{"id":882,"date":"2009-09-04T12:55:38","date_gmt":"2009-09-04T16:55:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=882"},"modified":"2009-09-07T22:36:53","modified_gmt":"2009-09-08T02:36:53","slug":"odd-lots-79","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=882","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>On Monday I returned the last third-pass page proofs (of a very gnarly part of the book, the partial instruction reference) and if the publisher&#8217;s schedule is to be believed, <em>Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition<\/em> goes on press tomorrow. Real books should be out of the bindery and in the warehouse by September 22.<\/li>\n<li>We came within a few hours of having a sunspot-free calendar month in August, but then very late Monday night, a barely visible sunspeck showed up, ruined the run, and then immediately started to vanish. The sunspot minimum appears to be heading for a double bottom, and there are <a href=\"http:\/\/wattsupwiththat.com\/2009\/09\/03\/nasa-are-sunspots-disappearing\/\">people at NASA suggesting that deeper mechanisms are changing within the sun<\/a>, and we may be a long time before seeing anything like a proper sunspot peak. So much for DXCC on 10M.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/technology\/2009\/sep\/02\/cory-doctorow-cloud-computing\">Cory Doctorow speaks up on cloud computing<\/a>, the goal of which, he says, is to allow companies to make money in a mature computing market by charging you month by month for computional facilities that you already have at home. So tell me: <em>How many people actually collaborate in the Cloud, as a percentage of people who actually compute?<\/em> I think it&#8217;s in low single digits&#8211;which suggests that the Cloud as an idea is something like 95% scam.<\/li>\n<li>If you&#8217;re following Michael Arrington&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/5205929\/crunchpad-photos-of-techcrunchs-delicious-web-tablet\">CrunchPad<\/a> project, <a href=\"http:\/\/crunchpadfans.com\/\">the CrunchPadFans blog<\/a> is worth a visit every week or so. It&#8217;s a little sparse, but there hasn&#8217;t been much news generally on the long-awaited gadget in recent weeks. I intuit that it would make a jack-fine ebook reader, if software to handle the major formats is included or installable.<\/li>\n<li>And speaking of ebook formats, Sony has announced that <a href=\"http:\/\/education.zdnet.com\/?p=2993&amp;tag=nl.e589\">it will be supporting the EPUB format<\/a> in its new reader products, days after <a href=\"http:\/\/www.internetnews.com\/webcontent\/article.php\/3836656\/Googles+EPUB+Embrace+Challenges+Kindle.htm\">Google&#8217;s announcement that it will be doing the same<\/a> within its Google Books system. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/EPUB\">EPUB<\/a> is a reflowable open standard not controlled by any particular firm, and if I had to finger a winner in the ebook standards wars (at least for primarily textual works) this would be it.<\/li>\n<li>Further relevant to ebooks is a reader app I&#8217;ve been fooling with on Ubuntu: <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Okular\">Okular<\/a>, which is nominally a PDF viewer but can open and display lots of other formats, including DjVu, CHM help files, Epub, Plucker, MobiPocket, and a few others. Although it&#8217;s a KDE 4 app, I&#8217;ve had no difficulty making Okular run under GNOME. Okular on a suitable handheld Linux-enabled device could make a helluvan ebook reader.<\/li>\n<li>And Okular led me to <a href=\"http:\/\/windows.kde.org\/\">the KDE on Windows project<\/a>, which aims to create native-code ports of KDE apps to Windows, with an installer to make it easy for non-techies. It&#8217;s early and the product doesn&#8217;t look as easy as it should be, but then again&#8230;it&#8217;s early.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve discovered a much higher-resolution photo of the old Turtle Wax building at the Ashland\/Ogden\/Madison intersection in Chicago <a href=\"http:\/\/i254.photobucket.com\/albums\/hh92\/Irishtom29\/burnhampoint109.jpg\">here<\/a>. We would pass that building on the way to my grandfather&#8217;s house Back of the Yards back in the late 1950s, and my mother would always point out the 25-foot tall turtle on the top of it. Cool building, too, turtle or not. Gone now, alas&#8211;the turtle and the building both.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Monday I returned the last third-pass page proofs (of a very gnarly part of the book, the partial instruction reference) and if the publisher&#8217;s schedule is to be believed, Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition goes on press tomorrow. Real books should be out of the bindery and in the warehouse by September [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[17,15,44,59,14],"class_list":["post-882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-ebooks","tag-hardware","tag-history","tag-linux","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=882"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":888,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions\/888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}