Thursday, November 23, 2006
Yoga and Capoeira
Interestingly I just came across this blog on yoga - focussing on the more acrobatic asanas and transitions between them. Some of the movements/drills are very similar to the ones we've been training recently in capoeira acro class.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
performancing..
Friday, November 10, 2006
long time
I tried posting on mixi for a bit - to practice my Japanese. However its kinda weird to know that there is a group of people ( your mixi friends ) who get notified every time you post and will most likely read it. Obviously that's the same as someone who subscribes to a blogs rss feed, but that some how seems more anonymous.
I have been reading a bit more science fiction recently - and its all English authors. It seems that all the *new* sci-fi coming out these days - with any bite anyway is hailing from the UK. Charles Stross ( I'm reading accelerando at the moment ), Ian McDonald, Ken McLeod, Alastair Reynolds and others seem to be powering ahead with lots of new and interesting stuff - with out very much coming out of the US.
Theres a great interview with Ian McDonald of "River of Gods Fame". I'm especially keen to see what he makes of near future Brazil in his new one - called Brasyl of course. And I've just fired off an amazon order for two debut novels by new authors, Crossover and Infoquake both of which look pretty interesting in their own ways. Maybe I'll post a review or two when I'm done. I probably shouldn't actually read them before my Japanese test on the 3rd of December - best to keep up my manga reading efforts until then.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
lulu.com and publishing
Well I finally got a couple of books setup on lulu.com. Both are public domain so there was were no worries about copyright etc. My lulu store front is at :
PD books of all sorts - Lulu.com
Learning to use Latex has been pretty interesting. Its got a few warts but its very powerful and best of all is free software. I think the results turned ok ok but I'd like to customise a few more things to get away from that default "typeset using latex" look. I'm also planning to learn a bit more about typesetting in general. Theres some interesting stuff about legibility of certain fonts, character counts per line and all kinds of other stuff I'd never considered before.
I've just been using some of the stock images supplied by lulu for the cover - however in the future I'd much rather have proper ie custom ones. I've been researching obtaining free, royalty-free images and using the gimp to edit them.
Right now I'm selecting texts to do book projects of based simply on stuff I'd like to read thats available in the public domain in some form readily convertable to latex. Fortunately there are lots of text available that qualify and I have a decent shortlist of what to work on next.
opinionated software
Great blog post by Edd Dumhill. I like the idea of software taking a stance by its design and standing by that. One example he didn't mention is gnomes enforcement of HIG standards across applications. I think hes alo right about mono kinda lacking focus at the moment. It seems to have been drifting a bit lately.
Monday, October 31, 2005
VM player rocks
I have been finding many uses for VMPlayer since its been released. I was using VMWare quite heavily anyway and its quite nice just to be able to copy images ( or download prebuilt ones ) to different machines and be able to run them with VMPlayer which runs a treat on my Ubuntu box. Getting a RedHat enterprise image setup for testing today was just a matter of downloading it from redhats site. No install to worry about - or the hassle of drivers not working as used to be the case with Fedora on VMWare. Unfortunately Suse's prebuilt image barfed running X.
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
flock
Just started testing out flock, the new firefox based browser. It looks great - they have designed a very nice theme for it. Not having used del.icio.us before I'll have to wait and see if the new bookmark system is any good. The ability to blog directly from the browser is quite nice and the post editor is as good as any I've used.
Hmm - I just discovered that the standard firefox extensions will not work with flock although they have ported a number of them across. I guess thats why its a developer preview. Still its fun to play with. I'll just see how long I can survive without the googlebar and mouse gestures.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Publishing on Demand
