It's been quite a while since the last book out of the Titan series has been released and I've been really looking forward to the next installment -- especially after the fairly big role the crew of the Luna-class vessel had during the resolution of the latest Borg crisis. Now, nearly one and a half year after Sword of Damocles Titan has finally continued its mission of exploration with Christopher L. Bennett's Over a Torrent Sea.
Read more about "Star Trek: Titan - Over a Torrent Sea" ...Archive for 2009/03
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Star Trek: Titan - Over a Torrent Sea
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Last.fm to charge for streaming
Today Last.fm's Richard Jones announced on the company's blog that the radio stations available on Last.fm are about to go for-money-only in countries other than the USA, the UK and Germany. This means, that there is no longer a distinctions between free and for-pay stations for people outside of these 3 countries anymore. Previously you could for example listen to a random playlist generated from your recommendations for free, while you had to pay for a playlist generated from your "loved" songs.
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Whoosh looks interesting
This morning I read a great post by Arne where he introduced me to Whoosh, a pure-Python search backend. Traditionally when you're working with site-specific search-technologies, you sooner or later stumble upon the Lucene ecosystem (since there is a whole forest of applications surrounding it, I guess you could really call it an ecosystem by now). Lucene might be the best thing since the invention of sliced bread but especially for smaller sites it might just be too much configuration overhead. Surely, some of the applications and libraries around Lucene have made that whole process much easier -- Solango comes to mind, there -- but that might still not be enough.
Whoosh on the other hand appears to be quite Python-targeted (while Lucene goes after any environment) with a very simple configuration- and operation-workflow: Create a storage, create an index above it, define what should be indexed, hand the index a document you want to index according to your schema, done. No running some Java application in the background, no XML-schema declarations.
I'm not yet sure, if I will go with Whoosh or Solango for the next iteration of this site but Arne definitely provided me with yet another option to think about, thanks :-)
There are a couple of aspects I'm not yet really sure about with Whoosh, though. For example, the searcher (the thing that you pass your query to receive the actual hits) doesn't seem to provide any offset mechanism. This way, running any kind of pagination over the result-set would end up being a bit of a problem. But perhaps there is already a solution for this out there :-)
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Enjoying learning Haskell with the right book
Since last September I've been thinking again and again about giving Haskell a try. I don't really know why but I simply always had fun playing around with languages like Lisp and Prolog but never actually gave them a try outside of the classroom. And for now Haskell and Erlang seem to be the most prominent functional languages out there, so why not?! :-)
Back then I looked at some of the larger free books about Haskell and while the first few chapters were always still understandable and, more important, enjoyable for some reason the descriptions and examples mostly around parametrised types or guards kind of lost me. Also, some of the tutorials I read wanted to explain to you the different between the popular Haskell compilers out there right in the intro chapter, which felt kind of weird. Real World Haskell by Bryan O'Sullivan, Don Stewart, and John Goerzen on the other hand is different there. I guess, part of it is that the comments by other readers are really helping and some sections of the book (I'm only in chapter 4 so far) are written like "this is how you do it in Java, Python, etc. and this is how you do it in Haskell and why you're doing it that way". This makes it very approachable for people coming from different languages.
As already indicated, this book isn't targeted at people who've never programmed. That's stated quite explicitly in the intro of the book and also the whole book mostly works on the basis that you know some common procedural or object oriented language like Java, C++ or Python.
So for now I'm really enjoying it and definitely more than any other intro-to-haskell ebook/tutorial I've read so far :D Just too bad, that Amazon.de doesn't have it :-( Thankfully the online edition of the book is very well formated so reading it on my iPod touch works quite well so far :-)
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E-mail disclaimers: The compact way
Ever contacted someone from a company and wondered about those huge disclaimers in her e-mail signature telling you what you cannot do with the content of the conversation? Some companies probably employ their own staff of lawyers just to come up with these disclaimers, as long as they are.
Recently Jana wrote about a rather nice alternative to such blobs:
// This email is // [X] assumed to public and may be blogged / twittered / forwarded. // [ ] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing.
Compact, universally understandable, just nice :D I have no idea of its legal value but for normal human beings this should be much easier to understand than those disclaimer-monsters :-) Even if you get not right away the permission to write about what has been discussed in the mail, it's quite comforting to know for sure what you can and cannot do with the content.
A couple of days ago I made this my primary signature and already one company (out of one) I was asking for some product information understood it.
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Reblog: Take the Python Packaging Survey
Want to give some feedback about the state of distutils and in general the available methods for distributing Python packages? Now is your chance: http://tinyurl.com/package-survey.
According to Tarek Ziadé the survey is for every Python developer that distributes his code and should help the participants of the Python Language Summit.
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Marked up README on bitbucket
One of the features I always liked about github was that it rendered you README files of various formats pretty nicely when accessing the root-folder of your project. README.rst got some rst2html-love and README.md was converted from Markdown to HTML. When I first gave bitbucket a try some months ago I noticed, for the first time, how much I actually had grown to expect my READMEs to get rendered as HTML, right when I couldn't find out how to get the same behaviour on bitbucket.
Well, there is actually a little hidden feature on the hg-hoster that lets you do the same: Simple put your markup language in an encoding-style preamble of your README-file and bitbucket will render it for you as HTML on the start-page of the source-browser:
-*- restructuredtext -*- If you put some RestructuredText here, it will get rendered as HTML.
Thanks, jespern, for this great tip :-)
So far I've tried it with "restructuredtext" and "markdown" and both seem to work. There are just some things to note here:
- This preamble gets only interpreted if it is in the very first line of your README-file.
- That first line has to start with the preamble so currently you can't really hide it within a comment or something like that. If you want to see this change implemented, perhaps giving this issue a little hug will help.
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Open eBook Reader on the Horizon?
Just a few days ago I wrote about how much I like Stanza for the iPhone and iPod touch and I still do. It opened up a whole world of eBooks for me I was previously pushing farther back on my to-read list every time I visited Amazon or startrekbooks.com. I actually thought, that I couldn't really find an open eBook reader out there. And so far that's still true, but at least now there is something for me on the horizon: txtr.
The txtr-reader is an eBook reader with built-in WiFi and 3G network support so that you can, as with the Kindle, be online all the time and get new books whenever you want them ... something that I honestly don't really care al that much about. What's getting me quite excited, though, is that you can also simply put content directly onto it either via USB or MicroSD-Cards. At least I suppose that you'll be able to do that given that the company behind this according to Golem claims that one of the goals of the txtr according to is to create a developer friendly environment with basically everything about the system being documented. The first logical step there would be to mess up the whole document-storage system ;-) And since you are able to access the storage directly via MicroSD I guess it's kind of likely that the system won't be another iPod database.
Part of the whole eco-system around txtr is also an online community portal where you can buy books, store your documents and let others know about what you like ... I don't really care. As long as I can get eBooks in a simple way (i.e. USB mass-storage) onto the device without any kind of lock-in to yet another proprietary platform, I'm happy. Now all I can do is wait for the 3rd quarter and hope :-)
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Enjoying eBooks with Stanza
I don't need a Kindle but a battery pack for my iPod touch. At least that's what I'm telling myself after I've discovered Lexcycle's app Stanza for me. After I finished the last bunch of books I had ordered from Amazon I was kind of too lazy to order new ones. Too lazy and I couldn't find any Star Trek book I was really looking forward to that I didn't have at that time. Plus, I had just spent nearly 100 EUR with Amazon for the whole DVD collection of Charmed ;-)
Then I remembered that public domain books like the works by H.G. Wells et al. were still on my to-read list. So I started looking for a free ebook reader for the touch (which I've been using more and more to read stuff like online manuals etc.) and after just a few minutes stumbled upon "Stanza".
Besides being a free application, Stanza is also actually quite a comfortable reader. The zoom level is just right, you flip pages by stroking the display in the respective direction, it hides any interface elements from you while reading and it gives you direct access to a handful of sources for free ebooks, either free as in beer, under Creative Commons licenses or the public domain. (I don't know if there are also some commercial stores integrated into Stanza yet, though.)
So far I've only read H.G. Wells' The Time Machine but the experience was really pleasant (considering that I normally prefer reading novels in the dead-paper format over anything else) and from what I've seen of it I can really recommend Stanza :D
