2003 was really a stinker for me in so many ways, I’m glad to see the end of it. I’m poorer, sicker and grumpier [and older] than I was a year ago. But tomorrow will be different… a whole new day, a whole new year, a whole new life.

Things will be so much nicer in 2004.

Merchandise!

Of course 2003 wasn’t all bad… for instance, I have been having a marvellous time at CafePress setting up a free shop, which you start doing as a bit of fun [because it really is a very clever system and costs nothing to set up] and then you think "hey, if I put a decent design here why wouldn’t someone want to buy it?".

So go on, why not startle me by buying one of my fashion Rorschach T-shirts!

Some friends of mine just moved into this somewhat historic Martello Tower on the coast of Ireland.

From where I sit [a semi-industrial area in Sydney’s inner-west, with 747s passing regularly overhead], it looks decidedly wonderful and romantic.

And so, just a few weeks later I have a perfect bound copy of Mark Twain’s Yankee, with layout and cover design by yours truly. I have been so weirdly excited about this, it is a relief to finally have it. After postage and currency conversion it ended up costing me just over AUS$30, which is pretty hefty for an ordinary paperback, but pretty impressive for an edition of one !

[If you have not read my previous entry on the subject, you may not register that I had this book printed as a test, just to see what CafePress’s quality was like. I am well aware that just about any Mark Twain text should be gettable in a cheap edition for just a few bucks.]

Read my preliminary report on the out-of-packet experience…

I’m a big fan of the appendix over the chapter… most times I have bought computer books I have either skimmed or skipped the chapters and then repeatedly referenced the incredibly valuable data in the appendices. Eg tables of character codes, keywords, formulae etc.

That said, I do like to try to share a bit of knowledge once in a while, and on that altruistic note I am writing a . Think billiard ball collisions. Compared to a physics text my descriptions are imbecilic, and my proofs nonexistent, but hopefully this stuff may still prove useful to someone out there.

As time goes on I will probably add more stuff about friction, along with non-spherical bodies and all the extra considerations that go with them…

Annoying revelation

Because that article is the first time I have used my HTML Editor to lay out mathematical functions, with special symbols etc, it has hilighted a massively stupid oversight on my part in some of my code, meaning that for the moment my editor has the tendency to screw up those HTML entities which have character codes beyond the standard windows character set. This includes the square root sign, so if you see little clusters of latin characters with accents on that page, there is probably supposed to be a square root sign there, dammit!

An interesting thing about text justification is that it really doesn’t have to be either/or. supports a sliding scale, from none to full. Unfortunately I don’t think many word processors do.

Here is the same page of text unjustified, fully justifed, and 5/8 justified:

I think the 5/8 partial justification offers a nice visual compromise between the "ragged-right" and "spaced-out" looks.

Word processors tend to lump "full-justification" in with centering and right-justification, even though it’s really quite a different feature, expanding the text rather than aligning it. I like to break justification and alignment into 2 separate parameters, each offering a continuum of values rather than just yes/no type options. This allows one to specify that a paragraph be 70% justified (expanded) and 25% aligned (where 50% is perfectly centered).

Yes, that might be more a lot more control than most users want or need, but you can always hide such options away on the advanced panel. The bottom line is that replacing 4 specific choices [left; center; right; full] with 2 sliders gives much more control over text layout, and surely that’s a useful thing.

I found this stuff via , and thought it was interesting enough to mention here.

It appears that some people suspect/believe that the Earth may be hollow . Extremely hollow in fact, with a shell only 800 miles thick. The explanation has something to do with centrifugal force and spiritual foundations I think.

The thing is, there may be people ready to spend money [$20K per person if you want to join] to actually try to find this other world inside our own*. An expedition is being proposed for 2005:

Don’t miss this chance to personally visit that paradise within our earth via the North Polar Opening and meet the highly advanced, friendly people who live there. We are of the opinion that they are the legendary Lost Tribes of Israel who migrated into the North Country over 2,500 years ago and literally became lost to the knowledge of mankind.

In case you’re curious, the most basic understanding of physics says that such a theory is fairly unlikely. Whilst it may be at least feasible for a large spherical body such as the earth to be hollow, passing through the crust at the poles you would find that gravity becomes close to zero, meaning that your chartered Russian nuclear ice-breaker could very easily find itself freefalling through "Inner Space", not accelerating but just drifting across the void until it finally crashes into the opposite [inner] side of the world.

Assuming it manages to avoid crashing into the central sun that is.

* Just in case the pages I’ve linked to here are in fact joke pages not meant to be taken seriously, thereby making me look like a dick with no sense of humour, here is a person who takes the theory very seriously, debunking it in much greater detail. I think these pages are for real, I mean, people really do believe some incredibly stupid things sometimes…

Actually updated today, and will soon be sending out an email to tell all my beta testers to download it. I also created a , because it would probably be good if I got a little more feedback (and making the feedback public means I will feel more obligated to respond). A bunch of my software is about to expire again [tempus fugit ] so I’ll have to update all of it soon.

Also today I took two of my most frequently used [by me] console apps and combined them into a single windows app. Basically I was using one program to do backups and synchronise files, and another to upload to and download from FTP sites. Since both are for moving batches of files from one place to another, it made sense to integrate them into a single app.

The new app is called "Snap" and once I’m sure it’s stable I’ll probably bung it up on this site as freeware.

Also modified my blog template again, just for fun!

For some reason I find myself obsessed by the notion of Print-on-Demand services. A while back I discovered Xlibris, which looks very cool and has options for getting ISBN numbers as well as sending copies to the Library of Congress [the most "official" way of having your copyright recognized], but it also has up-front fees for each book [starting at $500].

I later found out that CafePress was offering on-demand book printing to go with all its other POD merchandising, although they only had ring bound or stapled binding options… great for tech manuals and magazines but no good for a novel.

Until now that is.

It appears that CafePress are finally offering Perfect-Binding as an option, which means that for absolutely no up-front fee you can put your very own paperback book online for anyone to buy. The cost [US dollars] per book is $7 + 3 cents per page, which means a 300 page novel costs $16. Sure that’s probably a bit steep compared to an average paperback, but this is not an average paperback! This is your paperback!

It’s also worth noting [for non US types like m’self] that CafePress international postage is $7 for first item + $4 per additional item, as compared to Amazon’s ridiculously expensive $7 per shipment + $5 per item [meaning a single book from Amazon would cost me $12 in postage!]

Quality Concerns

One of my big concerns with a "virtual" store like CafePress is that you can’t handle the merchandise to see whether it is of reasonable quality. People don’t seem to discuss it very much either, or if they do they will say things like "I heard it was crap quality" or "I heard it was great" etc.

So to resolve my concerns, I am attempting to publish a test book, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court , which I will purchase myself. I will then post my feelings about the quality of the finished product (especially noting discrepancies between what I uploaded and what I receive in the post). Assuming I am happy with the result, I will probably go into much more detail about the methods used to create a book.

So far the uploading process has been rather harrowing, with lots of timeouts, but the text [PDF format only] is finally up and I have just completed uploading the cover art.

To the right is a portion of the interface you use to create your cover, using separate images for the front, back and spine. You just click on the bit you want to change and upload a new image. How cool is that?

One last thing…

Cafepress are offering amazing bulk discounts at the moment [for orders over 15 items], so that I can actually order 20 copies of Mark Twain’s classic for only $80! At this rate the international postage costs more than the books themselves, at $83.

OK, I’ll shut up now and wait until I get an actual book in my actual hands to see if the service is actually as good as it sounds ;)

Please read this article to understand why patents usually suck and cause more harm than good. An excerpt:

…when I worked on the Virtual Rollercoaster (aka Cyberspace Mountain ride), Disney bought itself a patent for the ride, though the "inventors" listed were the twenty assorted managers of the project (even the executive V.P. in charge), and not one of the actual ride developers who had worked so hard…

The question being asked here is: Where is the incentive to invent things when just about everyone is bound by contract to their employer to hand over the patent rights on just about anything they invent?

Working as a programmer I am constantly annoyed that the standard boilerplate in contracts insists that any invention [device, method, etc] created by the programmer while working for company X shall automatically become the property of said company, even if the creation is unrelated to the commissioned work and the domain of company X’s regular business. I always have those clauses struck out or modified, because they suck and are incredibly unfair.

Curse DOSBox! It is helping me to waste more of my time, by allowing me to run classics like Prince of Persia properly! This is one of those few games I actually stuck with and played right through to the end, taking me probably about 50 hours cumulatively.

I loved it (in 1991) in spite of its cruelty [no save points, overall time limit of 1 hour, dangerous things located just off the current screen] and was particularly impressed by its excellent use of FM synthesis for the music via the old Soundblaster/Adlib chipset. In contrast, the "technically advanced" Prince of Persia 3D [1999] sucked amazingly, and the demo lasted about 5 minutes before I deleted it from my machine.

Of course, now there is a new [advanced 3D] game in the franchise, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which probably won’t suck quite so badly, but I doubt it will ever be as famous or loved as its progenitor. The Flash intro at the official site is pretty sucky, if that’s anything to go by…

Prince of Persia Downloads:

Note: I cannot vouch for the integrity of these downloads, these links will take you to other pages with download links to zip files.

• Prince of Persia (the fabulous original)
• Prince of Persia 2 (fancier graphics and sound, too much fighting)

The authors credited on The Hobbit adventure game are Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler.

Mitchell created the parsing system [called INGLISH] which helped make the game so groundbreaking [also I think he may have devised the novel image rendering system]. Megler was responsible for the location & character design; in effect she had to adapt the book into a game.

There is a very nice recent [2002] interview with Veronika Megler here . I don’t know if Philip Mitchell is still about, actively programming, retired, whatever, which is frustrating, but here is an article someone wrote about him and his games 10 years ago.

Although personal this-is-me style webpages are generally derided [perhaps web logs are changing this perception], I’d still really like it if everyone who had ever published or created anything kept one, just so you could look them up and see what they’d been up to lately.

Downloads

If you’re interested in playing this classic game on a PC, you can download the DOS version from Stephan’s Retrocomputing Site. Of course it’s pretty annoying having to play in full screen CGA [or EGA?] modes, but I’m just glad there’s a version I didn’t have to run in an emulator [funnily enough in order to do screen capture I did have to run it in an emulator - DOSBox, an open source DOS emulator]