There is some desire for a Jon Udell-esque library bookmarklet for Harvard’s Hollis Catalog. A little bit of research, and there you go. It’s not perfect, since Hollis doesn’t seem to use ISBNs as the primary index, but the first book listed on the results page will be the book you’re looking for if it’s in the catalog.
Category: Technology
Add San Francisco to the universal wireless list, or at least to the “we’d like to have universal wireless someday” list.
Last night during the debate, Cheney suggested that you could find out the truth about his connection with Halliburton by visiting factcheck.com. At the time, factcheck.com was a spam site with ads for various and sundry scams; Cheney meant factcheck.org.
Sometime in the last 12 hours, the owner of factcheck.com redirected all traffic to that site over to georgesoros.com. That’s pretty impressive reaction time; either the owner is partisan or Soros got to him and offered him enough money to make the swapover really quickly. It’s also very Internet-savvy.
Meanwhile, factcheck.org is now pointing out that Edwards was “mostly right” about Cheney and Halliburton.
Fly, motherfucker! Fly!
SpaceShipOne has successfully completed its first qualifying flight. Piloted by Mike Melvill, it reached altitudes of over 63 miles. SpaceShipOne now has two weeks to reach that altitude again; if it succeeds, Scaled Composites will win the X Prize.
Words fail me; my delight is manifest. Space!
Although Ulysses has flaws, CopyWrite has a very similar interface and provides a slightly better editing pane (paragraph spacing) plus in-line formatting. It looks like I can coerce InDesign into handling formatting codes for me, which means named styles are less important. And CopyWrite is about a quarter the price of Ulysses.
I’m doing my latest game (The Kiss of God) in CopyWrite; after I’m done I’ll post about the experience.
Sometimes the technology is so damned close, but it’s not quite there. Ulysses is like that; now that I’ve tasted it, I want the perfect version, but I don’t think I can quite use it as it is.
OK, so: as a writer, I don’t use most of Microsoft Word. Mostly I want is something I can type into. It needs to do spell checking. It needs to be able to save style information with the document, because I want to be able to mark headers and bold text and so on. It needs to be able to export the style information in a format which InDesign can handle, since that’s what I use for layout these days. It needs to be able to do smart quotes and hyphens.
Word does all of that. It also does a million or so more things, which is vaguely annoying.
Ulysses is a very simple text editor with an amazing interface. The interface is now on my list of things I want, after about ten minutes of playing around with it. It’s hard to explain without pictures, so check out this screenshot.
The big middle area is your typing space. The tabs up at the top — “Obstacles” and “10x – Notizen” are different documents; you can also see a list of documents in the first pane on the left side of the window. The project is the sum of the documents in the left hand pane. You can have as many of them as you’d like open in tabs at once. The right pane is mostly an area to type notes, with a small pane for title and word count down below.
If you select a document in the left hand pane, you get the text of that document in the little window below; you can select it, but not edit it. This is great for reference or for copy and paste. You can set the status of any document — New, Final, Draft, Done, etc. You can also set colored labels, which are customizable.
When you’re done, you export the project as a document. You order the individual sections however you like during the export process. The notes don’t show up in the exported document unless you want them to, so you don’t need to worry about cleaning up the little bits that say “Don’t forget to add an example of play here.”
This is the best idea for editing large books I’ve ever bumped into. Everything’s readily accessible; you can get to any chapter of your text whenever you want. But nothing’s ever in the way. You never get lost in editing windows. It is insanely great.
But it doesn’t do styled text, because the authors are purists about formatting getting in the way. I can’t even get it to change the spacing between paragraphs, which means that paragraphs will always jam into one another unless I put extra blank lines in, which will mess up any layout work I may do. You can do styled paragraphs by tagging them with a code at the beginning of the line, but the RTF export format doesn’t have named styles, so it’s a pain to do layout once again. The only other export formats are plain text and LaTeX.
So now I am frustrated. It’s not quite good enough to use as my main writing platform, but the interface it offers is so much better than anything else I have that nothing else is going to satisfy me either. So close! So far!
For the record, Vernor Vinge was right. I want that slogan on a T-shirt.
Last February, it was .bmp files that carried the hack. This time, viewing a JPG on a Windows XP computer that is not running Service Pack 2 can cause your computer to execute arbitrary commands. This is horrible. Imagine what would happen if I stuck an worm image in a bunch of Flickr photostreams. Imagine what would happen if I used one for an LJ icon. Do you read a bulletin board that allows people to upload their own avatars?
Time to upgrade to SP2. I don’t care if it breaks City of Heroes.
Ranchero Software released the beta of MarsEdit the other day. My preliminary feeling is that it’s nice and slim and practical. As Ginger has noted more than once, ecto is kind of getting increasingly bloated. The latest version, 2.0, has a WYSIWYG editor that isn’t quite there yet, and it’s all about autoformatting for you, and so forth — and I don’t really want my weblog editor to be a RTF editor. Sure, I can switch into a simpler mode, but why should I buy into all the overhead?
However… on my system, my ecto process is currently running at 14.55 MB and my MarsEdit process is running at 33.42 MB. That’s with this post typed into both of them. So we’ll see; they’re both in beta and they both have time to slim down a little. (I have enough memory; it’s the principle of the thing.) In the meantime I’m going to use MarsEdit so as to give it a workout.
Hm, it just posted this as a draft. That’s not what I wanted…
“For about $10 million, city officials believe they can turn all 135 square miles of Philadelphia into the world’s largest wireless Internet hot spot.”
135 square miles is 3,763,584,000 square feet. Let’s pretend each access point is giving us about 50 feet of range That’s 7,853 square feet per access point, or 7,500 for easy calculations and to allow some slippage. So… around 502,000 access points. That’s 20 bucks an access point even if you don’t allow for wiring costs. But the article says “hundreds, or maybe thousands of small transmitters.”
Am I woefully underestimating the range of each access point?