I’m a big fan of Project Gutenberg and have downloaded many of their etexts over the years. However, their etexts have numeric file names, which aren’t very human friendly. In order to keep track of the etexts that I have saved on my computer, I’ve written a little perl script to extract the author and title from the etexts and generate an HTML file to list them.

The code’s release under the GPL, so feel free to tinker with the code and share alike.

Breath in. Count to ten. Let go of the anger.

This is what I must do whenever I come across strawmen arguments between what Americans call “Liberals” and “Libertarians” in comments on the internet.

What the sensible cybernaut learns from these sorts of spats is that life at the extremes is hell. He can also safely assume that just because he doesn’t see exactly eye-to-eye with another, the other is probably not advocating the most extreme position.

After that, we went down to Lulworth Cove for my second swim in the Channel of the summer. I only spotted Lulworth while I was exploring the south coast with Google Earth because it looks like someone took a bite out of the coastline. I saw a monument celebrating the fossils that have been uncovered on the Jurassic coast. It talked about the 185 million years of history in the fossils. Stonehenge didn’t seem so old anymore.

2010-07-03 to 2010-07-04 Wiltshire and Dorset

2010-05-01 Cambridge

I’ve just finished a short contract working for a company based in Battersea. I had a great time there, and every day, as I walked from the station, I was reminded of Pink Floyd when I saw the crumbling power station.

2010-04-11 London

In order to get a better idea of how the language works, I’ve written a small program for editing the PATH environment variable on Windows machines:

http://www.percidae.com/

I find myself editing this variable on various Windows machines pretty regularly. Every time, I also am annoyed by the small text box in the dialog in the Control Panel.

So far I’ve enjoyed the experience of writing with Visual Basic and can’t see what all the fuss is about. Having written PHP for years, I’m used to ignoring the comments of language purists. I’m much more interested in getting something working than any imagined superiority of different languages.