Thought On Bone
One of my favorite comics is one called Bone. It's a nice fantasy tale, and the art is excellent. The author is currently redoing it in color, but the original black and white is excellent. He makes great use of the contrast to make for excellent scenes.
In any case, I was reminded of it because of a post on Neil Gaiman's blog. He's noticed something that I did we I last re-read it. The first time the series really does seem to make a drastic shift in tone, but when you read the second time you discover that it was clearly planned from the beginning. I highly recommend picking it up.
Month of Django Tips
James Bennett is going to try to blog everyday for the month of November with a new Django tip each day. Let me just say that the first post is quite good, and I can only hope the rest of the month is filled with such useful information. His blog archives will quickly become an excellent reference.
Reinteract - Graphical Python Interpreter
(via) Okay, Reinteract is just cool. Not something I need now, but in college it would have been really handy working with graphs. That and being able to plot data to audio is just icing on the cake.
Backdoor In Standard Random Number Generator
Bruce Schneier writes an unsettling article about Dual_EC_DRBG. This is one of four recently NIST standardized random number generators. It was already the odd algorithm out, it being significantly slower, more complicated, etc. Turns out it has a backdoor. Schneier has a great summary of the issues and worries.
Quicklook on the Command-Line
(via) Okay, now I can lauch Leopard's Quicklook from the command-line. That's really quite handy for pdf, doc, and other similar files.
SWM Desperately Seeking Weewar
Thanksgiving Projects
While I was in college breaks like thanksgiving and Christmas were time for me to work on personal projects. Now with this upcoming holiday season I'm faced with free time and no active projects.
Oggify has a single bug in the queue but is feature complete. Oggify will be feature update free until some other projects make progress.
I'm working on an abstraction library for mutagen so you can edit all formats of tags with one API. But it won't take too much time to finish.
My eventual goal I writing a good general audio file tagger is blocked on some more design work on the underlying structure. That and design work on the GUI.
My goal for this weekend is to actually have something posted for my tag wrapper, and maybe a nice write-up on Django that I've been thinking of doing for a while.
Blogging on the iPhone Sucks
So this and the previous posts were typed up on the iPhone while at the airport. The iPhone doesn't take well to the text making the text field scroll, nor does it make for good editing with markdown. There's a broken link I'll be fixing later tonight.
The Nerd Handbook
(via) The Nerd Handbook, a guide for your significant other. I always find it weird to read something and feel like I'm looking in the mirror. My only question is: why haven't I been reading this blog till now?
Review: The Myths of Innovation
While traveling for Thanksgiving I read Scott Berkun's The Myths of Innovation. I originally became aware of the book from attending his session at this past OSCON. His OSCON session consisted of what would be the first two or three chapters of the book. I really enjoyed that and had been meaning to pick up the book since. I finally did about 2 weeks ago and dove in.
The book centers around the common (mis)perception of innovation, invention, and creativity. The beginning of the book talks epiphany and history. The classic moments of invention are brought down to us as stories with some single moment as the source of innovation. Newton with the apple is the classic example. Sadly history and innovation isn't nearly that clear. Berkun's first task is to open our eyes to the complex history of innovation and the fact much work comes ...
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