From Mishin tando, “Thank you to the Roshi for finding numerous Open Source Software resources so that Practice Council work can be done without resorting to being locked-in to proprietary software; […]”

Good that the Roshi took care of that, but also good that there was interest in it in the first place. It is a high-tech town, I suppose. Of course, that got me thinking, and:

Foxit Reader is a free, lightweight PDF reader for Windows and Linux. It comes in somewhere around the 4MB mark on disk once installed (compared to Acrobat Reader’s 87MB), and the copy I have running right now with its own 90-page, user manual open has a 10MB working set in RAM (6MB private). It starts in a second and renders and prints PDFs very well (unlike, say, xpdf). Until version 2.0 it didn’t have a browser plugin, but I consider that a feature — I want PDFs to open in their own program. (Apparently 2.0 does include a plugin, although there’s a bit of a bug in the installer that requires some extra steps to get it to work with Firefox.)

They also offer a Pro Pack ($39) which offers PDF annotation without a watermark and a “Save as text” option.

And they don’t stop at reading PDFs — if you’re the sort that needs Acrobat instead of just Reader, there’s also PDF Creator ($35), which provides a virtual printer that lets you print from anything into a PDF file, and PDF Editor ($99) which lets you modify PDF files directly. I don’t use any of those although Creator is tempting now that I’m reading about it.

But Reader is their shining star. PDFs are so much less hassle when they’re fast.

Something went wrong – -32300 : transport error – HTTP status code was not 200

Well, that’s certainly helpful. I wonder what the HTTP status code was, or what URL was being requested that returned said status code. But at least I know that something went wrong.

And if that’s not Web 2.0 enough for you, you can experience my tag cloud or author cloud instead! (Boy, I sure read a lot of dead white men. Much of that is thanks to a sociology degree, though.)

One nice thing about LibraryThing is that it has a librarian on staff, so the organizing concepts have all been thought through well. For instance, acknowledging that a book will have multiple editions and multiple countries of publication and multiple formats — and thus dozens of ISBNs — but still be the “same book”, it tracks your collection both at the book level (this particular edition and ISBN) and the “work” level (all of the published copies of the same book). And all of the metadata about the books is already there, imported from Amazon, LC, and other library catalogues. So once you enter your books (by ISBN, by CueCat scanner, by importing lists from elsewhere, or by searching titles one at a time).

Ages and ages ago, I decided that I needed book recommendations, and decided to find all of the books I own on Amazon and add them to my “I own this” list which it uses to come up with new recommendations. The results were uninspiring — its recommendations rarely strayed from “You have five books by author X, so we recommend this book by the same author” or “I see you have a few books on motorcycle safety, here are two more.” (That’s why I had a big Amazon “I own this” list to begin with.)

But that’s one thing that looks promising on LibraryThing: you can get recommendations based on your entire library from four heuristics: books owned by people who own lots of books that you own; books that have tags similar to those that you used; the most popular books on the site that you don’t have; and “special-sauce” recommendations using LibraryThing’s proprietary recommendation algorithm. All of them have their flaws (and the geek-heavy userbase doesn’t help things, either), but together I think they’ll be useful in tracking down good reads. The rating and review system won’t hurt either, and if I want to bother there’s a big community on there in its forums — sort of a “FaceBook for bibliophiles”.

The only real problem with the recommendations is that they’re based on your entire library. I have a lot of computer reference books that I don’t care much about anymore, but I have a lot of computer-related recommendations. Yes, I have half an O’Reilly Perl library; no, I don’t program in Perl beyond quick hacks anymore; no, I don’t want the other half of that library.

It’s no killer app, but for $10/year or $25/forever to list over 200 books (and free for under 200), it’s a neat toy.

1. Take photo
2. Send to Flickr photo-posting address from phone

How I send photos to Flickr on my new Virgin Mobile phone:

1. Take photo
2. Send to an email address of mine which feeds into a program, which
3. Extracts the HTML part from that message
4. Pulls the message text and a URL out of that HTML part
5. Retrieves that URL, which links to a thumbnail of the image
6. Pulls a second URL out of Javascript source on that page
7. Retrieves the second URL, which links to the full-sized image’s page
8. Pulls the image URL out of the full-sized image’s page
9. Requests the image, but with curl(1) instead of libwww-perl, since libwww-perl mysteriously produces 500 Internal Server Errors on that page only, even though the previous two pages loaded fine
10. Bundles up a new MIME message with the text from (2) and the image
11. Sends that to the Flickr photo-posting address

Real elegant. Oh, well, at least it works. I knew going in that Virgin Mobile makes data-related things a bit difficult, but that just kept getting sillier and sillier.

Firebug is what the Web Developer extension was heading towards: a complete, live-editing HTML and CSS editor embedded in the browser. Make a change in the HTML or CSS of a site and the change is reflected immediately in the browser. Turn individual CSS elements on and off, add and change properties (with autocomplete!) with a click. Debug and profile Javascript, see a graphical representation of page load times (and view requests and response headers for each request involved in building the page!), see graphical representations of CSS element/padding/border/margin metrics, inspect the DOM and more. The screenshots on their website are a great tease about what Firebug’s capable of.

Outside of a great set of major features, Firebug gets the user interface right too. Mousing over an image filename in CSS shows you a thumbnail of the image, and same with color identifiers. HTML and CSS editing lets you edit the minimum chunk you need, not an entire source file. Mouse over elements in the rendered HTML and they’re highlighted in the source. When debugging metrics, actual rulers appear on the top and right side of the element being inspected!

If you do any web development at all — even if it’s just working on your own homepage or LiveJournal style — you should really give Firebug a try. You’ll quickly forget how you ever got by without it (and curse the high heavens whenever you have to do Ajax-y debugging in Internet Explorer!).

Verichat apparently got out of the Blackberry IM business just in time. I’d hate to be in WebMessenger’s shoes right now. I suppose they’ve still got Windows Mobile users. Public IM always struck me as a particularly fragile sort of thing to sell software for, though, especially when it’s such an obvious value add for the carriers.

Since I have a list of around a hundred books in my to-read list, I don’t open requests for all of them at once. Instead, I use the “My List” feature that lets you maintain lists of catalogue entries without requesting them. It was getting a bit difficult to find books in there, though, so I decided to use a related feature that lets you create multiple lists to sort them by subject area. That way I could keep one title each from a bunch of subject areas on request, and then when those requests were filled, grab another.

This worked well for the first few lists. And then:

Oooookay. I can store as many books as I like on my three lists, but a fourth list is apparently out of the question. I know that it’s a given that online catalogues are brain-dead software — think “enterprise software” without the incentive of profit — but I can’t begin to imagine why they’d think it was a good idea to limit users to THREE LISTS. If you’re going to do that, and not, say, 63 or 255 or unlimited lists, why bother implementing multiple lists at all?

Luckily, My Opinion Counts! so I think I’m going to tell them my opinion of limiting me to three lists now.