I love these posters. The sheer awfulness of the puns they employ never fail to make me smile.
This was taken on my cameraphone (hence (lack of) quality) in Warwick.
Links 25/10/05
Haven’t done one of these for a while. Sorry!
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:
- Palimpsest’s Ono No Komachi suggested using EReader, but that costs money!
- The guys at South Cheshire LUG had a go at producing some Perl to convert the text files – but they didn’t quite work, and I don’t have a linux box to run these on yet
- Blixa on Palimpsest came up with some VBA script for MS Word to reformat the text, but it doesn’t quite work either, and it involves Word and VBA (but is very clever)…
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.
Can you trust Wikipedia?
The Guardian asks whether the content in Wikipedia is worth all that much, and gets some experts to judge some entries.
The founder of the online encyclopedia written and edited by its users has admitted some of its entries are ‘a horrific embarrassment’.
To be honest, I would never dream of using Wikipedia as a serious research tool. If I want a very quick rundown on something, though, it’s fine. Would be interested to find where Jimmy Wales mentioned this ‘horrific embarrassment’!
edit: Aha! The article than began all this was by Nicholas Carr, titled The amorality of Web 2.0. Wales then responds:
I don’t agree with much of this critique, and I certainly do not share
the attitude that Wikipedia is better than Britannica merely because it
is free. It is my intention that we aim at Britannica-or-better
quality, period, free or non-free. We should strive to be the best.But the two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific
embarassment. [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] are nearly unreadable crap.Why? What can we do about it?
So there we have it…unless we let Andrew Orlowski have his usual rant against ‘Wiki-fiddlers’, in the Register:
Encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and überpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work.
Criticism of the project from within the inner sanctum has been very rare so far, although fellow co-founder Larry Sanger, who is no longer associated with the project, pleaded with the management to improve its content by befriending, and not alienating, established sources of expertise. (i.e., people who know what they’re talking about.)
Meanwhile, criticism from outside the Wikipedia camp has been rebuffed with a ferocious blend of irrationality and vigor that’s almost unprecedented in our experience: if you thought Apple, Amiga, Mozilla or OS/2 fans were er, … passionate, you haven’t met a wiki-fiddler. For them, it’s a religious crusade.