Since leaving for Europe in mid-May, being ill, then coming back to the US I’ve read a lot of books.
Here’s the summary:
Savage Summit – Jennifer Jordan
Atrocity Exhibition – J G Ballard
The Bomb – G J DeGroot
Teach Your Baby to Read – Glenn and Janet Doman
I re-read:
Espedair Street – Iain Banks
Cluetrain Manifesto – Locke, Searls, Weinberger
The Complete Henry Root Letters – William Donaldson
I am back in Lebanon, NH for a day or so – and what a difference from the previous visits.
The first few visits here were during the depths of winter – very cold and with a higher humidity than Utah it was bone chilling.
Today it is sunny, warm and about 30’C/90’F. This part of NH is also very green and lush; even with the prolonged rain back home it is nothing like this. It’s a real reminder of England.
I found another nice new tool for blogging – especially when I am off-line.
Drivel is a really cool client for working with your blog – it supports the online hosted stuff like blogger as well as self-hosted sites like MovableType or WordPress.
I installed Drivel from the Fedora Core 3 RPM (runs just perfectly on NLD) – just make sure you have an updated libcurl on your system. You may need to do some jigging around with symlinks in /usr/lib if you find badly behaved/packaged applications.
I posted a few months ago on why I used Blogger. The main reason for not self-hosting was:
Without starting the whole religious war – yes there are very very strong open source blog frameworks out there; put it simply I’m just too lazy (or too busy) to get the thing deployed, tweaked, secured and customised for my world.. that’s why I’m posting here.
I wanted more control of the content; as well as the ability to control posting, comments, spam etc. I also wanted to investigate using one of the tools in production. What better way than to host.
As for my choice of WordPress – I like the plugin architecture; the post-editor; the licensing works for me. I also looked at several blog comparisions – and it really came down to personal choice.
Sorry to everyone reading PlanetNovell – I moved my blog and everything got pulled across.
I’ve moved my blog from blogspot to a self-hosted WordPress installation.
No particular reason. I just wanted more control over the look and feel of the blog; as well as supporting features like trackback.
Currently running on a crappy old server running SLES 9 with WordPress, Apache, PHP and MySQL. Hopefully the hardware is reliable enough.
I’ll post more on how things progress.
Maybe only for the Brit-centric geeks – but the BBC have a somewhat splendid flash app which lets you play with samples from the original Doctor Who theme.
The original and best was composed by Ron Grainger of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop – it’s a classic of early electronic music that even receives homage on Ishkurs (ever updated) Guide.
More observations on changes in the UK since we last lived there in 2002..
One noticable theme of our stay in England was that every newspaper seemed to have a Sudoku puzzle in it. Asking around and this is a very recent phenomenon. Even Wikipedia notes that the craze started in the Spring of 2005.
It seems that the Sudoku puzzle craze is just another meme – take a look at this article from The Observer Sunday newspaper from 15 May 2005:
If the first week of May 2005 will be remembered for a general election, the second will go down as the week of Sudoku.
National newspapers scrambled to advertise the puzzle on their front pages, while websites devoted to it sprang up and TV and radio stations caught the new global bug.
Numerous articles have attributed the puzzle, which has a Japanese name, to the mysteries of the Land of the Rising Sun. But its true modern origins lie with a team of puzzle constructors in 1970s’ New York, from where it set off on a 25-year journey to Tokyo, London – and back to New York.
Scientists have identified Sudoku as a classic meme – a mental virus which spreads from person to person and sweeps across national boundaries. Dr Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine, said: ‘This puzzle is a fantastic study in memetics. It is using our brains to propagate itself across the world like an infectious virus.’
Indeed.
The nice people at the Mozilla Foundation have released the first alpha of the Firefox 1.1 code.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/deerpark/releases/alpha1.html
It installed and ran just perfectly on my Novell Linux Desktop – all of my cookies, bookmarks etc came across perfectly from Firefox 1.0.4.
I’m just hunting down sites that don’t work. Looks like Blogger is one of them. I’ll revisit this post and add appropriate link goodness.
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