I want to borrow books via the Los Angeles Public Library's Axis 360 service, which won't give you their DRM-laden ebooks without use of the Adobe Digital Editions software to take the small file you download (normally called URLLink.acsm) and use it as a kind of key to download the longer .epub book file.

And Adobe Digital Editions is not available for Linux.

But it can be installed with Wine, the Windows compatibility layer for Linux systems.

I already have Wine installed on my Fedora Linux system so I can use the excellent IrfanView image editor that's written for Windows. While instructions on the installation of Wine might be useful, I don't want to go there for the purposes of this post. I'll just say that you should use your distro's package manager to install Wine, and in this particular instance, the version of Wine available in your distro's repositories should be sufficient. One thing I will tell you: Make sure you also install wine-mono (or whatever the package is in your system that includes the Windows version of Mono in Wine).

Back to installing Adobe Digital Editions in Linux via Wine.

A few people reported problems (a very few did not) with version 2.x. A few offered easy-to-byzantine workarounds to make Adobe Digital Editions 2.x work in Linux.

None of that worked for me.

So I followed the advice of Mr. Alphaville, used his download of Adobe Digital Editions 1.7, and was up and running with a working application in a few minutes.

You are prompted at some point after installing Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) to either create an Adobe account or use the one you already have.

I already had an Adobe account, so I used that login and password and was quickly swimmming in the world of DRM-ed ebooks.

Wait, there's a problem

Huge problem. The DRM'd epub files that Axis360 puts out aren't compatible with the Amazon Kindle.

Sure, I could break the DRM and use Calibre to convert the files. But I don't want to do that. I'd rather get the books for the alloted loan period and have them somewhat gracefully disappear when the loan is up.

So for Kindle, I'll stick with the Los Angeles Public Library's Overdrive system.

And for those titles from LAPL's instance of Axis360, I guess I'll just read them in Adobe Digital Editions via Wine.

Editorial comment: It's not like the Amazon Kindle is some obscure device. It dominates the ebook market. Axis360 basically tells users of the dominant ebook readers to take a long walk off a short pier.

Kindle Fire tablets, which are mostly-fledged Android devices, can access this content with the Blio or Bluefire apps.

But non-Fire Kindles (the cheap, not-a-tablet kind) get nothing. I guess that's what Overdrive is for.

Now is the time. I'm going to really learn to program.

I've been dabbling in programming for awhile now. I've mostly stayed within the friendly confines of the Bash shell on my local Linux system and the Linux servers on which I run various scripts and services.

I've been meaning to get deeper into real programming, whatever that is, for at least a couple of years. I would say it hasn't happened, but to a small extent it has. Now I'm ready to take the next step.

So what did happen?

A couple of years ago, I began writing little Bash scripts to automate my rsync-driven backups. With these little one- to two-liners, I didn't have to remember the exact syntax to do the rsync backup correctly and remember where my "exclude" file was living.

I also had trouble with screen blanking in Debian Wheezy. I finally figured out how to fix the problem with xset, and wrote a little Bash script to automate that process.

I have also written a bunch of scripts to automate posting and create an archive of this Ode site. Among these Ode-related scripts is a local Perl program that generates an Indexette date stamp. You can copy/paste it into your post file, or call the script from within a text editor, which is what I do with Gedit.

It's still a simple two-liner, albeit with more than a dozen lines explaining what's going on.

About a year ago, I started a more complicated programming project at my day job.

So what do I do at this job? I work for a bunch of local news web sites. I push content. I create web pages in an arcane CMS. I create blogs in a common CMS (WordPress). I fix broken things and solve problems. I take things that are separate and mash them together.

The project, the thing I've wanted to do, was to script together data from various sources, more specifically election results for the nine web sites I work on.

I wanted to do it in Perl. But when I finally decided to do it, I just didn't have the chops. But I did know Bash, and I learned (or learned more) about such Unix/Linux utilities as wget, cat, cp and sed to turn my data into HTML pages I could generate with cron and iframe into my various web sites.

Thus far I've been re-reading "Learning Perl", this time noting things that will help me in my election-results project.

I'm somewhere in the 40s in terms of pages, and I'm making notes in the book -- it's a real book, not an ebook -- in pencil.

• Search and replace is pretty much a core function in Perl, so I can safely say goodbye to sed.

• Concatenation can be done with a dot (a .) between items, so that takes care of cat.

• I would really like to pump data into an array and use Perl's foreach to process each line.

• Grasping scalars and arrays is going to be key.

• I'll have to look into grabbing data over HTML and bring it into the scalar or array. The LWP::Simple module looks like a good candidate for this. I could also use the full LWP.

• I'd like to code a date stamp into the data. I've already experimented with that in Perl for my Indexette date-stamper script.

• Eventually I'll need to write the results out to files on the web server. That shouldn't be too hard.