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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.

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A first taste of Google blog reader

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  • Post category:Google

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.

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Winchester Mystery House

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  • Post category:Travel

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.

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100km week

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  • Post category:Bike

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]

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Mont 24 hour race

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  • Post category:Bike

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]

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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

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ImageMagick book – Chapter 4: Other ImageMagick Tools

It's been a while since I wrote one of these chapter summaries here, and the reason for that is that I've been busy writing chapters, attending conferences, caring for a sick wife, and stuff like that. The book is still pretty much on track (I'm currently running about a week behind on the chapter deadlines, but I think I can have the whole thing done by the overall deadline). Chapter 4 is an interesting one as it discusses all the tools which aren't going to be covered elsewhere in the book. The reality of ImageMagick is that 95% of the functionality is exposed in the convert command, so you can discuss most things there. There are however some cool things which happen in commands of their own, and those are the things discussed in this chapter. The chapter is so early on in the book because I don't want to give the impression that ImageMagick is a one trick pony, and because any book claiming to be a complete coverage of ImageMagick really does have to discuss them. I wont go into a blow by blow account of what commands are covered, as that would be quite dull to read.…

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