SF Gateway specialise in putting Ebooks out there for classic SF titles that will probably never see the light of a printing press again (they also have some classic well known SF listed as well). They’re well edited, and the books I’ve had through Kobo have been excellent.

Enjoy, and have a Merry Christmas.

A few days ago (17th November … cough), I picked up a new toy, a Kobo Touch E-Reader.  I made a tweet along the lines of…

Look, it’s an EBook reader that’s not a kindle! It is, rather good. Review in a day or so.

In my defence, I have been testing the device thoroughly.  So thoroughly, I’ve clocked 41 hours reading time on it and around six books.  If you don’t believe me, see the photo for proof.

It’s small (6 inch screen, quite thin border), it’s light, and comes with a touch screen.  If you need more space, just pop in a micro SD card.  The device supports EPUB, MOBI, TXT, CBR/CBZ and PDF.  It’ll also connect using Adobe EPUB if you’ve bought books from other stores.  The UI is amazingly intuitive: your bookshelf can be arranged in a variety of views and reading consists of flicks or taps to the left and right.  The font size, margins, line spacing and font can all be changed, so you can make your page look like a condensed cheap 70s paperback or as spacious as a modern best seller hard back.  Reading is an addictive pleasure.  If the on board fonts aren’t good enough, you can side load TTFs.  Finally, it comes with a pretty good webkit based browser, Sudoku and a sketch pad.  Battery life appears to happily be a few weeks with a couple of hours a day.  I personally, recharge between books.

Firmware updates are regular and come as OTA updates.  Firmware appears to be released every few weeks with new functionality each time.  Latest release (as of writing) brought notes, highlights and annotations to non Kobo Books.

One of the big winners for me, is the shop system.  Purchases can be made on the website, on the reader or on tablet/phone.  Books are delivered OTA (Wifi only).  Books purchased from the store are tracked as you read so you can pick up your position on any device, and keep track of your reading habits.  Sidloaded books are only tracked on the device.  Books purchased from Kobo can be downloaded as Adobe EPub to use on other devices.  Admittedly, my first purchase had a small hitch, but this was quickly resolved by the store and I was refunded the full value of the book as store credit, which was rather nice.

I am impressed.  Love the device, love the system.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m getting back to reading.

(Edit: Wired rather like it as well: page1, page2)

In Manchester, our sessions revolved around Conway’s Game of Life, a simple cellular automaton. Working in pairs, every 45 minutes we would throw away our work and start again in a new pair.

Nothing is more frustrating than spending a whole day writing code, and having nothing to show for it. So this evening I hacked out a javascript implementation of life, and a HTML/JS front end for it. Set a grid size, then click on the cells to set the initial state. Start and stop the game and alter the state at any time.

You can try it out here, and the code is available to do with as you please on GitHub.

They brought forth to him tea,
It was tepid and weak.
What insult was this,
Did his patience, they seek?

Willing to forgive, he let this one slide.
And awaited the main to arrive with some pride.
Unbeat in battle, known far North was he.
As it’s mightiest eater, the pig slayer – me.

Out came the plate, brought to his table.
With quite some pomp, as if from a fable.
Insulted again, for what meat was this?
Reclaimed from the bits of the pig that were missed.

The sausage was plain, not Cumber’ or Lincoln,
They had managed to fail, with their miserable bacon.
The poor wretch had never seen a winter up North,
which would have hardened the meat, added taste to the pork.

The pudding had never seen innards or blood,
And the eggs had been pushed from the arse of a dove.
(For clearly not, the chicken had seen,
the great battle of foul of 2003).

Was this truly the all and the sum of the south?
That so soft were they, that their food left such doubt?
And all I could see was red in mine eyes,
That this was the best they could offer as tithe.

And as wont is all Northeners as is to do,
when treated as thus by as others shall too.
For whence and such as nerves are left this raw,
There was only one action left: to declare WAR.

Back in the North batallions were formed,
Regiments armed with real sausage, not Quorn.
And phalanxes grappled with spears made from bread,
formed and baked hard enough to crack a man’s head.

For where food is in battle, be in no doubt!
Our northern counterparts are tasty and stout.
So when presented forthwith with such a threat,
we go armed to the teeth, and very well fed.

Between Manchester and London the forces did meet,
and the Midlands did form the place for the feat.
All forces did bring, son, dog and daughter,
Lines of both sides threw themselves to the slaughter.

The battle was mighty, the battle was proud.
The Hodge was in Weatherspoons, where else to be found?
Our comrades did cleave though the soft sourthern masses.
Like a spork glides fast through a bowl of molasses.

On centre of field, two fighters sought out,
For Devon was held as the prize of their bout.
David and Daisy stripped bare to the waist,
Their udders displayed, a fight in poor taste.

Over so quickly, noone asked how.
Poor Daisy lay spent and dead on the ground.
The victorious bathed in the milk of the spoils,
It was clear right now, the Southeners recoiled.

In one final act, to cleanse and to pure,
Because dead bodies rot and makes harder to cure.
The earth was schorced to five thousand degrees,
a fitting end to Birmingham, sacrificed for we.

And the lands were divided and owned by the North,
apart from Devon which Dave had claimed as his fort.
And the land was now once quite again sure,
that no breakfast again would be served, quite so poor.

Dennis Ritchie, the father of C and Unix, was responsible for developing the operating system and language which underepins almost every machine which matters in the world.  With no C, despite your own personal views, there would be no Objective-C, no C++, no C# and no Java.  Programmers, computer scientists and anyone with any attachment to a computer owes this man a drink.  The man was quiet, quite reserved, and I think this reflected in his work.  There will be people the world over quietly raising a respectful glass in his honour.

Steve Jobs was a visionary,  driven by a desire to commodotise and make the things computers can do accessible.  With no Steve Jobs, I am pretty confident that certain areas of user interface design and product design would be at least a decade behind where we are now.  Jobs’ lasting legacy is not the products that he’s introduced, but the ideas.  It’s surprising to see the effect Apple’s rising has had on other producers in the industry, switching from a “good enough” viewpoint to consumer-centric.  Whether intentional, he did build a cult around himself and became worshipped by customers, worshipped by others in the industry and worshipped by fellow engineers.  When he passed away, there was a global out cry, and scenes of fans out-pouring their grief over what they saw as their loss.  This was also appropriate in its own way.

There have been complaints that Ritchie’s accomplishments were greater, his legacy larger, and yet his death passed relatively unnoticed by the mainstream media, and that this was unjust while the death of Jobs was plastered for several days across the major news channels.  The people who will mourn Dennis Ritchie genuinely appreciate his contribution to the industry, and will know it every time they use a tool he has influenced, be it mobile phone, desktop, server, programming language or toolchain.  People grieve for different people in different ways.  Both will be missed.  Jobs and Ritchie will be remembered for different reasons, and the way they will be remembered will reflect that.

(Cut for images)

NU.nl homepage @ 20^th October 2011 17:30

BBC News homepage @ 20^th October 2011 17:30

Some of them are getting a little over-excited over it though. Both the BBC and NU.nl are showing pictures of Gadaffi’s body on the front page, with no warnings – just plastered in your face. This may be rather unsuitable for younger viewers, for which the beeb and various news sites are seen as trusted sources, and as such are accessible behind school firewalls. It’s also very triggery for a lot of people, especially those who have been involved in trauma or handling the recently-deceased.

BBC News Article on Dale Farm @ 20^th October 2011 17:30

Even viewing news articles not on the front page isn’t particularly safe, since there’s a picture and reminder in the top right that Gadaffi is dead, and just to back that up, a picture of his dead face, still covered in blood.

I’m against censorship of the internet, but I am for an awareness of your viewers. Beeb, Nu.nl, you may want to take this in to account.

Apple apparently fixed this issue with 10.7.2 and closed the related ticket. Alas the issue is not closed, although it is much better. There is also a temporary way to resolve the issue until the machine is rebooted.

Send the machine to sleep, and wake it back up. The related graphics problems should now stop.

I have no idea why this works, or how this works, but it does indeed work. I’m now happily using ScreenRecycler again and VMWare isn’t getting so attached to my cursor anymore.

Another weekend, another barcamp… But blackpool is a little different to the other ‘camps held around the country. Whether it’s the epicness of running the event at the Blackpool Pleasure Beach Casino (I kid ye not), or that we have a near infinite supply of rock, Blackpool always manages to blend the geek with the surreal.

Three to four years ago, when I first started to attend Barcamps, talks were always based on computing technical topics. Ruby on Rails, iOS and Android were the new kids on the block, and Barcamps were seen as a way of getting people involved (or at least introduced) to those platforms. As the years have gone on, the amount of computing-technical content has gone down, and we’ve seen sessions run on knitting, hama-badge making and British Sign Language. Always interesting, but I had started to wonder whether we were losing focus on things to do at Barcamps.

This year, I was pleased to see a range of talks run over a number of tracks, some technical, some less, some nostalgic. I think the most popular, and certainly the most well received talk was “A Brief History of Error Messages”, including live demonstrations of Spectrum loading[1] and a real Windows ME machine. Well stitched together, there’s a potential stand-up routine here to rival Dave Gorman’s Powerpoint Presentation.

For my sins, I ran “Introduction to Teaching” – an explanation of the IDEA methodology with some practical work involving games, and “Propositional Logic for Beginners”, which caused much comment about attendees’ preference for sausage.

Barcamps come with after-parties, and Blackpool’s have become the stuff of legends. A little more keyed down than in previous years, after the buffet (otherwise known as the meat-fest), some Rock Band was played and a few, rather large games of Werewolf. The person who managed to sing Free Bird really deserves an award. The people at the bar thought we were listening to the recorded track…

As always, Barcamps can’t happen without the support of sponsors. This year’s Barcamp was sponsored (in no particular order) by: Testled, The H, Indigo, Magma Digital, FTP Concepts, JMC Website Design, Magic Missile (also winner of the dodgy logo award), Sugru, Tweetdig, Neterix, Mediaburst, FY Creatives, Our Learning and the Brookson Enterprise Freelance Fair.

Money is one thing, but actually having the stuff to put the event together takes even more, so a big shout-out goes to RubyGem and BigLesP for throwing away their sanity, and possibly their dignity to make it happen.

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[1] – there is genuinely something wrong when you hear the tones in the next room and think “that’s the header loading…”.