marramgrass

I have a problem: I read a lot. In itself, this isn’t the end of the world, but has some tricky consequences.

As a scarily voracious reader since I was very young, I buy books in great number. My “to read” pile seems to grow a bit faster than I’m currently working my way down it (life, you know?), and we’ve pretty much run out of space to keep the books. The bookcases — all of them — are full, and the staging piles around the house are beginning to teeter. Taken alongside my inability to dispose of any book, the problem becomes clear.

Over the last few years, I have almost completely stopped buying CDs. It’s not because I don’t buy music any more — I’m probably buying more music than I have at any time since I was sixteen. It’s just that these days most of the music I buy comes as a digital download, usually from either the iTunes Music Store or Amazon’s MP3 service. Physical discs have become an encumbrance I’d rather do without. (My wife took some convincing on this, but has been coming ’round to the idea, too.) All our actual CDs are in big plastic boxes in the garage.

We haven’t taken the same step with video (TV boxed sets or movies on DVD) yet, but that’s mainly because video eats up hard disk space very quickly and the only active computer in the house is a laptop, where disk space is limited. Once I figure out the easiest way to keep track of media on external drives, that may change.

Books, then. Are books different? Part of me thinks so. I’m a little funny about books, a little reverential. It might be daft, and I trace it back to a specific incident when I was a child*, but I can’t get away from viewing them as a bit special, a bit more significant than other media. Unlike shiny platters, I like the things themselves a great deal — even the pulpy paperbacks, of which I have many.

Set against this is the geek in me, frequently glancing towards the world of the ebook reader.

Lately, I’ve taken to buying technical and reference books as ebooks. They’re easier to find for download than they are to get in any bookshop in Belfast, I like getting my (metaphorical) hands on them straight away, and an indexed PDF is much easier to handle than a five, six or seven hundred page lump of pulped wood. Having to read them from the computer screen is no problem, and can be very handy for reference books.

I’ve read one novel from the screen of my computer. It was a pretty poor SF thing that the author stuck up for free download a couple of years ago. Quality of the prose aside, it’s not a reading experience I’d be keen to repeat: reading fiction, or even non-technical non-fiction, is done differently. A laptop screen won’t do. Might a dedicated ebook reader?

Ebooks aren’t much, if any, cheaper than print. Project Gutenberg and the like aside, the benefit is convenience rather than cost, especially when you figure on spending a couple of hundred pounds on a reader. Also, not everything that’s published is available as an ebook, or in every format, but the genres I read seem reasonably well served.

There aren’t many hardware options available. You can get pretty good reader software for PDAs and phones, but I find the screen of my iPhone a bit cramped for reading long-form text. Amazon sell their Kindle readers, although they’re not yet available outside the US. There’s been talk for a while now of a UK launch, but no sign of it actually happening. Sony have their Reader hardware, which is sold here by Waterstone’s. There are a few other options from smaller manufacturers, but these two are the main contenders. (IREX wouldn’t count as a smaller manufacturer, but their hardware is crazy expensive. That said, their latest, just announced reader could be a definite contender.)

While the Kindle isn’t officially available here, it’s not hard to get one imported. I’ve spent some time with a friend’s Kindle DX, the main strengths of which seem to be its fantastic big screen and its excellent PDF support (important to me). It’s also a very nicely put-together item. However, outside the States it’s trickier to buy ebooks from Amazon, and they seem to be the main supplier of books in the Kindle’s preferred format. Also, you lose its ability to buy books and periodicals over-the-air. I fell in love with it a little, though.

The first Sony Reader to be widely available here was the PRS-505. I know folks who love theirs, and I almost bought one, but the slow page turn and the woeful PDF support put me off. The new PRS-600 seems to have sorted these issues out, though, and it supports a nicely large number of file formats, including the very widely-available ePub. I hope to get a detailed play with one sometime soon; I had been holding out for a UK Kindle DX, and even thinking of importing one myself, but the PRS-600 might take its place.

I think I’ve decided that it’s time for another shift in how I consume media, although I expect the flow of paper into our house to continue as a trickle. I’m just trying to figure out when and with which device.

I know there are at least one or two people who peek in here who use ebook readers. Please leave a comment with any advice you can offer.

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* The incident: I was young. I was an avid viewer of Blue Peter. One afternoon they demonstrated how to make a nice cardboard picture frame, but the only cardboard I had available was the hardcover of one of my dad’s fishing books. It was impressed on me that you don’t do that kind of thing with books…

Techy, geeky stuff again. I’m going to stop apologising for that. For a while, there, I toyed with launching another blog as an outlet for the geeky things I like to post; I’m aware that it’s not really the cup of tea of everyone who reads here. I was going to call it Heartless Gravity. (Extra points if you figure out why.) For now, though, I’ve decided to keep it all here.

Having just gone through a (relatively painless) operating system upgrade, I’ve been noticing the little things, software especially, which make my day go just a bit more easily.

• 1Password is very first on the list of software that I’d have trouble functioning without. With so much business being done online and web applications as far as the eye can see, I’ve ended up with what feels like hundreds of username/password pairs to try and remember. Better that everything has its own (difficult) password, so 1Password remembers them all for me and I only have to remember its single (stonkingly complex) master password. Best make sure that database is backed up…
• MobileMe is the over-the-air syncing service from Apple. It was a little flaky when it first launched, but now it keeps the diaries and address books on my computer and on my phone matched up without me having to do anything about it. This is the service that got me away from pen and paper for everything, which is enough of an achievement alone.
• Caffeine is dead simple. It’s a little icon in the menubar of my Mac that deactivates the screen saver, sleep setting or anything else that will affect the screen when the computer is idle. Don’t try and give a presentation without it.
• Things is a simple, slick task tracker, and it even syncs to my phone. I could never do lists, but over the last few years I’ve developed a serious habit. Things tracks everything for me. If you take it away, I’ll never get anything done.
• TextMate is just a text editor. Like Notepad, or TextEdit. A big, smooth Lexus hybrid, or a Porsche 911, is just a car. Like a Corsa or a Fiesta. TextMate can be the Lexus or the Porsche. Or a Landrover. I do more and more of my writing in plain text, before dropping it into Word or Pages or whatever, and I’ve tried a ridiculous number of text editors. TextMate won that race.
• ChronoSync keeps my local copy of all my work documents in step with what’s on the file server in the office, so I don’t have to think about it.
• Spotify sits alongside iTunes, keeping my ears happy through the day.

And that’s just the software, and only that of it that’s always running every day. There’s plenty more.

Now it’s 12:34:56 on 07/08/09.

Simple pleasures…

Just now, on 07/08/09, it’s 10:11:12.

That is all.

If the title of this post doesn’t mean anything to you, you’re pretty safe to skip it.

Like many others, I’ve been using Subversion for source code management and version control. I have mostly been happy, but over the weekend I’d had enough of some of the foibles by which Subversion shows its age. After playing about with it for a while, I decided to move to Mercurial.

Distributed VCS is all the rage right now. All the cool kids seem to be using Git, but Mercurial appealed to me more. There are other options, as well.

Migrating from Subversion to Mercurial should be easy. Mercurial includes the hg convert extension, which takes your Subversion repository and converts it to Mercurial while maintaining all your branches and tags as well — if you can get it to work. I tried for an afternoon and couldn’t get it to fire. (I was working with a remote repository. You may have better luck working locally.)

I decided to try hgsvn, which I installed from MacPorts as py25-hgsvn. It aims to allow you to use Mercurial to manage a repository and then push and pull from a Subversion repository. I didn’t take it that far, though if you try it please let me know how it works. I was mainly interested in making the switch completely, which I managed reasonably well.

Before we go through the process, here’s one thing to bear in mind: if your Subversion repository contains tags and branches, these will appear in your new mercurial repository as directories containing a bunch more source code, with the whole directory structure making up one big working copy. This makes sense if you think about it, as branching and tagging in Subversion is nothing more than making copies of your files and promising yourself (and your collaborators) that you’ll treat them a certain way.

Because of this, I found that this will work best if you select a certain branch (maybe your trunk, maybe not) and convert it only. So this process will work best for you if you’re working on your trunk, or only want to bring over one branch with its revision history.

With that in mind, here’s what you do. (I’m on Mac OS X, but this should follow for most *nix-type systems. On Windows, it may well be a bit different.)

Set up the conversion using, for example

$ hgimportsvn http://yourrepo.com/trunk/

In this example, the new Mercurial repository will be in a folder called ‘trunk’, so you may want to rename it by

$ mv trunk MyProject

Move into that directory and grab the contents of the repository with

$ cd MyProject
$ hgpullsvn

At this point, you will be able to run this as a Mercurial repository without any trouble. However, there is a little cleanup we can do to make everything neater.

First, because hgsvn is designed to allow Mercurial and Subversion to coexist, but that’s not what we want, you can get rid of the .svn cruft and the file that tells Mercurial to ignore that cruft, using

$ find . -name .svn | xargs rm -frv
$ find . -name .hgignore | xargs rm -frv

(By the by, if you’re planning to pipe find into rm, especially with the -f switch, it’s best to run the find first to check you’re only going to delete what you want to, and only then run it with the pipe in place. Man, am I glad I checked it first!)

Second, if you run

$ hg branches

You’ll see that your main branch is currently called ‘trunk’ instead of ‘default’ — which is what a new mercurial repository would have. You can correct this by running

$ hg branch default

By now, you’ll have made a few changes to the contents of your working copy, so commit them with

$ hg commit -m “Cleaning up after migration to Mercurial”

And that’s that. It’s easy when you know how.

(I found useful clarification on a little of the cleanup from samhart.com.)

Google are famous for their (unofficial?) company motto: “Don’t be evil.”

Their fun Street View service eased its way into action in the UK yesterday, and then got picked up by the media.

The BBC has been following the story, and has published this series of images from and of the Street View cars — did you spot them anywhere last summer? You’d know if you had. (I spied the car in Dundonald, and it may have taken my picture. I was too far away to be sure that it’s my car in the photo.)

How do you feel about the whole thing?

The Daily Mail reacted pretty much as you’d expect them to, emphasising controversy. Junior was also quick to criticize the availability of imagery around Northern Ireland. I particularly like his suggestion that everyone who viewed a picture of a police station “should be traced by the security services.”

It is possible to ask Google to remove imagery, and they have taken some down already.

The main concerns seem to be that Street View invades privacy and that it may be useful to criminals.

Maybe I’m just not paranoid enough (which would be hard to say about me, really), but surely there’s nothing here that a determined criminal, or — dare I say it — terrorist, couldn’t find out pretty easily elsewhere? The fear of terrorists armed with photographs is almost totally baseless, and surely a simple street map is almost as (theoretically) useful. If you wanted to see what the Google Street View car saw, all you need to do is take a walk or a drive down that street.

The privacy question is more complicated. I was quite surprised, in a not altogether good way, when I saw how detailed the images of my parents’ house are. What Google says is true: they don’t show anything that isn’t in clear view of the public roads, which means technically there is no legal concern. Indeed, by my non-professional but I hope well-informed understanding, the contention in that Daily Mail article that this is using people’s likenesses commercially is irrelevant: “commercial use” generally refers to advertising, where you could be seen as endorsing a product, and Google obscure faces anyway. Making money using images is incidental to this sense of “commercial”. (Of course, IANAL, so don’t go by what I say.)

Legally it seems fine, and, according to the articles linked above, Google have been in dialogue with the Information Commissioner to make sure of that. That doesn’t make it completely comfortable, though.

That said, while I get uncomfortable with the accessibility of pictures of my family’s homes, I enjoy looking at other places on Street View. That makes it complicated.

It’s like many things Google does: they’re handling and controlling a frightening amount of information (they get all my email, my RSS subscriptions, my searches, everything any of us writes online), but they do it so well. Perhaps we’re alright, as long as they stick to that motto: don’t be evil.

Last Friday was the Future of Web Apps Dublin 2009. It was a packed day, with the venue as crowded as the schedule. There were ten sessions, plus the ‘uni’ workshops during the breaks.

By the time I got home on the Friday night I was knackered, and I was nursing my usual post-conference headache. I came away with a lot to think about: even though the content was aimed squarely at a particular field of endeavour, and there was a very strong emphasis on making money (fair enough — food and lodging are nice to have :), much of what was said was very (surprisingly?) transferable to just about anywhere, including the volunteer/support/community work/youth work/faith spheres. That’s value for money!

This won’t be for every reader here, so click on through if you want my brief (some briefer than others) thoughts on some of the different sessions (there were others). (more…)

I was a grammar nerd before Lynne Truss made it (somewhat) socially acceptable.

Several months ago, I cooked up a slightly silly, mostly-but-not-wholly tongue-in-cheek project. I wrote the copy and put together the basic layout, but never quite got it finished.

Last night I decided to revisit the text, which was awful, and finish off the layout. The main sticking point had been the type, but @irishstu‘s www.stewartcurry.ie, which I linked the other day, inspired a go with Palatino. It’s just right, I think. Of course, use of Palatino means that if you’re browsing on a Windows or Linux computer you have almost no chance of seeing the site the way I do. You could view a bit of screengrab, though.

What is it, then? A public service, The Oxford Comma ⋅ PunctuateAware.

Remember: everything in moderation, including punctuation.

One of the advantages of queueing on Saturday morning was getting a peek at the work of the gents at Infurious and Blue Pilot Software on comics for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

There was some press last month when the first title, Murderdrome was rejected by Apple for “not meeting [their] community standards”. (My take: it’s definitely a grown-up comic, but not extreme by any comics standard.) Alongside, the writer and artist (Al Ewing & PJ Holden) have been working on a comic aimed at kids — EyeCandy (that’s an iTunes store link, by the way), which since then has gone live at the App Store.

While the content isn’t really my thing, it’s an amazing application that demonstrates how perfect the iPhone and iPod Touch are for this sort of application. The screen shows the artwork off beautifully, and the touch/accelerometer interface allows for brilliant and original interactions. If you have one of the devices, definitely go and spend 59p (or 99c if you’re so inclined) to have a play. Plus you’ll be supporting genuine innovation right here in Northern Ireland.

As an aside to the weekend’s celebrations and craziness, this is the Apple store in Cambridge.

No glass staircase!