everything samwyse knows

I just discovered Rob Weir’s blog and have been reading some of his past posts. One thing that has occurred to me is an old annoyance with HTML, especially from ten years ago or so. HTML never standardized a way to implement work-arounds for new elements. (more…)

Since before adopting children from there four years ago, I’ve been trying on and off to learn Russian. I’ve not made much progress, mostly because it seems that Russian isn’t the most popular foreign language for people to learn. I have, however, learned a fair bit about the process of learning a foreign language. So when the opportunity came up to go for Japan for business, I was in a position to start learning the language quickly. (more…)

• MegaTokyo - Chapter 9 - overlord

Here’s a little script that makes it easy to create command line interpreters (CLIs). Creating a CLI framework is one of my usual benchmarks when I learn a new programming language. It usually requires a bit of in-depth knowlege, yet is easy to code in only a day or so. In this case, it took a bit longer but it was worth it in the end because it taught me more about decorators. (more…)

The Problem

I like books. I like them a lot. Over the years, I’ve collected a large number of books. And now I want to get rid of some of them.

A lot of them I’m giving to Goodwill, but there are several sets that all deal with one topic or another. As I was packing some of these for transport, it occured to me that someone else may want to buy some of my books, so I needed to write an ad. Of course, good ads are packed with useful information about the product being sold, and collecting that data for a collection of random books is a bit labor intensive.

So, I wrote a Python script.

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• Abusing Amazon images

Yesterday, I discussed my experiences with rPath, and the one thing that I dislike about it. (Fortunately, the developers are aware of the problem and seem to be working on it.) Today I’m going to discuss Linux From Scratch, aka LFS.
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In the beginning, to use Linux you had to download and compile a kernel, and then download and compile any programs that you wanted to use. This was a tedious and error-prone process, so after a while someone came up with the idea of the “distribution”, aka “distro”. This combined a pre-compiled kernel, a selection of other software, and a process for installing everything onto disk. Since the process of building a distro was still tedious and error-prone, many of the largest are supported by commercial ventures, such as Fedora Project (Red Hat), openSUSE (Novell), Ubuntu (Canonical, Ltd) and Mandriva Linux (Mandriva).

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• Rais Gabo Wood-burning stove (TreeHugger) If you like the idea of curling up next to a cozy hearth while the silent snow is coming down all around, and you hate the country-kitchen look of most wood-burning stoves, then Rais is likely for you.
• Bots on The Ground - washingtonpost.com The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have become an unprecedented field study in human relationships with intelligent machines.

• PC World - Seven Post-Install Tips for Ubuntu 7.04 here are seven steps you can take right away to prevent common headaches and help yourself enjoy your new surroundings.

• These are some basic rules of thumb of improvisation.

• Programmer Dvorak Programmer Dvorak is a "sub"-layout which makes it easier to write source code in C, C#, Java, Pascal, LISP, CSS and XML. It was generated through reflection of the most common constructs in these languages and the rules spelled out by Dvorak himself, the

VMware Workstation 6.0 Beta

Workstation for Windows: A8HC7-1GGR0-E4PD4-4T694

Workstation for Windows (with ACE Authoring Capability): 0A136-0C0U4-78487-4ALRE

Workstation for Linux: A8033-17FKN-F5640-48QTE

• Solar power breakthrough at Massey - New Zealand's source for business, stock market & currency news on Stuff.co.nz

• Combine Google Maps With Your Photo Album This site has a tutorial on using Google Maps with your photo album. Looks awesome. Each album has a latitude and longitude so it shows up as a pin on a map of the world. When you click a pin, up pops the highlight photo for the albums at that location. Makes a great front page to a gallery. Includes a demo with 200 albums.

On Christmas Day, 2006, the following intro to a fantasy story popped
into my head.  Due to procrastination, it is only now being put down in
words, er, electrons.

In the Elder Days, before the Time of Legends, we were all
brutes.  Only the Bear Clan has stories from that time and they are
ill-formed tales, possessing neither Heros nor Deeds.  They tell of a world overrun by goblins, and of a light from the heavens that drove them away.

The story that may someday follow would be a “Watership Down” sort of thing; not an animal fable (although I may adapt some fables as interstitial and/or sidebar material) but a heroic fantasy.  The goblins, BTW, are humans, who for reasons unknown have (mostly) left the world of the story, leaving the animals to re-populate the forests and streams.

I’ve also been reading Blogging the Bible at Slate Magazine.  I’ve mostly been skimming, but it has a lot of good quotes that could inspire sections of my story.  The hardest thing about writing a story about a pre-industrial society is getting into the mind-set; I really need to read lots of stories written in those times.

• One wife's poignant protests against Communism. - By Clive James - Slate Magazine