Well, actually, I've got specs. Sam (my son) and I went to get our eyes tested a couple of weeks ago, and now we both have specs. His for reading and writing, mine for using the computer (== 'working') and driving at night.

I don't mind wearing glasses really, not being particularly worried about the effect it has on others. Annoyances I've noticed so far:

I added the writeback plugin today. Feel free to submit comments.

Also playing with geourl, but nothing interesting to report so far.

I finally switched over to one of the release candidates of blosxom 2.0. The main reason was to get access to the plugins, which look neat.

At the moment I've added only textile, though it would be useful to have one of the two Amazon plugins as well ( macrolinks or asin). It seems odd to me that textile would break lines in the way that it does - perhaps that's something to do with coming from Movable Type. It was relatively easy to fix this - replace the part of textile.pm that says:

 $fmt .= '<br />'."\n" if $i < $#lines; 

with:

 $fmt .= ' '."\n" if $i < $#lines; 

blosxom textile.pm

Reading books based on recommendation always seems like a dangerous thing. If you fervently dislike something that someone else has raved about and recommended (and lent), what do you say?

Happily, in this case it's not a problem. A colleague (Hello Heiner!) lent me the fourth book in the Otherland series, but after about 50 pages it was obvious that it really was necessary to read the earlier three books first. A trip to Waterstones and I'm all set with volumes I and II.

The books, being set in the near future, contain a whole host of recognisable technologies, some of which are easily imaginable as extrapolations of what we have today (phones are integrated with video, computing, etc.). Others seem further out (direct interface with the brain) and yet more are interesting oddities that I've not seen before, like 'squeezers', which are an input mechanism involving a device held in each hand. Reading between the lines, squeezers might be some form of next-generation keyboard device.

The book itself is long and, at times, irritatingly slow. It's also not a book for people who are interested in the details of technology - as Heiner said “Greg Egan makes you think, Williams just writes good stories”. The story is good and it can pull you through the slower parts of the book easily. You want to know what happens next and there are a variety of interesting twists and turns.

After reading the last page, it's obvious that even this, the first in the series, doesn't stand on its own. In the introduction to the second book ( River of Blue Fire) Williams acknowledges this and it's not unreasonable - the four volumes in one covering would be impossible to manage.

Well worth a read, but be prepared to buy all four books if you enjoy the first one.

It sounds like when I used to go to confession at church: Dear readers, it has been six weeks since my last weblog entry...The main difference, of course, is that at church you were guaranteed an audience of at least one, which is clearly not the case here.

Scanning through the other weblogs that I read it seems that everyone wants to talk about 'the war'. I don't.

Marc Nozellsent some feedback on dme:blog.el!

The version of html-mode that he is using ( Debian/sarge, emacs21) inserts a template document into a buffer when started. This interferes with the smooth path to blogging nirvana that we're aiming for.

At Marc's suggestion, the ordering of dme:blog is re-arranged slightly and two new hooks are added, dme:blog-pre-html-mode-hook and dme:blog-post-html-mode-hook . These are run as the names imply - before and after enabling html-mode .

In Marc's case, only the post- hook should be necessary.

As usual, feedback appreciated!

This weekend was something of a watershed - it's the first time that I learned of a major world event from a weblog.

Whilst playing with NewsMonsterI was looking at an article on boingboingreading about transparent iBook covers. boingboinggot the article from Charlie Stross, so I followed along to read some more. The newest entry on Charlie's page was " Oh fuck", which was about the shuttle.

At that point I bounced off the web and onto TV.

It wasn't a particularly long path from new aggregatorto space disaster, but it wasn't something I'd anticipated.

After an email discussion with DJ Adamsresulting from his entryon RSS to NNTP, I realised that what rss2emailneeded was the ability to generate multipart/alternative messages.

These would include both plain text and HTML versions of the entries. When using a mail reader which prefers text (like muttor gnus), the reader gets to see a plain text rendering of the RSS entries (with URLs as footnotes). If you happen to use an HTML capable mail reader ( Apple Mailor Mozilla), you get the full HTML rendered version.

This is particularly nice if you use both types of mail reader, as you get the one which is most suitable at the point you are reading.

Anyway, the fix was simple, so I've sent it back to Dean Jackson, who seems to be the keeper of rss2emailright now.

Send me emailif you want a copy "right now".

From DJ Adams:

RSS via NNTP is certainly not a new concept - I first read about the idea on Matt Webb[1]'s site almost three years ago[2]. More recently there's been mention over at Jon's (Crossing the bridge of weak ties[3]), and Ben's (RSS to NNTP[4] and HEP Messaging Server[5]). [...] After deliberation of such matters, I then wrote a very simple plugin for Blagg[19], which would post each weblog item to one or more newsgroups. For my purposes, I solved the question of what to call each newsgroup by using the 'nickname', required for each feed, in Blagg's *rss.dat* file which controls the aggregation activity. [...] There are plenty of possibilities for experimentation: combining the various weblog trackbacking mechanisms[22] with NNTP article IDs to link articles together in a thread; replying (to the newsgroup) to an article might send a comment to the post at the source weblog. Hmmmm...

The difficulty with this approach is a general one about maintaining state about which news articles have been read by a particular reader. If you move from one NNTP client to another, or from one client system to another, you have to work to take your state with you (it's stored on the client). If the articles are stored in IMAP mailboxes, that state is stored on the server, so different clients or systems can share the articles in a much more useful and consistent way.

Perhaps IMAP would be a useful back-end datastore for a new RSS aggregator (customised Mozilla ?).

About twenty pages into Bored of the RingsI came to a somewhat startling revelation: I was one of those people who have an emotional attachment to the original book. I was offendedat some of what I read, as it seemed to be sacrilege! Thinking about it some more, perhaps the real reason for my offense was that this book clearly aims to have a joke at the expense of the original, but really it's not particularly funny. It might be worth taking apart a classic if the end result was actually worth the effort (and cost?), but very little of the end result is worth bothering with.

The only part that made me chuckle was Eorache, daughter of Eorlobe.

Perhaps because it is more contemporary, Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parodyseemed much more fun. The story pulls you along and the gags seem relevant and mostly amusing. After reading the first half of the book I found myself referring to Barry Trotterwhen talking about the original.

The ending came as a bit of a surprise, but that is explained therein, and is in accord with the rest of the book.

Worth reading if you can borrow a copy, probably not worth a trip to the local bookstore or any P&P costs.