iLiad Fetching and converting content from the iLiad

[ajnorth]

Here are some useful binary files for fetching and converting content for the iLiad, run from the iLiad itself, possibly automatically using e.g. cron (if you use adamb's updated busybox).

Firstly there is "curl" for fetching URLs, which is more powerful than GNU wget (and much more useful than the version of wget installed on the iLiad). See e.g. http://www.samhart.com/cgi-bin/class.../Wget_And_Curl for comparison.

Secondly there is "convert" from the imagemagick software, which can be used to convert and combine images into one pdf file. Note html2ps and whatever else is required to convert html to pdf isn't included here: like the comic fetching mentioned elsewhere I just wanted to automatically fetch images (and combine them into one pdf). When you run the convert binary the shell variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH needs to point to the directory where the libraries are.

[ajnorth]

Question: does anyone know how to use the new wake-up-at-a-certain-time functionality in 2.11 to do stuff other than connect to the IDS? My intended use of curl involves connecting to the Internet through my wireless router, fetching a bunch of html and images from known web locations (stuff I look at regularly), do a bunch of parsing/reformatting using awk and convert, then have it all there waiting for me to read in e.g. a pdf report at a certain time of day.

All this can easily be scripted but as I understand it cron won't run its jobs at a certain time unless the iLiad is turned on at the scheduled time of the relevant job, and I don't want to leave my iLiad on all day. The wake-up functionality sounds ideal but I don't know how to make it run my script. Anyone know if there is any software control over this functionality?

[ajnorth]

It seems running "convert" on the iLiad wasn't such a gret idea - the iLiad doesn't have enough memory to efficiently pack a bunch of fetched images into a pdf. It seems if you run a memory hogging app on the iLiad you can cause other programs requesting memory to terminate - if that happens to the contentlistener your iLiad freezes and you have to reset it.
So I now autogenerate a html document with inline images for all the images I've fetched and put the right amount of vspace in to flip between images with the page bar (all the images - stock charts - are the same size).

[Adam B.]

Originally Posted by ajnorth

It seems running "convert" on the iLiad wasn't such a gret idea - the iLiad doesn't have enough memory to efficiently pack a bunch of fetched images into a pdf. It seems if you run a memory hogging app on the iLiad you can cause other programs requesting memory to terminate - if that happens to the contentlistener your iLiad freezes and you have to reset it.
So I now autogenerate a html document with inline images for all the images I've fetched and put the right amount of vspace in to flip between images with the page bar (all the images - stock charts - are the same size).

Have you tried using my updated busybox to create a swap file on an external memory card? Might solve your memory problems....

[ajnorth]

No, hadn't tried that, but I've found the relevant thread.
Thanks, I keep running out of memory with samba installed.

Am a bit worried about having put all my apps and books on the internal memory now - wonder how many writes the internal memory can handle.
I'll try operating out of CF. But then I read that can interfere with the wireless network.