Meet the life hackers
A nice online article about personal productivity, and why I feel I never get much done. [icbm: work]
The book process continues
Despite my lack of posting here in the last couple of weeks, and the death of my laptop (which I believe is traditional when you write a book), the book process continues. This is the first time I've written a book, and the process itself is pretty interesting. At the moment I'm looking through edits from the copy editor for the first chapter (previously this chapter has survived technical review, a review from the acquisitions editor, and review from the project manager). The copy editor is providing comments on my writing style and how to make the chapter easier to read. I guess that I could take the comments as hurtful, but to be honest it's fun. It's kinda like having a personal coach trying to teach you how to write better. I like that. One interesting thing that has happened is that the chapter title was tweaked to "be more active", which I like. I guess that means some of the chapter descriptions I have already posted might actually be wrong. Oh well.
A first taste of Google blog reader
So, Google has released a beta of their bloglines equivalent service, and given that Liferea crashes about four times a day for me I thought I would give it a go. Login et cetera is easy, and the user interface is nice and AJAXy. It's fairly intuitive as well, although when I was importing my OPML file from Liferea I missed the message at the top saying the import was in progress as first. That said, it's been 30 minutes and it still says it's importing my 460 line OPML file. I just refreshed the page for the import, and the import stopped and said that I now had 54 subscriptions. So, I guess that means I should wait longer for the import. I'm now going to try importing over the top and see if it's smart enough to squelch duplicates.
Winchester Mystery House
When Andrew and I were in San Francisco recently we ran out of time to see the Winchester Mystery House, a mansion built by the widow of the dude who invested the Winchester rifle. She was convinced that the ghosts of Indians killed by Winchester rifles were haunting her, and modified the mansion to confuse them. Then Boing Boing pointed to this blog about the house which has some interesting photos online. I really must try to make it there sometime.
100km week
At the start of last week I set myself the goal of riding 100 kilometres during the week. Despite a couple of rainy days and being busy, I made it... I'm very proud of my little self now. [icbm: home]
Frank Arrigo discovers Steve Walsh’s free wireless
Steve Walsh from CLUG is associated with the free Internet access at the Pancake Parlour in Canberra. It's a small planet.
This looks handy, subway maps for mobile devices
Subway maps formatted for Playstation Portable.
Mont 24 hour race
The Mont 24 hour race (a mountain biking event in Canberra) is coming up. I'm thinking about coming along to take some pictures... Hopefully they'll be as nice as this one taken by Big Headed Simon. [icbm: home]
75 kilometres last week
It would have been more, except I was away on the weekend. I haven't gone riding yet this week -- it's been too wet. [icbm: home]
ImageMagick bug?
Subject: imagemagick: If the trailing character of a montage label option is a percent sign, the output image is erroneous Package: imagemagick Version: 6:6.2.3.6-3 Severity: normal *** Please type your report below this line *** Executing this command line: montage -geometry +10+10 -tile 2 -label "-sepia-tone 15%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20a.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 35%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20b.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 55%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20c.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 75%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20d.jpg ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20.jpg Whereas this command line: montage -geometry +10+10 -tile 2 -label "-sepia-tone 15%% " \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20a.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 35%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20b.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 55%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20c.jpg -label "-sepia-tone 75%%" \ ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20d.jpg ImageMagick_Chapter5_Insert20.jpg Produces the expected output: -- System Information: Debian Release: testing/unstable APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Kernel: Linux 2.6.11 Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968) Versions of packages imagemagick depends on: ii libmagick6 6:6.2.3.6-3 Image manipulation library imagemagick recommends no packages. -- no debconf information