Inspired by Keith Martin’s Reading Notes, I’ve decided to try writing a short review of every book that I read, starting today. I expect that most reviews will be 100 to 250 words.

Why? Like my Picture of the Day project, it should help me think a little harder about what I’m reading, if I know that I’m going to have to say something pithy about it. I’m a better pho­tog­ra­ph­er than I am a reviewer, so the exercise should be good for me.

Now you know why I put together a way of Rating with Stars for dasBlog yesterday.

The first two reviews have already been written and will follow shortly.

Technical Notes:

• Abusing Amazon images …continue.

Julieanne Kost, a Photoshop evangelist for Adobe, flies 200 days a year. For the last five years, she’s been taking photos out of airplane windows.

This book is part pretty pictures, part a meditation on creativity, and part a Photoshop tutorial.

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. That must be why the word count is so low. In the first 120 pages, there are eight pages of text on creativity, and one page of text for each …continue.

I want to be able to write some reviews and graph­i­cal­ly rate them with stars. I put together some trans­par­ent stars in Gimp and added a macro to dasBlog.

I’m going to rate this effort:

$stars(4.5)

To get this effect, I simply wrote $stars(4.5).

(And I had to carefully construct the previous sentence so that dasBlog wouldn’t invoke the stars macro.)

I’m hardnosed. I rarely give 5/5 to anything. I don’t really expect to need the half stars, but I may want that fine control at some point.

To use this in your own blog, download the zipfile of star images.

Copy 5star*.gif to your blog’s images directory. The *.xcf files are Gimp source files.

Add the …continue.

I’ve been getting into Python lately. One problem that I’ve en­coun­tered under Windows, is that input redi­rec­tion doesn’t work if you use the .py file as­so­ci­a­tion to run the script; e.g.:

C:\> foo.py < input.txt

There’s a well-known input redi­rec­tion bug. The fix is to explicitly use python.exe to run the script.

A related problem for me was that stdin was opened as a text file, not a binary file, so \r bytes were being discarded from binary input files. The fix is to run python.exe -u (unbuffered binary input and output).

I didn’t want to hardcode the path to python.exe in a batch file, so I came up with the following wrapper, …continue.

I’ve dualbooted my laptop between Linux and Windows since June, spending nearly all of my time in Linux. I started out with Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake), but soon switched to Kubuntu (the KDE variant), later upgrading to Kubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft).

To make this useful, certain key ap­pli­ca­tions have to be available in both Windows and Linux. Firefox for browsing; Thun­der­bird for email; Rainlendar for calendar; KeePass and KeePassX for password man­age­men­t; among others.

My laptop has four partitions:

• Primary 1, NTFS - Windows, aka /windows or /dev/hda1. 8GB
• Primary 2, Ext3 - Linux system partition, aka / or /dev/hda2. 12GB
• Extended 1. Linux swap partition. 2GB.
• Extended 2, Ext3. Shared partition, aka /shared. 15GB.

I’m using NTFS-3G under Kubuntu …continue.

At work, we’re having a Christmas party every day this week at 4pm. Each day, a different team is re­spon­si­ble for providing food and drink. Yesterday, my team provided Caipir­in­has and some Brazilian food. Today, we had Scotch and savory cheese­cakes!

I’m so used to cheese­cakes being sweet that it’s never occurred to me that they could come any other way, but I have to say that mushroom, pepper & pesto, and brie &hazelnut cheese­cakes are all quite tasty.

About six weeks ago, I read about Sparky’s A Picture a Day project on his blog. He in turn had been inspired by Photojojo’s Project 365.

Here’s how it works, for me. I take at least one photo a day, every single day for a year. Every so often, I upload the photos to my Flickr site. If I get more than one worthwhile photo in a day, great, but one and only gets tagged potd (picture of the day).

Why? Apart from the reasons enumerated by Photojojo, here’s what I get out of it.

First of all, fun. It adds a little spark to my day, to be always looking …continue.

10/29. In mid-October, I shaved off the goatee that I had sported since March, leaving me clean-shaven for the first time in a decade. I quickly got over that urge and let the beard start growing back.

This is me at the two-week stage: a self-portrait taken while ex­per­i­ment­ing with the new camera. It looks a little odd to me. I’m using this as the startup photo on the camera.

10/30. I go back and forth between Atlas‘s offices at Pioneer Square and the In­ter­na­tion­al District, and Smith Tower is a major landmark.

10/31. Once again, we got dozens and dozens of young callers at Halloween. I have a set of Halloween …continue.

I noted at the beginning of July that my sister Michelle was to be married to David Bowles in Dublin in early November.

The wedding took place on Friday, November 10th. Emma and I arrived the afternoon before, half stumbling with tiredness. My brother, Mark, and his wife, Lizzy, had arrived from New York only hours earlier.

The ceremony took place at 1pm at St. Brigid’s, a small, old Anglican church, on the outskirts of Stillorgan village, long since absorbed into the Dublin met­ro­pol­i­tan area. It was very Ascendancy, with 19th century plaques about Fellow of the Royal College this and Brevet Colonel (Boer War) that.

The bride looked lovely, and I have the photos …continue.

Sys­In­ter­nals has always been a source of great tools for trou­bleshoot­ing your system. FileMon, RegMon, Process Explorer, Handle, ListDlls, PsTools, DebugView: all of these have earned a permanent place on my Windows in­stal­la­tions. Mark Russi­novich, the co-founder, is a world-class hacker. He co-wrote Microsoft Windows Internals without access to the Windows source. It was he who discovered the Sony Rootkit and publicized it on his widely read blog.

Many people were somewhat disturbed to learn that Microsoft bought Sys­In­ter­nals a few months ago, that it would compromise the tools.

It seems not to be a problem. The tools have just been re-released on the TechNet Sys­In­ter­nals site. There’s one new tool, ProcMon, …continue.