Unclutterer reports that O'Reilly tech books has an ebook promotion for $4.99 per book you already own. This looks quite useful to me:

- O'Reilly ebooks come as a bundle of three common formats (mobi, pdf, epub)
- they are un-copyprotected, a.k.a. not locked to existing software/hardware readers
- while only a fraction of their books are currently available in ebook, some others are also available as pdf

To get the $4.99 books, you need to make an account on their site, register the ISBNs of your books, add them each to your cart, and use the 499UP discount code. I tested one book, and it appears to work.

I may just have to get busy with our barcode-reader at work, since that's where my O'Reilly books live now. I figure at least a dozen of my books are worth future-proofing in case I eventually buy a portable bookreader. :)

The arts event I went to this evening was... meh.

I slept instead of going to the Cory Doctorow talk. It was a good nap.

I had a funny idea that solves a problem at work. I want to start hacking WWW::Mechanize to make a proof of concept, but roverthedog is standing at the door staring at me and her eyes are saying, "You haven't given me a walk yet."

I shouldn't write this code, anyway; I should give it to my co-op.

Really I shouldn't.

OK, Rover, time for a walk!

I will freely admit this post will be of limited interest, but I'm quite happy with this result, and maybe you will be too, if you're a big 'ol label-making geek. :)

So, part of GTD is the importance of having labeled manila file-folders. I can corroborate that printed-label folders do work better than hand-printed labeled folders. Not only do they look good, there's something viscerally fun about filing something away in a new folder.

The GTD guy recommends buying an electronic label-maker. For a number of reasons (including: the clutter factor, the expensive label-tape they use, and typing on those chiclet keyboards annoys me) I've made do with printing onto a sheet of Avery 3x10 labels in OpenOffice. While this solves those problems, this still felt like "making do" because it takes OpenOffice a full minute to open, the template is a little mis-aligned, yadda yadda.

( So I found a little script, and extended it. )

And that's my labeler, which I figure is at least 5 times cheaper than the tape-label machines, going by the price of the refills.

Data can come from a unix pipe or from standard input. Turning a manual task into a unix pipe command is about as good as it gets, productivity-improvement-wise. (assuming it's not a stupid task in the first place).

Oh and also, if we decide to do them this year, I think it will work wonderfully on holiday address labels, even straight from an emacs buffer of addresses, because you pipe data to it.

Three years ago, I read about 9-block quilt patterns and I turned it into a perl program and article, purely for amusement-value. And a Christmas present.

Someone else has taken the original idea and made them into a security feature for web discussion-boards to prevent spoofing. It's a one-way hash from someone's IP address into a unique picture. Quite a clever idea!

I noticed a few weeks ago when these shapes started showing up on wordpress blogs. It seems they've added it as a standard wordpress plugin option. It will take me a while before I don't do a double-take each time I see them though. :)

While melted_snowball is learning the very useful R statistics environment, I'm learning just enough about Piet, a graphical language whose programs look like Mondrain paintings. I foolishly volunteered to present on this topic for my local Perl Mongers group. I'd hoped I could reimplement my quilt-building program to make executable programs, but that part has fallen by the wayside. If you want to know what I present on, either show up [1], or ask me after the fact what went down, 'cause I'm sure I'm not going to have time in advance to write up proper slides.

[1] google for our town and perl, should be easy to find our website. The talk's tomorrow night at 7pm. Pizza's on the house. Beer, after, probably at McGinnis in the Plaza.

Come watch me make a fool of myself!

I'm in Chicago. First task tomorrow: replace my camera's CF card.

I bought my digital camera in 2001. One of its features was its massive storage capacity: a 340 MB hard-disk, in CF form-factor. (Man, that was a lot of storage then. And so tiny!) But progress marches on. Now my camera is old, slow, and I was wondering when I could afford to replace it.

Yesterday, I tried a regular CF card in it. Weow, it's like a whole new camera, so much faster.

Staples has a sale on CF cards. $30 gets you 1GB. That seems like progress to me.

--

emaki and I are in a hotel just next to McCormick Place. It's overlooking some odd looking statuary.

( Blade Runner? )

Also, the
( bedside table )
has both a Gideon Bible and The Teaching of Buddha. [ed: fixed titles]

Tomorrow: architecture tours.

I'm going to Chicago for a perl conference that starts Monday. This is the most geekish group I am involved with. In addition to many other things about YAPC that I enjoy, I like the opportunity to learn what all the alpha-geeks are up to these days. The conference flavour is not particuarly higher-ed, corporate, or trade-show. It's more like a smallish con, or a swap-meet trading in programming ideas. I always learn something interesting, and often something I can take and use at work immediately. But a lot of it is just plain fun. (For example YAPC was my first exposure to massive numbers of laptops with wifi, in '01 or so.)

This year's mailing-list and wiki have been gearing up for a few weeks, and people are starting to make their plans for hacking sessions, being tourists in Chicago and so on. (I've made plans for a less herd-oriented tourist experience; emaki , another friend Arguile, and I will be touring in a small group on Saturday and Sunday).

The conference planners are taking advantage of the stuff that seems to be called "Web 2.0" these days, including social-networking services, AJAX (which is less server-intensive web tools built with javascript and xml), and "mashups" between web tools. This makes sense; the organizers this year include a number of bloggers, a podcaster, and a part-time magazine-publisher.

Yesterday, they announced the "official tag of YAPC". I initially scoffed, thinking it overkill. Then I thought about what it would be used for; del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr photos, perhaps technorati blog-searches, and google searches. So yes, it makes sense to standardize on a tag, and since most people will be bringing laptops, cameras, blogging, and maybe bookmarking whatever they discover at YAPC, it makes finding stuff in these web services much easier for those of us who come along a bit later.

This morning someone converted the official schedule to ical format, including abstracts. Someone else posted it to Google Calendar, which is pretty handy for me, though I'll probably use ical for the duration of the conference since there isn't a guarantee of network quality.

So what's the point? I suppose it all comes down to laziness. ;) And, hopefully, building on the work of others (and giving it out for others to do the same in an open-sourcy way).

I'm a happy camper. We just had our first guest presenter at my Perl User Group meeting; he was an excellent speaker, on a great topic [1], followed up by some good local-ish [2] beer, and biking home in shorts and tee-shirt for a total of ~10km today. And melted_snowball is coming in 2.5 days, huzzah huzzah.

Logistically, in the list of: preparing the talk, presenting the talk, reserving the room, ordering and getting the pizza, paying for the pizza, and cleaning up after the pizza, I only had to do one item. There have been many months when I didn't have to do most of them (some when I did) but I think this time it was distributed more evenly; two people each did two items, the other two were chiefly done by one person each. That is to say, I think we're more organized. I think if I were to be hit by a bus, the group would continue. Which is a good stage to be at.

[1] Cees Hek spoke to us on AJAX - Dynamic web sites with DHTML and Perl: How to use the popular Prototype library to fill your web application with flashy widgets such as draggable lists, autocompleting text boxes and transition effects. With a focus on HTML::Prototype and CGI::Application.

That is to say, some of the magick behind gmail, flickr, and such; sending data without reloading pages. With a minimum of fuss/writing XML (ugh).

[2] I've been corrected. It was by Molson. (*sigh* Shows what I know about beer.) But it was still OK beer; Rickard's Red.

Friday night, I went to dinner with Quaker friends; two who are going away on a 4 month trip to walk across Spain. We'll certainly miss them, partly since they are responsible for a lot of the week-to-week repair tasks for the Meeting House. Speaking of which, the weekend also featured not one but two Quaker Meeting House disasters, one sewer-pipe-related and expensive, they other boiler-related and expensive. Those became the capstone to Sunday's Quaker Meeting, which included an emergency Business Meeting to deal with the problems. Otherwise, the Quaker Meeting continued the last month's string of really good Meetings- there were a few surprising messages, all of them good.

Saturday, I lazed and programmed. Fish and I talked about photo mosaics and by the time we were done talking, we were most of the way toward planning the code, so we (mostly he) went ahead and wrote a mosaic-builder. That will get its own post, later.

I also went over to our favourite neighbours' (L & D) house for an extended chat and coffee. They just bought a shiny silver espresso-maker for L's birthday. D, being D, had to try out what happened if he turned on the steam-maker when there wasn't a cup in place ("to clean it out") with predictable results. L, being L, rolled her eyes and shoed him from the room while we made coffee. :)

In the evening, I went to the concert for melted_snowball's chorus, themed for Easter. Most of the first half was a capella and I was really feeling the harmonies. Great stuff.

Oh, Sunday also featured a walk uptown with roverthedog, to try and buy a book and a ticket to see Karen Armstrong speak next Saturday (her latest book is about the 9th century BCE, during which time she says all of the following were created: Confucianism and Daoism in China; Hinduism and Buddhism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece. I don't exactly believe her dates are that tight; Confucus lived 350 years later; but I liked her other books on comparative theology so I'll go see her speak again.)

I have a talk to go to at 7. I previously decided to skip the potluck beforehand, because I didn't want to prepare Yet Another Potluck Meal * (it would be the 3rd since Sunday). But I still need to eat.

I also have a dozen and a half deviled eggs left over from last night's potluck. I wasn't sure how I'd manage to eat 'em all before they went bad; even considering I could mush them up into egg salad.

Gee, how ever can I solve both of these problems?...


(*) Not to be confused with Yet Another Perl Monger, which I also don't want to prepare tonight. Anyway.

I wish I understood why it never rained but always poured. I mean, really understood, instead of shrugging and winging it each time. My leading hypothesis is a trickster god. (It's funny when one squirrel falls out of a tree onto a friend, but my money says it's gotta be staged when the second squirrel falls onto her a few weeks later. Do you know anybody who's been hit by two squirrels?)

Since I've taken the full-time job at the University a month ago, I've gotten a gratifying number of requests for my time to do small programming gigs (small as in 15-30 hours worth). The notable feature is that they travel in groups- three one evening last week, two this evening, both which I'd have probably taken six months ago.

I would really like to spread some of this karma around- does anybody know good perl programmers looking for small gigs? I've been directing people to the perl jobs list, but I'd like a bit better connection because these are all for friends or colleagues who I'd like to do the right thing by.

This morning, the purchasing guy at work handed me a new ergonomic mouse; which means I can take my other one home again.

This morning I handed off my article on drawing quilt patterns to the editor of perl_review. The issue will come out some time in the spring, and since my article is on a colourful topic, it gets the cover. Now I have something else to send dan's mom, who was the reason I started playing with these in the first place.

I also found out that my article for Linux Journal is in the March issue. I won't complain much, because they will be paying me. But about bloody time; this ain't acadamia. I think the author's bio is two times out of date, since I wrote the article about the same time I started my previous job last summer. Because the topic is decidedly non-colourful, (the Perl Debugger), it appears it did not get the cover.

Now I need to be less one-note and write something interesting that has nothing at all to do with a scripting language.

What do do on a blustery, -15 degree, flurrying day? d's answer today seems to be playing a lot of Civ. Mine has been to play around with computer-generated limericks and quilt squares.

I'm happier with the virtual quilt squares, which got turned into a christmas present: a large print with 10,000 patterns. 'Cause they asked, I hope to also turn it into an article for a quarterly Perl magazine some time in the next month.

The limericks suck.


there once was a sword-leaved from noil pschent
who stay sports neologize so blent
circumnavigate
sneesh black-figure prate
rail-line cockleboat privat-docent


Sigh.

The database I'm using doesn't have parts-of-speech, only meter and pronunciation, so the best it can do is nonsense words. Eventually, I'd like to work my way up to: providing as much as I could come up with on my own, and the program will suggest words to complete the lines.