Index & News — hermiene.net

I worked on a simple substitution cipher. I'll work some more on it, and maybe make a little game out of it.

I also finished those door-stoppers!

• Edgar Allan Poe Collected Stories and Poems
• Asimov's New Guide to Science
• Sherlock Holmes: Short Stories

And I read three novels:

• Airframe
• Shadow Puppets
• Shadow of the Giant

I added explanations for the fields that a book might have.

I added some more special browsing criteria to the Books page. The neat thing about having a relational database like this working like a charm (as it now finally does) is that you can view your data in all kinds of interesting ways. As an example of this, check out The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (which I discovered in the course of properly cataloging my science fiction books and which is a tremendously useful tool).

And of course, I've read some more books:

• The End of Eternity
• Kilden
• Døde Menn Går i Land
• Expanded Universe
• The Planiverse

I realize that many books lack a synopsis and a review, and that those that have them have very short ones. This will probably get fixed when I re-read some of those books. You see, I have qualms about making my mind up about a book while I'm reading it (or just after I'm finished). If I don't digest it properly, I don't trust my own opinion on it. Better to do a proper review than a hasty one, I think.

I've read some books:

• Freedom Evolves
• Pebble in the Sky
• Collected Stories of Artur C. Clarke
• Apocalypsopolis
• Good Omens
• Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions
• More Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions

I redesigned the underlying code of my Books page, making it cleaner and more easily maintainable. As an unforeseen by-product of this, the two bugs which have been bugging me for some time (the Multiple Role Bug and the String Length Restriction Bug, as I call them) magically vanished! Also, browsing by category or author (or more generally, by any method which requires many-to-many tables to be joined) used to mean that under each book, only the category/author under consideration would show (even though a book might be written by many authors or be in many categories); no more! And there's a new feature: For all non-book views on the main page, you get the number of books in a category in parenthesis.

The Multiple Role Bug meant that for books where some authors had roles (editor, illustrator, translator, etc.), I'd get two sets of roles. (Example: The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction.) I had this fixed with a kludge, deleting every other role. However, this worked most places, but not all. It turned out that I'd get n sets of roles, where n is the number of categories in which a book is (most books are in two categories).

The String Length Restriction Bug would cut off the comma-separated strings containing the authors' names and ids long before its actual limit was reached, so that anthology books with lots of contributing authors were bungled. (Example: Dangerous Visions.) I never could figure out how to fix it.

However, I looked at my database queries, and designed them a little more logically. Before, I had one master query per view (by category, by series, single books, special criteria, etc.) and sent along GROUP_CONCAT()s for author names, ids, and roles, and for category names and ids, and then had my home-grown print_book() function work on the strings. Now, I do two separate queries inside the function to fish out author and category information, so that instead of one massive and unwieldy master query, I have three smaller ones. The lesson? Don't be afraid to use several queries.

I'm so happy with the way it works now that in a spirit of why-not-ism I added all the rest of my books to the database. So in the future when I've read a book, making it appear in the various views is as easy as flipping a boolean value. This should serve as an incentive to read more books (something I've really been neglecting lately).

Opera 11.11 was just released, supporting CSS3 columns, and so I implemented columns on my Books page. Doesn't it look much nicer?

There are also some book updates, but I'm postponing them for another update.

I read (and even reviewed, by the gods!) a whopping two books: The Martian Chronicles and Infidel: My Life. I also listened to The Moral Landscape, which is pending a real review. And I found an awesome Clarke story that I transcribed, The Possessed.

As for my excuse for the drought of updates, I blame it on the exceedingly addictive game Minecraft in conjunction with the immensely interesting lectures of Terence McKenna and Alan Watts (both of whose output is substantial, so it's been a huge time sink). Well. Now I'm finally trying to be more productive, and perhaps I'll even finish some of my door-stopper books (I have some collections from Clarke, Poe, Lovecraft, and Conan Doyle that I've been reading in from time to time that I'd like to finish).

I spent the last few days painstakingly rummaging through my books, transcribing their structure (in most cases this means their table of contents). Incidentally, this represents my first forays into JavaScript (or more specifically, the library jQuery). It gracefully degrades (meaning that it at least doesn't break for people browsing without JavaScript support), but I'm ambivalent about the fact that it displays the structure by default for non-JavaScript browsers. As an example, check out 2001. The [Toggle visibility] button exhibits the JavaScript magic. I'm pretty satisfied with how it works, overall. (So far it only works while displaying single books. I'll try to work that out.)

My vision for the Books page is to simply let it grow, hopefully into a big and useful online library, for my own (and hopefully your) delight. But before that, there are many bugs and wrinkles that must be ironed out. I suspect I'll have to meander into the dark, scary forest of "Web 2.0" for that.

My dearest sister and (I dare say) life-long friend, Irina Therese, has given birth to two wonderful twin girls, Mathilde and Nicoline, whom I already love to death. The sensation of being an uncle is a weird and wonderful one, and I cherish every moment of it. May you find bliss and happiness!

In site-related news, I went through the Books page and re-scanned the poor scans (since I started scanning the fronts, spines, backs, and, where applicable, dust-cover flaps of my books, I've learned some tricks), and in the same swoop updated the default height of the scans from 700 to 1000 pixels. (My policy now is, "1000 pixels in height, more if the situation calls for it". At the least, all text should be legible, even if the text is part of the cover art; as an example, the letters in the DNA illustration on the front of Richard Dawkins' book The Ancestor's Tale are perfectly legible.) I also read a number of books, although I haven't gotten through the doorstoppers as I'd planned. I re-read and scanned The Blind Watchmaker in addition to reading and giving a review to The Greatest Show on Earth. I listened to the three audio books of George Carlin, Brain Droppings, Napalm and Silly Putty, and When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops. All of these will get reviews when I've read them (this seems to be evolving as another policy of mine). I did the same with Bart Ehrman's books Misquoting Jesus and The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot; these will also get reviews when I've read them. I also read Livingstone: Oppdageren — Forskeren — Misjonæren, The Man in His High Castle, The Sex Revolts, True Hallucinations, American Poetry: An Introductory Anthology, and The Blank Slate.

I linked to Micrographia, the book that made the word "cell" famous (I haven't read it myself, but the illustrations are awesome), Notepad++ (my new favorite text editor), DOSBox (a DOS emulator), and two gaming wikis, KeenWiki and Minepedia (caveat lector: it is extremely easy to get addicted to this game).

As for future updates, I will really, really, really try to make them more timely. Really. I mean it this time.

I've read a slew of books: The Tyrannosaurus Prescription, Words in Genesis, The Greatest Show on Earth (only the audio book, but as soon as I've read the real book I'll review it), Frankenstein, Lord of the Flies, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Two, Lake of the Dead, Breaking the Spell, The Stars, Like Dust, and Deception Point. I have a couple of doorstopper books (mostly anthologies) that I plan on reading next. (I've started on several of them.)

I updated my Links page with a single game: Knytt. It's a wonderful little game; if you like it, you'll probably like its cousin games, too.