lowest drive letter alphabetically. My PS3 partition had been set up with F:\ and the Backup partition was set up with G:\, so it was detecting the PS3 partition first. I swapped the drive letters and it detected the correct partition and everything worked swimmingly.
Kind of annoying, but I'm happy there's at least a workaround. I'm a little curious as to why WHS doesn't let you treat the individual partitions on an external drive separately, though.