Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup
With my ongoing Discworld reread; I’ve just started on Carpe Jugulum, which is what .. book 23 ? My chronologically ordered re-read didn’t go quite as planned. Somewhere around the early twenties, I jumped the queue; moved to a copy of book 30, the most recently released and started working my way back. Glad I did, because I think TP has picked up a full head of steam with recent books. Or maybe this is my Vetinari/Vimes fixation. Anyway…
This is truly a case of one title fitting many topics. Went for a BBQ last night, my first of the summer. Lots of grilled meat washed down with several interesting varieties of alcohol. Lots of suspiciously coloured rum concoctions, several beers (including a Caledonian Deuchars) and lots of meat (with the token breadroll or two) later, everyone retreated inside since it was getting a bit cold… and watched Southpark. Somewhat surprisingly, no one had ever heard of dousing the meat in beer before putting it on the grill though. And I was also dragged from the stone age and introduced to disposable BBQ grills. Sadly, this was pretty much the last outing before The Don leaves for a swank new job down south.
And on a completely different note (but staying with the greasy theme), I made some cosmetic changes to Greasepress. 0.21 (now with background colours) can be downloaded here. The older version is still available from here. I’ll have a few more fields (excerpt, keywords, draft advanced settings) hideable for the next release. Thereafter, I’ll do something about the main feature I’ve been asked for; making some sense of all the buttons (Save, Save and Continue Editing, Save as Draft blah blah) on the post UI.
Just a quickie release announcement. I had some time to hack on Greasepress last night, so I pushed out a new release. It’s such a relief to not have to test Javascript against all browsers, I can tell you.
At any rate, Greasepress 0.20 is out and can be downloaded from here. The version bump cleans up the UI text and makes sure that options are shown only when they refer to UI elements on the screen, adds a few more hideable widgets (can optionally hide comment and ping status and post password elements now) and also adds a means of resizing the content textarea.
As before, it requires Greasemonkey 0.3 or higher to be fully functional, although it can work with earlier versions. Try it out, let me know it how goes.
Twas the longest day yesterday. Midsummer. Where daylight for this part of the planet begins at around 0300 and dusk falls at around 2230. It’s great. The strange thing is, despite being widely regarded as a night person, I actually feel more productive in the long summer months than I do during winter. It might have something to do with the fact that I’m rarely bitching about how cold it is… oh, wait. I bitch about how much it rains during the summer, so we’re all square. But at any rate, productivity climbs during the warmer months.
And taunting the weak Europeans about their intolerance for a mild, sultry 30C daytime temperature is always fun.
I’ve had a high tech piece of kit sitting in my cube for the past month with no time (I’m a lazy bastid) to set it up. The general idea is that it functions as a PVR, a Personal Video Recorder. Clearly, it’s improbable that funding bodies would pony up cash for rebuilding a better tv recording and ad skipping wheel. Nonetheless, that’s almost exactly what did happen; and now my job is to make things slightly more appealing in terms of technical breakthroughs and so on. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the person who wrote the project proposal. Are the dots beginning to connect yet ? The promised version of this wonderful device is supposed to be a nicer, all singing all dancing PVR that will actually make toast, write my dissertation and display intelligence on par with sentient beings. (As an aside: notice that I picked widely differing jobs as examples. Writing a dissertation, for instance, apparently requires attention to detail but no intelligence) The chances of all of this happening in the given timespan, needless to state, are somewhere about as likely as finding a polar bear walking around in the Sahara desert. Translated: that means; yes, it could happen, but don’t do silly things like holding your breath waiting, will you ?
The real benefit from this device (for me, obviously) is found in the fact that it has - no, it needs - a television tuner card to function. A card that is freeview capable. Are you thinking what I’m thinking ?
Lots of things happening on television these days. There is Wimbledon. And the tea lady in the department, a kind old soul who is quite enthused about tennis, actually has tickets for the men’s final. Goddammit!. They cost the earth, however, so I’m not too upset. The good old BBC is doing the whole live coverage nine yards. Then there are the Aussies and their seeming fall from grace in the cricketing arena. Dissected and analyzed and exulted over by the British press like any Eastenders breakup or BigBrother eviction would be.. and televised only on freeview enabled sets. And this isn’t even counting extra goodies like the US version of Apprentice that’s screening from tonight. There is no way in hell I can watch all of those at their scheduled times and actually get a reasonable amount of work done. None whatsoever. Even accounting for the fact that I usually have the TV droning in the background while I’m working anyway. So…
In order to watch even more television and reduce myself into a drooling, gibbering, mindless wreck, I must get off my lazy ass and setup the MythTV box. Which means, I need to do more work. Work actually related to deadlines. Think of how … revolutionary this is. This is like a hypersomniac being paid to sleep.
So actually setting up the PVR quick is covered by laziness and impatience of the Perl virtues.
Or something like that. Anyway, it’s the Jeffster’s birthday today, so a night of riotous fun (on a Monday, no less) is planned. Should be good. Staggering around the city center is always safer when the only crowd of drunken yobs happens to be the bunch you’re with.. And now that the hoity toity mobs of Ascot have disappeared back to London, the streets should be quite calm.
Planned visits tonight to The Evil Eye and Victor Js. I’ll update when I get back. If I’m not too sozzled, that is.
Europe is in crisis. Thanks to the nationalistic, jingoistic and utterly self absorbed British (as certain countries and sections of the media would paint it), the grand plans of ever closer unification seem to be tottering on the brink of collapse. Like the chronic alcoholic trying to wend his way avoiding ditches and gutters, the European union is staggering from one crisis to another. And dealing with the obstacles just about as successfully as said chronic alcoholic too. Has the grand dream of the United States of Europa (err.. sorta) finally been dealt the cirrhosis diagnosis ?
Opinion is divided in the industry about the appropriate way(s) in which to document source code. Should one write an exact description of the functionality ? Or merely explain the hard parts ? Or just have a boilerplate header and footer and forget about anything else. Maybe go the full monty and employ something like Doxygen or Javadoc to write entire reams of documentation from within the source code itself ? It’s difficult to draw a line and say that some types of commenting is appropriate and others are not. A rule of thumb that most programmers (whose code I’ve read, at any rate) seem to follow is that of documenting the surprises and exceptions. Why the monologue on a topic which is best left to a treatise on software engineering practices ? Well, the opening of the Solaris operating system source code has produced some interesting statistics about code quality. There are even personal source code tours offered.
Never been one for the equestrian sports. Unfortunately, like the MJ verdict, some things just grab one’s attention and this week seems to be good for noticing horse racing. Specifically, the Royal Ascot is in York. I could hardly miss the extra traffic around the A64, at any rate. Or the swarms of helicopters circling in the distance. Because the really rich and famous travel by chopper instead of in stretch limos like the hoi polloi.
It’s a bigger deal than it might seem at first glance because the Royal Ascot rarely seems to move from it’s southern location. In fact, this has all the makings of a historic occasion. The lil York racecourse is seeing a high profile racing event, at long last. Note that I know as much about horse racing as I do about nuclear physics, but it’s quite difficult to not get caught up in the excitement of it all. And let’s not forget about ogling the headgear. Not to mention the wearers of said headgear.
Anyway, there are supposed to be some tickets floating around here that people don’t seem inclined to use, so I might just get one of them to see what all the fuss is about. Oh, and speak to a man about a horse at the same time. Billy Bunter would be proud.
So I’ve been playing around a bit with Greasemonkey. And where better to start than by tweaking some things I don’t like about various webby interfaces ? Well, a couple of days ago, I started seriously reading Dive into Greasemonkey. What follows are a couple of small tweaks to pages that I seem to visit frequently.
It’s been a while since my last post. Oh dear. I’m reduced to playing a cameo of Captain Obvious here because I can’t think of a better way to lead in to this post. But unfortunately, work has been slightly hectic, mostly because I wanted to keep roughly to my self imposed deadlines. And work at the pace which I was doing it for most of this week means not much time for anything else.
But, I’ve read Shadow of the Giant now. The book, the last of the quartet, took great care to leave some plot threads dangling. Evil. No indication of what happened to the three kids and Bean; or if a cure for Anton’s key was discovered later. No news of what happened to the rest of Ender’s Jeesh and where they ultimately ended up. And most importantly, no inkling of where Randi and the ninth kid escaped to and what became of them. Obviously, they were never heard of in the lifetime of Peter Wiggin or the last chapter would have made some mention of it. And a few continuity errors here and there but these were pretty minor. Overall, a good way for the series to end, but I wonder if OSC might not consider a new quartet of books a little later on.
In other news… well, I’ve discovered how little I know about scriptable objects and the DOM when I tried to make a few client side hacks recently. Things really have progressed far beyond the times when I last worked with Javascript seriously. Unfortunately, the lack of a good reference, and more importantly the lack of a good editor is driving me insane. I never did realize how much having a consistent editing environment actually helps. So, what I’m really trying to say is that I’ve gotten used to the crutches of brace and parenthesis matching and dropdown lists of properties and methods to help me along. And sans those aids, my programming prowess has reduced itself to a childlike scrawl. Well, at least till I come to grips with the most frequently used properties anyway.
Also trying to get some time to do the oft promised but never accomplished tweaks to the template here. Might have to wait for the weekend for that.
Lots of snippets about new books to be published this year. I just finished Going Postal by Terry Pratchett a few weeks ago. I think I like the newer Pratchetts’ works more than the older ones for some reason. That might well be because I like Vetinari and Vimes and the City Watch series more than the others. But at any rate, it was a great read. Even book 29 (Monstrous Regiment) was ok. Of course, Monstrous Regiment did seem a bit … umm … contrived to me. And the punchline, the surprise at the ending, was a touch predictable. Be that as it is, it seems like 2005 will be a bumper year for new books to read.
It’s a sad feature of my life that I’m open to the manipulations and dangling carrots of series. Does anyone remember the Batman series that screened on TV ? Well, other than their notable contribution to the art of visual sound effects (blam! biff! bong! pow! bang! kapow!), they also had this corny cliffhanger phrase at the end of each episode. And what will happen to our heroes next ? Tune in, same bat time, same bat channel to find out!. Aargh. I’m a sucker for those fake cliffhanger plot lines and it seems that book publishers and authors have discovered how to tap into the motherlode as well.
So who are the contenders due for their piece of action from me this year ? Let’s see, shall we ?
Yeah. I read Harry Potter. So what ? At least this is one of the series which I feel reasonably sure will actually end in my lifetime. A supposedly finite number of books in the series and a regular publishing schedule. Well sorta, there was a huge delay between book 4 and book 5, wasn’t there ? All the same, not too bad overall. The series started in 1996, I believe. I hopped on the bandwagon quite a bit later. Book 6 is out on the 16th of July.
Man, this one took almost forever. I finished the first three in 2002 and it’s taken three years of waiting for this monster to turn up. And it turns out that he’s actually not done with this book, but just half finished. Egad. The planned length of the series just grew by one book. So, total 7 in the series now and book four is due out 26th of July.
As much as it sickens me to say it, I need to note down that Robert Jordan’s eleventh book in the Wheel of Time series is due out this year. And is seemingly slated for release on the 11th of October. Ugh. If the other two series had at least some semblance of a regular publishing schedule, a finite number of books promised and above all, books in which things … wait for it … actually happen, well.. the Wheel of Time series is all the more noticeable by it’s absence of said qualities. Actually, I started on the series by reading Book 4 umm.. 7 years ago. Found it in the bargain bin of a bookstore, read the synopsis, looked interesting and hey .. it was cheap. So I bought it. It took me around three years to track down and read all other 7 that were available at the time. And I, for the first time in my life, actually bought a hardcover edition of book 9 when it was released in the US. Ah, the depths to which I sank. Crack addicts couldn’t tell a sorrier tale. Only, after the weak tasting milk powder that Jordan tried to induce me to snort as book 10, I went to my own version of the twelve step. Not again. So, the release of another Wheel of Time book is moot. I’m not going to buy any more till he finishes the damn series. Whenever that may be. It’s a popular refrain on the newsgroups that the publishers may simply hire a ghostwriter once Robert Jordan dies and keep on shovelling book 50, book 51, book 52 ad nauseum at regular two year intervals.
Sound bitter much? Anyway, moving on. Book 11 is one step closer to the much rumoured (but never definitely confirmed) target of 13 books.
And one I haven’t read yet, Orson Scott Card published book 8 of the Ender Saga in March. Tis called Shadow of the Giant and it’s on my read-soonish list.
And speaking of sagas, Orson Scott Card reviews the Revenge of the Sith. George Lucas and OSC might have more in common than they both realize.
We like sorting things into pigeonholes. It’s nice to be able to say “these are the sites I visit for news, these are the sites I visit for educational purposes, these are the sites I visit for … “. But there is sometimes an overlap. Figuring out the overlap means displacement of pigeonholes. Or their expansion, whichever.
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet
The first quote that came readily to my mind is that old hoary chestnut from Shakespeare. Sue me for being unoriginal and illiterate. I probably deserve it.
