Friday, 4 November, 2005

Google Print, Firefox, Google Portal

A day off work today. A few quick things before I get on. Maybe more later…

  • Google Print is online. Had a quick play, looking for H.G. Wells’ The First Men on the Moon. Sadly that text is still under copyright so not all of it is available. Plenty of other classics are there in full though. Haven’t had a chance to see what options are available for printing – I am guessing that it is probably just an on screen thing.
  • Firefox has reached a 10% share of the browser market, according to ZDNet, linked to by John Naughton. This is good news, not least because the more people using FireFox means that they can’t be ignored, and web sites will have to start complying with standards to ensure their sites are displayed proplerly.
  • Google’s personalised portal is now released for the UK. Has a few new links for UK related stuff, like news and even the London Review of Books! Sadly, the UK-centric weather service focuses only on a select band of cities – the closest to me being Wolverhampton, which is almost completely useless!

Wednesday, 2 November, 2005

NaNoWriMoSest

Everyone has heard of NaNoWriMo, the web-organised novel writing sprint, which involves writing 50,000 words to get a novel finished during the month of November. It sounds like madness, and it is.

What’s the point of it? Well, part of the idea is that the quality of what you write isn’t all that important. It’s the very act of getting the words down on paper, or rather onto the screen, in such numbers that the whole thing just won’t seem so daunting any more. Plus, there might be some nuggets of plot or character, or maybe even a chunk of some genuinely good writing that can be salvaged. It also gives you an opportunity to say to people at christmas parties that you are now on your second novel.

Over on Palimpsest, we have set ourselves a different challenge. We are going to try and get the 50,000 words done collectively. With more of us involved, the individual word count goes right down, but complications are added, such as getting the thing to make sense, for example. Have a read of the various deliberations that have taken place over who is involved, how it can be done, and what the plot should be.

The actual document is being collated using the web word processor Writely – which is ideal for a collaborative project like this, where people from both the UK and the US are working on the same document. A copy of the work in progress is published for other Palimpeople to read and keep up-to-date.

It will be interesting to see how things turn out. It looks like there will be a massive editing job at the end.

Microsoft Going Live

Microsoft have released two websites just recently: one that barely works and one that doesn’t actually do anything at all.

Live.com

The first is live.com, some sort of portal that seems rather like start.com, though Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s chief apologist, claims there will be more to it than that. At the moment though, it doesn’t work with Firefox. Joel Spolsky gives it a thorough spanking.

MS Office Online

The second is officelive.com, which appears to be an attempt by Microsoft to head off the potential competition of Web 2.0 style applications, presumably by offering online services that MS Office currently lacks while still tying users into the core desktop applications. Either way, all you can do at the moment is register an interest.

There are a couple of issues to be debated around here. One is the current fad, which is to release stupidly early beta versions of software, which I assume Google is partly responsible for. Is there some sort of credibility to be gained by having beta releases floating around at a really early point? Possibly – the other factor might be that these companies are getting a whole load of free testing being done, and with the growth of blogs and accurate searching via Technorati and the like, it’s all very easily collated.

Secondly, if Microsoft is taking a turn in this direction, then it must be pretty worried. Maybe the constant rumours of a Google powered OpenOffice have got Bill Gates and co. a little worried. But the ease of sharing and collaborating on documents across the net is becoming a number one priority for software makers, and this will have interesting affects on all sorts of things, not least the way people work. Soon, people working from home, given a fat enough broadband connection, will be able to do everything that someone based in the office can – and they can be anywhere in the world, and using any operating system. Maybe Microsoft try and use their web services to tie users into their existing platforms, but they would be unlikely to succeed long term.

The key to all this is the creation and acceptance of an open standard for documentation formats, to ensure that peope can work across all services, so that it doesn’t matter what application or site someone is using: the file can always be opened.

Tuesday, 1 November, 2005

Wednesday, 26 October, 2005

Advertising God

I love these posters. The sheer awfulness of the puns they employ never fail to make me smile.

Methodist poster

This was taken on my cameraphone (hence (lack of) quality) in Warwick.

Tuesday, 25 October, 2005

Gutenberg formatting

Palimpsest’s Book Group is reading two H.G. Wells books at the moment. Being a skinflint, I thought I would download them from Project Gutenberg, a library of free books available in ext format, and sometimes HTML.

The two novels are:

The trouble is that often the HTML option isn’t there, and the text files are formatted with hard line breaks, which means that the lines break at that point whether it needs to or not. So if you load them into a word processor and change the font and text size to get the page count down for printing, the results look terrible.

Surely, I thought, it must be possible to automatically remove these line breaks, somehow? I asked in various places:

All to no avail!

Until Carfilhiot suggested a tool called GutenMark, a command line tool for linux or Windows which takes the text file and reformats nicely it to HTML. It is released under the GPL, so it should be possible to have a look at the source and see if it can be persuaded to produce just text files, though it may be possible to cut and paste from the browser to a text editor to see what results from that.

Carfilhiot has hosted the reformatted versions of the Wells texts:

Excellent – and the copy-and-paste to text file seems to work too!

In the News

Been listening to Radio 4 and the Today programme on the way into work recently. This morning’s news was full of interesting stuff:

  • Galloway accused of Senate ‘lies’ – I am no fan of Galloway’s, but I do find it surprising that the Seante Committee has come out with these statements without further interviews with ‘Gorgeous’ George.
  • Africa Aids orphans ‘may top 18m’ – and one report stated that the life expectancy for a male in (IIRC) Zambia is 30. 30!
  • EU mulls wild bird import freeze – Apparently this was suggested and agreed by most EU states in March this year. the only country to explicity say ‘no’? The UK. Brilliant.
  • Overweight job hunters ‘lose out’ – no wonder I can’t get a job nearer home! Reminds me of one time I was being abused for my rotundity, and I accused my adversary of being fattist. “No, Dave,” he replied. “You’re the fattest.” Bastard.