I'm really behind on my book reviews (and, in fact, in managing the bookshelf over there on the right). Here are some quickies.

Otherland by Tad Williams:

Otherland : River of Blue Fire (Otherland), Otherland : Mountain of Black Glassand Otherland : Sea of Silver Lightare the last three books in the Otherland series that began with Otherland I: City of Golden Shadow (Otherland)( ???). If you liked the first, the following four are very much in the same vein. As a complete story Otherland feels somewhat slow to progress, though there are lots of parallel storylines and plots to follow, all of which coincide along the way. Book 3 ( Mountain of Black Glass) was probably my favourite, as it had a little more pace. Recommended.

Eye in the Sky by Philip Dick

Spotted this in a shop in Cornwall, probably pushed to the fore by the film Minority Report, which is based on anotherPhilip Dick book. It's interesting to imagine how many aspects of the story reflect the time in which it was written - crazy communists who have to be routed out, stamped out, eradicated. The science seems flawed, but it doesn't distract from an interesting 'what if' story. Borrow a copy, but don't bother to buy it.

As a slightly late birthday present, I bought myself a Handspring Treo 180 from some chap on Ebay. Despite some initial difficulties (the first one to arrive was actually a 180g) the purchase went very well. At 100 pounds it's the most expensive thing I've ever bought on Ebay.

The Treo itself is interesting. In no particular order:

With the exception of web browsing, it's not obvious that having a colour screen would enhance the experience much. Perhaps the colour screen is brighter?

At the moment the phone is in full-time use. I'll post any more thoughts that occur to me.

listening to: Alanis Morissette: Joining You (Unplugged)

After being away for a week, I've returned to ~2k email messages, ~1k feed items and a lawn gone wild.

Of the ~2k email messages, about 8% appear to be spam. This is a bit disappointing, as most of those messages should have passed through two different spam detection systems. Looking at isbgnow as a way to reduce the number.

I've read 4 of the items. The rest just went in the bin.

The lawn is still wild.

Oh, we were in Cornwall. The weather was great !

I was planning to be on a plane to right now, for a one day visit to Unfortunately my appointment to present the strategy at has been delayed, so I decided not to go.

I wanted to change the font in the message list window of the Mozilla mailer (it's the top right window). This turned out to be something of an exciting journey into the world of and friends. It's unlikely that I'll want to go back there any time soon.

Anyway, I discovered that one magic incantation that works for me is to create a userChrome.css in my Mozilla profile directory, and add the following:

 treechildren:-moz-tree-cell-text(unread),treechildren:-moz-tree-cell-text(read) { font-size: 10pt !important; } 

This changes only the message lists as far as I can tell. It's much easier to change all of the fonts (replace the 'treechildren...' stuff with '*'). Figuring out the correct widget (or whatever) to which the style should be applied was something of a trial and error experience.

The Mozilla source is just huge. It's complex, includes a variety of languages and lots of the source files don't even have comments explaining what part of the overall picture they implement, never mind comments explaining how they work and interact. Perhaps it becomes clear once you dive in with some gusto, but to the casual wanderer it's quite frightening.

I added the macrosplugin by Todd Larason.

So far it's only used to define some automatically linked words (like Mozilla), but I'll add the Amazon and Google macros as well soon (but that requires me to re-write my bookshelf code).

Irritations associated with using Mozilla as a mail reader:

The main problem with SOCKS is that Mozilla doesn't appear to use SOCKS to resolve hostnames. So, if you are behind a SOCKS gateway with no real DNS service, you are forced to use IP addresses to gain access to services beyond the gateway (IMAP in my case).

The keyboard focus problem occurs when I'm reading messages using the preview pane. At some point I'll type 'm' (to mark the message as unread again) or '5' ('look at this again later') or even 'n' (next message). Most of the time this works just fine, but occasionally focus will shift to the 'Subject or Sender contains:' box, and I end up limiting the set of displayed messages in an odd way.

How the 'View->Messages' menu and the 'View:' dropdown can be so poorly integrated escapes me. It's crazy.

Still, I've not found a better GUI style mailer for MacOS X yet :-(

Comparing Blapp and NetNewsWire as blog authoring tools (because obviously NetNewsWire was originally intended as an RSS reader rather than a writer) is interesting.

Nice things about Blapp:

Nice things about NetNewsWire:

NetNewsWire costs some money, which is a disincentive to use it purely as a blog authoring package. Currently I'm using some scripts based around rss2email to read RSS feeds (which works well with Mozilla), so the reader part is not particularly useful to me.

Using blosxom categories seems impossible with NetNewsWire, but perhaps I just missed something.

For the moment I'll play with both (and dme:blog.el) and see how it goes.

In a vain attempt to wean myself off my emacsaddiction, I've been trying out Blapp. So far it looks good - has the ability to store blog entries locally and also run a script to synchronise with a remote server.

Last night and this morning my mobile phonestart receiving messages which it said were from people in my phonebook, but it seemed highly unlikely that those people actually sent the messages. At the same time, Emma received a message from me that I didn't send.

Weird.