Want to be an acquisitions editor on Open Source topics
Because the Average Joe is looking for one. [icbm: home]
The channel seven defence
Your honour, they can't prove we didn't lie in our story. Arguing that you could have lied in a journalistic story as a defence? Either Channel 7 is populated with such morons that you shouldn't be watching, or they can't be trusted. Pick. [icbm: home]
Hackathons
Let your development team spend a day hacking on a feature they care about. Sounds like a great idea to me. I look around at a lot of the developers I know and they're running at 50% efficiency because they feel bored doing what the managers say they should the whole time, and the product suffers as a result. Is your company having trouble with staff churn? It's probably because you don't let your employees become passionate any more. [icbm: home]
Sydney Australia in Google Maps
Sydney, Australia is in Google Maps. Satellite imagery only, but it's a start. Via the Unofficial Google Weblog. [icbm: home]
Interesting technique for finding leaks in code
So, your code leaks and you need a technique for finding what object you're leaking, so grab a couple of addresses at random and dump them. Chances are, they're the object your leaking. This technique is so sexy in it's beauty. [icbm: home]
Ministry of re-shelving
Re-shelve copies of 1984 under "current affairs" or "politics" in your local bookshop. [icbm: work]
Random segue: how I came up with the original table of contents
One of the problems I grappled with early on with was how do you come up with a table of contents for a book? It's a complicated process, and it's really important. If the book doesn't flow, then people are left confused about what goes where, and the book is a lot less useful. Additionally, when you sit down to actually write, then you need to know what is covered where so that you can refer the reader to the right place to find out more about a specific topic -- even if you haven't covered that topic yet. So how did I come up with the first cut of the table of contents for the ImageMagick book? Well, I started by looking at all of the command line options to the various ImageMagick commands. I wrote this down on a stack of old business cards, and then distributed those cards in logical sounding piles on the floor. Those piles pretty much became the chapters that I originally submitted. That's the card mound. Anyway, once that was done, Matt (the editor) and I sat down and worked on the table of contents description until it flowed nicely, covered everything we…
The Apress page for the book
I just noticed that Apress has a page up for the book as well. Perhaps I should stop pointing these things out, but I find it exciting. There's something deeply weird about reading about yourself though.
Working on review comments for Chapters 2, 3 and 4 tonight
Michael Carden asks in a comment to my previous post to the book if I had considered making draft chapters available for public comment before printing. To be completely honest it hadn't occurred to me until Michael suggested it, and it does fit well with all the open source stuff I have done over the years. It's a hard call though, because there is already a review team of four or five, and there isn't much spare time in the process because we really want the book published in time for Christmas. This is why I'm going to say no this time to the offer of a more public review, and I'll do my best to take that on board next time when I know more about how long this sort of thing can take (I'm actually only about two days over schedule at the moment, but I really don't want to slip any further). Sorry Michael. Anyways, I'm working on review comments for three chapters tonight, which is one of the things that made me think about this more. I'm really rather surprised about how positive the review comments have been so far given how I feel about the…
ImageMagick book – Chapter 3: Compression and Other Metadata
Writing the summary of Chapter 2 seemed to work as a warmup for me the other day, so I thought I would write about Chapter 3 as a warm up for working some more on Chapter 7. I also need to look at reviewer comments for Chapters 2, 3, and 4 sometime today, so it seems like a good idea as well because it will help me remember what I am trying to cover in the chapter. Chapter 3 is all about the different things you can do with compression with ImageMagick, as well as other forms of image metadata. So, I start out by talking about lossy versus lossless compression (there's an interesting tangent to this discussion which I need to add as a sidebar to the chapter during this editing process, but I'll leave that to another post here), I give some examples of the accumulative nature of the loss from lossy compressions. We then move on to compare the size of a bunch of images using different compression algorithms, which gives a good introduction to discussing which image format is the right choice for given scenarios. (As an aside that I will follow here, that was probably…