The movie ' Fight Club' had a profound effect on me when I first saw it in 1999. I wasn't as fond of the originating novel, although there was something about the prose that Palahniuk used which I did enjoy. Since then I've read more of Palahniuk's work. My favourite of his books is actually Non-Fiction (a.k.a. Stranger than Fiction ): a collection of essays and interviews. Reading some of the stories in that collection, it becomes very clear where some of the concepts in his fiction originate. There are also a number of pieces on the craft of writing. He writes some really gushing praise about Amy Hempel:

When you study Minimalism in the novelist Tom Spanbauer's workshop, the first story you read is Amy Hempel's The Harvest. After that, you're ruined every other book you ever read will suck.

I recently read a couple of novels, both of which reminded me a lot of Fight Club. 'Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture' by Douglas Coupland is an interesting tale of three or more societal drop-outs. Fight Club was written five years after Generation X and owes it a lot. 'Generation X' has curt, clipped passages and many dictionary-definition-esque side notes decoding hipster-slang, which add a lot of colour to the non-events of the story. These remind me both of the copous asides in Pratchett novels, or the chapter introductions in Philip K Dick's excellent 'Ubik'.

Historical Overdosing: To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.

The novel goes absolutely nowhere, but that's actually one of the appealing things about it. When I mentioned this to my partner (who, as far as I know, has not read the book), she said that it sounded like the perfect tonic to a stressful life: imagine lying on a sunbed, doing nothing, reading about people lying on sunbeds, doing nothing. This is the first of Coupland's novels that I have read, but I managed to pick up a copy of 'Generation A' (so far as a I can tell, not a sequel, as such) 70% off as part of the closing-down sale at my local Borders store, so I will probably read that too. I also recently finished The Dice Man , by Luke Reinhart. It's a tongue-in-cheek pseudo-autobiography written under a pen-name about a psychiatrist who opts to delegate all life decisions to the throw of dice. Once again, Fight Club owes a lot to this book. The unhinged situations that occur are used to shine a satirical light on modern society. 'modern society' in the book is the 1970s. The distance between society then and now adds something to the novel's value now. Having said that, the narrator is not a particularly likeable character and it's hard to relate to him. Coincidentally my dad recently read this book and described it as 'misogynistic', which might be an understatement. Mind you, most of the characters, female or otherwise, are fairly 2D: perhaps intentionally the only fleshed out human is the narrator. In my favourite scene of the book, the narrator is in a situation under the influence of more than one drug. A TV set is on in the background. As the scene progresses, the events taking place on the TV are written about with increasing prominence compared to the main events of the scene. This escalates to a point where they are of equal importance and you can no longer easily distinguish the events taking place in the real world from those taking place on the television. This is the only part of the book that I can recall that employed any narrative tricks. The rest is by-the-numbers, and mostly internal monologue. The book is also at least 50% too long: the concept just doesn't stretch as far as it's forced to.

I've always preferred dead tree to reading things on screen; I just find it easier. I've tried reading fiction in the past off a laptop and just didn't find it as enjoyable an experience; whether it was the form factor (hard to curl up with a laptop, even a netbook), the quality of the screen or the interface I don't know. Equally with technical documentation if it's something I'm using a lot I prefer a printed copy to flick through. However e-ink based e-readers are becoming much more common and affordable and I figured I should give the whole ebook experience another try.

I spent 3 weeks in October in the Bay Area on work, so I borrowed my Dad's Sony PR505 for the trip. First problem is that it's picky about USB charging - works fine if attached to a computer, but using a Blackberry charger looks like it's fine but then results in what looks like a hanging reader. However once charged it lasts for ages - I charged it before I went and only hooked it up to my laptop once during the trip to transfer some new content onto it. The form factor is also quite good; a bit heavier than a book, but not excessively so. Holdable in one hand, big enough screen that I wasn't squinting at it. Slightly too big physically to easily go in a coat pocket the way a paperback would unfortunately, but perfectly fine for taking to read at breakfast every morning in the hotel.

The screen was also much better than I'd expected. I knew the technology was different and supposed to be easier to read than traditional LCDs, but I was sceptical. Overall I had no problems with it. I was even quite impressed with the Sony's zoom function - one of the PDFs I was reading was too small when view full screen, so I zoomed in so it was readable. The nice feature was that then the "next page" button gave me the next bit of text to read, rather than the actual next page, so it remained very easy to navigate through as I read. A small touch, but very welcome.

This isn't intended to be a review of the Sony reader; that just happened to be the model I was easily able to borrow. I happened to see a Kindle in use on the plane and I was struck by how much bulkier it seemed, though having looked at the relative specs it seems this is entirely due to the keyboard rather than any difference in screen size. The Nook was also announced during my trip and I'd quite like a play with that as it looks quite nice.

Despite my positive experience with the Sony I'm not planning to go out and get one just yet. And that's the lack of sensibly priced content. When I bought my first mp3 player I could take my exising CD collection, rip it and be able to play it on my new device. This meant I got an immediate benefit of having my entire music collection with me all the time, just by buying the player. If I buy an e-reader then in order to get all my existing books on it I have to go and buy them again. What's worse is they'll cost me the same or more than I paid for the paperbacks. I can't go and exchange my Pratchett collection for the electronic versions for a nominal fee. I can't easily scan them in myself and produce some decent ebooks. I can't even go and buy the entire set for 20; I'd have to spend something like ten times that. With mp3s I can continue to buy the real item and also have it on my portable player. Or, while albums still don't seem to be much cheaper electronically than on CD, there is at least the ability to buy a single track if that's all I want. Books don't have a comparison. I'm not going to want to buy a single chapter, am I?

There are some sites out there that can provide cheaper ebooks - Rachel Willmer runs ebookprice.info which lets you compare pricing from different vendors. There's also Project Gutenberg if you're looking for out of copyright books. Finally Peter Corlett pointed me at the Baen Free Library, which I haven't downloaded anything from but will definitely investigate at some point. I still maintain that none of these are enough and that content provision will continue to be a hinderance for e-reader mass adoption until there is some fundemental change in the way its provision is handled.

A friend e-mailed me this morning asking for some help with a problem he had where he wanted to make a folder writable by a group of people without making the files deletable. Stepping back from his question, I first pointed out that if the files are editable then they can be effectively deleted by removing the content from them, regardless of whether the directory entries themselves are retained. One solution which occurred to me would be to automatically version the content of the directory, and this reminds me of why versioning of /etc has never worked for me: it only happens when I remember to commit.
<!--break-->
Normally when I edit files in /etc, I am focused on achieving something now, and not on being able to undo it later. To this end I have written myself a script which will commit the contents of a directory (including adding new files and removing deleted ones) into a git repository, as follows:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Allow for debugging.
[ -n "$DEBUG" ] && set -o xtrace
cd $1
MESSAGE="Autocommit"
# Initialise the directory if it's not in Git currently
if [ ! -d .git ]; then
  git init
  MESSAGE="Initial commit"
fi
# Any files that aren't in the directory, but are in the repository can be removed.
for F in  git ls-tree HEAD   cut -f2 ; do
  [ -e "$ F " -o -L "$ F " ]   git rm "$ F "
done
# Any files that are in the directory, but aren't in the repository can be added
git add .
# And commit...
git commit -m "$MESSAGE"

So this script takes one parameter: the name of the directory where changes have (presumably) occurred, and just blindly commits everything there. The magic glue, then, is the awesomeness that is 'incron' :-) My first target is the ~/bin directory of all of those useful little scripts that I tend to randomly edit without nearly enough version control:

incrontab -e
home/andrew/bin IN_MODIFY,IN_DELETE,IN_CLOSE_WRITE,IN_MOVE \
     /home/andrew/bin/commit-directory /home/andrew/bin 2>&1   logger -t andrew-bin

With this, it means that whenever a file changes, is deleted from, moved into, or out of the directory we are monitoring, our commit-directory script is run. Just for testing I delete some ancient files that should have been killed a few computers back. A quick 'git status' in the directory shows everything was committed nicely. I edit a file and make some quick changes. Once again, I go into gitk and can see all the history. I sit back and ratchet my laziness another notch with a nice cup of tea, happy that, for now, at least, changes to my scripts are under revision control at last. Outstanding Issues Well, ok: it's usable as is, but there are a few small things that could be improved:

• When I edit a file, the temporary swap file gets committed, and then deleted as the changes get committed
• If I make a whole lot of changes the script can fire multiple times, or even fire before some changes fully happened
• Maybe I want a shadow folder maintained and committed, rather than just this folder
• Perhaps it would be a good idea to push the repository elsewhere

I'll keep monitoring in the real world if these are real annoyances, and whatever other annoyances I find, and maybe I'll tweak that commit script a bit more - add a delay and/or some locking too it. I don't think that adding some push would be too big a deal either, and I'd love to get suggestions from Git geeks as to how to do this more simply/reliably too.

Steven Brust is a big tease. His most recent Vlad Taltos novel is full of tease for two reasons:

• He jumps back in the timeline so that we hear nothing of Lady Teldra.
• The acknowledgements of the novel mention the use of some "emacs macros" with no hint of what they are, or why he uses them.

It was a fun read though, and didn't make me as hungry as the previous volume did. (Mmmmmm pies food.) I always liked him as an author, and he rocks for publishing Dzur around the time I was telling local people "Too many people seem to write novels in which nobody really eats. Forget all that action, dialog, and exposition. Lets have a bunch of folk sit down and eat an exceptionally well described meal." (Many things that people do are never described in books. We all know why. Still on the same subject I love the scene in Terry Pratchetts Pyramids where Teppic puts his outfit on. "And slowly falls over". Nice) ObFilm: Blade

I am not quite up to listening to this myself, but this interview with author Terry Pratchet about hisearly on-set of alzheimer’s disease seems interesting and it is good to see people talk about it frankly.

[ Apologies for Debian planet readers expecting something pithy and Debian related. This isn't. But then pkg-xfce packaging just continues. We get more bugs, we fix some of them (if you have a dual-headed setup and want to help us fix or reproduce more we'd love to hear from you). Corsac became a DD at last and has made me more or less redundant in a good way. I should probably investigate libburnia again and prod George Danchev about #450873 since basically it seems to just need the ubuntu packaging brought across into Debian to replace libburn etc. But anyway, on with the irrelevant stuff... ] Books part 1 was back in April and I've since found myself with some time on my hands before I get a new job so here we go again.

Making Money - Terry Pratchett

This was a Christmas present and I quite enjoyed it and enjoyed the character but didn't really think it lived up to the laugh a minute Pratchett books that I remembered from the good old days.

The Lovely Bones - Alice Seebold

This is quite a weird concept for a book given that it's from the point of view of a dead girl in heaven but it seems to work. It's very well done and I enjoyed it.

Alex Rider series - Anthony Horowitz

I had seen Stormbreaker and wanted to read some more of these as light holiday reading. They work well for that. There's enough plot to keep me interested but not enough to make them at all hard to read. I read a couple of them in French when I was in France (in between traipsing between different bits of Paris since the m tro workers were on strike). I wish they'd been around when I was younger.

My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult

Ooh this is a really, really good book. I loved it except perhaps for the very end but I can forgive it that. The idea is that she's suing her parents for the rights to her own body because she was conceived as a donor for her sister to fight off her sister's leukaemia. It's a very thought provoking read with several interesting characters with their own stories woven together.

The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker

This book is fascinating to me. It takes ideas mainly from linguistics, evolution and psychology and explains a theory that seems to hold together and is well illustrated and explained. The central point is that we all are born with the ability to develop a universal grammar from an early age which can be adapted to any human language and which sticks around in the young child and then disappears. If you have any interest in language at all read this book.

A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon

I found this a bit hard to get into as essentially it's about the normal lives of a family (albeit quite a special family). It doesn't really grab you. Towards the end though I was interested to find out how it would all unravel and was pleased with it.

The Mephisto Club - Tess Gerritsen

This is a nice, honest thriller that does what you expect. It keeps you flicking the pages wanting to know what happens next.

The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

I quite enjoyed this and did find new arguments against religion but I don't think he's going to convert anyone with this book. Of course I'd recommend anyone read it because it raises lots of interesting points but it's polemic essentially.

The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins

I enjoyed this though it builds on previous work I'd read. I guess if you're just interested in evolution then read this and not the God Delusion.

The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall

I was recommended this by a friend. It's very surreal possibly a bit too surreal for me but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K Dick

I hadn't read the book and saw it at a friend's and borrowed it. You probably all know what it's like. I'm glad I read it because of the references to it but it's not my normal reading material.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J K Rowling

I had to read this of course to finish off the series but I thought it was a lot better than some of the others. I think I enjoyed the first, the one with the tri-wizarding championship and this one the most.

Love in Idleness - Charlotte Mendelson

This is well written and you really get into the character that's painted for you. I really liked some of the descriptions of justifying things to yourself and coping with boredom.

Blood, Sweat & Tea - Tom Reynolds

This was an interesting look at the life of a paramedic and if you don't already read Random acts of reality then read the book first and start reading the blog.

Telling Lies - Paul Ekman

This came from my Blink/Tipping Point reading and I found it hard going. It was interesting but quite detailed and not really a book for late night reading. The theories in it are very interesting though and explain why you probably aren't as good at detecting things as you think you might be and how to look for factors that will help you.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks

I read this ages ago and it was fascinating. It's about a number of different cases of problems with the brain. Often physical defects in various areas of the brain that cause odd problems and how it sheds light on how things relate. I really enjoyed it.

As always, do please punt your own recommendations at me.

The second movement of Mozart’s String Quartet in C «Dissonance», K. 465 has an interesting two bars where it appears that the violin theme is accidentally missing. As highlighted in red on the score, the violin part is devoid of the crotchet/four quavers that the other parts present - the other “missing” bar is at this section’s mirror in the sub-dominant, bar 75. Some printed editions have added the missing notes, claiming that Mozart made a mistake (or overruling him on musical grounds!), but it seems bizarre that Mozart—who even likened the composition of the “Haydn” quartets to a long, labourious fatigue (”lungha e laboriosa fatica“)—would make such an error. The preface to the Neue Mozart Ausgabe claims:

It is unthinkable that Mozart [could] have made a mistake or from absent-mindedness made a slip of the pen no less than four times in such an obvious and important detail.

(The preparation of the original first edition, which Mozart himself presided over, presumably accounts for the other two.) At least one scholar has claimed that the notes aren’t missing at all; they are simply contained within the cello’s notes. I don’t find this explanation particulary satisfying. The NMA goes further by stressing its wish that the original version should be used in performances, which seems to suggest that adding the notes is (or at least, was) a common practice, but I cannot find many recordings with the added notes: my Leipziger, Emerson, Alban Berg, Ysa e, Italiano and Amadeus Quartet interpretations all omit the notes, whilst only the Hagen Quartet add them.

Good comrades, great chat, greater motivation.
Some good Scotch whisky, a good friend who was lumped along with me in .br by mere chance. A very good time.
A strong whisky aftertaste and numbness in the mouth. My first couple of pages of Terry Pratchet - Thanks a bunch!
My mind wanders, I go over all the nice and dear things and people
Maybe tomorrow I should restart my reading? I know Pratchett is not supposed to make much (rational) sense, but still... Although I've enjoyed this couple of pages, I'd rather let the whisky wear out before continuing with the gollem owner's life and tribulations, with his friendly treatment for his plausible but honorable assassin...
Today I saw quantum superpositions mixed with special relativity in a small (less than 200 lines) Perl module. Positronic variables go back in time, yay! Damian Conway rules.
Time to sleep, yes, if tomorrow you want to be in time for the lightning talks. Oh, BTW: great honor, great honor: One of the lightning talkers requested /me to sit on the front row "to have a friendly face to look at". Have to comply, have to do.
But... Last reflection before going away: What a better way to describe bliss in Vienna (oder auf Deutstch, ich glaube - gl cklich in sterreich;) than to go to sleep while listening to the neighbour's fucking-loud music? Of course, his fucking-loud-music is just the-Balkan-music-you-seem-to-love, so everything's berfine!
Thanks to everybody who made this possible. Specially to the Austrian friends.

Kevin Mark commented:

"I see--Redarded Terrorist--ok. So this Gareth fellow is making a comparison with smarter, more intelligent terrorist that was the IRA. Which kind of says that everyone should be far less afraid of the current crop of folks and yet the media, as it does so well, inflates their dangerousness for the sake of ... well, beats me. Oh, maybe it help Tony get a job ;-) If the IRA came to the US, what color (or is that colour) code would their activities get on our terror scale as opposed to these Tardorrists?"

How about Emerald Green? More seriously, I think it's entirely fair to suggest we should fear this lot less than the often-USian-funded Provisional IRA, or local groups like animal liberationists. Those didn't just attack the big cities - it was everywhere, an attempt at terrorism. I lived about three miles outside Milton Keynes, then a fairly small midlands city, which was firebombed by both those groups. Ultimately, it didn't work. Most people weren't terrified. We carried on regardless. The government may be over-hyping this threat to ride in a new load of "expensive and ineffective" Security Theatre measures, like ID cards. Some media is sceptical, but the Murdoch-run media is mostly complicit, which is hardly surprising given the historic relationship. We should not let these "tardorrists" change our way of life, yet that is exactly what our spineless politicians seem to be doing. Let's continue as before: beware, but be happy. Update: niq comments:

"Recommended reading: Terry Pratchett "Interesting Times". Written before "9/11" and set in the wrong part of the world, but nevertheless beautifully relevant."

Surprisingly many local people seem to be catching icky-illnesses of death recently. Both Megan and myself are under the weather recently. I managed to infect her with a nasty cough and cold on Wednesday and the pair of us have been mostly shivering indoors since then. Today is the closing day of The Leith Festival (Leith being a district of Edinburgh. Where we live.) So we made it outside and consumed beer and pies for a while. Now we're back and I'm wishing I'd not left the house. Still it could have been worse I could have been in the sun in a blurry suit and without any books! (Books visible and recognizable include the complete works of Terry Pratchett, minus two, the complete works of Steven Brust (Maybe Vlad will give me the edge in the assassins game!)) All being well we'll be more recovered in time for the Debconf7 activities, although I expect Meg to be driving around Scotland for part of the time with a friend and not completely available. (A three-day roadtrip with Emma - a local girl who is hoping that somebody at Debconf will be able to fix her Ubuntu laptop..?) Update: - Debconf7 game of Settlers of Catan..? (I have only the Zarahemla set myself, but it will suffice for four players in a pinch.)

As I'd semi-intended to after last week's renewal of hatred towards my current in-line skates, we popped into Skates on Haight yesterday while we were in San Francisco, and I acquired a pair of Rollerblade Crossfire TFS' The store was pretty nice. Small, but no other customers, so I got pretty good customer service. I have to wonder if I did the same level of due-diligence before purchasing as I did last time: I bought the first pair they recommended and I tried on. That said, they have a nicer closure system than the Bauers I had previously. They've got a ratchet-style strap at the top, a bit like some snowboard boots, and they've sort of got laces. They have some thin "string" and an interesting bit at the back that you grab and yank on to tighten the string, and there's a separate release catch to loosen it. A bit hard to describe. I've done a few test runs around the apartment complex today while I waited for the washing, and so far they seem not too bad. My biggest problem is I've got wide feet, so I have to find the happy medium between having the laces tight enough to have good ankle support, and not being too tight as to squish my feet. If the weather is good tomorrow and I can drag my arse out of bed at a reasonable time, I'll try skating to work.

Collection Management I like to collect things, books, audio cds (which I buy exclusively second-hand/used then rip), and films. I’ve had a lot of fun putting my film collection online (Warning image-heavy). Although I admit the reason I did it in the first place was because I found myself buying DVDs I already owned more than once. I do the same thing with books. I can recognised covers easily, so if I see a book which is by an author I like I will look at the cover and think “Hmmm got this”, or “Hmmm thats new”. This leads me to buy duplicates too often. This leads me to wanting to organise the hundreds of books I have, so I can lookup what I have/dont have easily. My recent query the other day about scanning ISBN numbers with a barcode reader seemed to suggest that using the hardware is trivial. However the next step is hard. I can’t find a decent tool for using storing the data in. So far I’ve looked at:

alexandria

I loved this when I started it up and imported a few books by ISBN. It found the title, the publisher, a cover image, and more. However the backend seems to be a bit hit and miss. Picking books at random I soon found major gaps. e.g. Adding Terry Pratchett’s Mort gave me all the details. Adding Witches Abroad gave a blank image and just the title, all the other details were wrong/missing.

tellico

Tellico I’ve just ruled out. It allows you to create collections of things, but you must enter all the details yourself. I’ve neither the time nor the patience to do that.

So I’ll postpone this project for a while. Probably just as well since I’ve discovered that a suprisingly large number of my books do not actually contain ISBN numbers! Mostly the older paperback fiction books I have such as “H.G.Wells the valley of the spiders & other stories”, but even modern books like some of Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series are free of ISBN numbers.

The State Services Commission (SSC) (the NZ government body that oversees NZ government departments) released a guide to legal issues in using Open Source Software recently. The publication of this guide has caused a certain amount of consternation in the open source community and even manged to make it to Slashdot and Groklaw as well as spawning a fairly active thread on the NZ Open Source Society’s openchat mailing list. Through all of this I’ve found myself very much on the opposite side of opinion to most other people commenting on it. My initial thoughts on the document are quite nicely summarised by the Groklaw comment that Stuart points out. While the document uses some unfortunate language, there is nothing in it that is actually untrue. In fact my initial feelings towards the document (without having read it thoroughly) were that it was good to see the SSC taking enough notice of open source to feel the need to advise departments on the particular issues that it can bring up. Particularly dissapointing to me are the conspiracy theories that have been flying around. Groklaw surmises that the paper is a Microsoft hatchet job simply because it was authored by Chapman Tripp (a large NZ law firm) who happen to also represent Microsoft NZ on a range of intellectual property issues. I’ve yet to hear a single shred of evidence to back up this assertion and I find it quite ridiculous. Large firms working in a small market such as NZ will often run into conflict of interest issues and have well established procedures for dealing with them. Without seeing evidence to the contrary I cannot accept that a reputable firm like Chapman Tripp would risk their reputation by trying to intentionally mislead the goverment in a report like this. A far more like scenario, to my mind, is simply that the author(s) of the report are not very familiar with open source issues and didn’t do quite as much research as they should have to bring themselves up to speed with the unique IP features of open source licenses. Having read the document more thoroughly now, I can agree that it is far from perfect. I think the single most glaring problem is that it focusses only on open source software and doesn’t mention that many of the risks also exist when using proprietary software. This could leave an uneducated reader completely scared off open source due to a mistaken belief that it is far too risky. On the other hand we shouldn’t completely dismiss the document either as it does raise a number of clear risks that a department will face in adding open source software to their IT environment. We’re not going to do ourselves any favours by pretending that open source is a panacea to all the worlds software ills and can just be dropped in to any IT environment to make things better! It’s worth pointing out at this point that previous evidence from the SSC indicates that they are open source friendly. They have a very clear policy stating that Departments are encouraged to consider open source software alongside proprietary software and use it in cases where it wins on the basis of cost, functionality, interoperability, and security. Given this history, I am alarmed at the hostile reactions many participants on the NZOSS open-chat mailing list had to the document. Quite frankly I think some people are responding far too emotively to the language in the document (which is problematic - but not that bad) and missing the chance to evaluate the rest of it in an objective manner. We have a SSC that has indicated a friendliness towards open source in the past, and I don’t think that they would turn around and reverse their position in this manner. This report is intended to support their overall policy after all. Rather than jumping down their throats and shouting about how poor the document is we need to engage in a civil dialog, point out the issues with the document and offer constructive suggestions for how the document can be improved. To that end, Peter Harrisson has started some pages on the NZOSS wiki where we are going to co-ordinate our impressions and responses to the document so we can present a consistent NZOSS position to the SSC in response. I’d encourage everyone with an interest in the document to read and contribute to those pages. As for exactly what I form our response should take and what it should consist of? I’ll follow up with another post on that later in the weekend when I’ve had a bit more time to reflect.
What I do know (if you haven’t guessed already) is that I think we should be very careful not to respond in a hostile and emotive manner that will result in our relationship with the SSC becoming worse. That means we should take time to consider the document objectively, evaluate its propositions and provide a well researched and substantiated list of suggested improvements to the SSC.