More grief creating formatted documents
I write my fiction using a 'word processor' which is in fact no more than a hacked together set of shell scripts. To produce final proof output, I need a tool to render my text into nicely formatted PDF or Postscript. I do this by way of HTML, but I still need a tool for the HTML to PDF step. For years I've used Prince, which is very good indeed. It has three problems from my point of view
- It's proprietary software, and although you can legitimately use it for free, if you do it prints its own logo on the cover page of your document;
- It's too expensive (US$ 495) for me to be able to really justify a license;
- And finally — for me this one's the killer — it doesn't run on Debian, and because it isn't free, you can't just compile it yourself.
It does run on Ubuntu, and consequently I do run Ubuntu on one of my machines just so that I can run Prince, but I now want to run my fiction through my continuous integration toolchain, which runs under Jenkins on my server; and my server runs Debian.
Restating the case against Land Value Tax
Note that I'm not arguing that Land Value Tax is inapplicable in urban areas — on the contrary, in urban areas it may well be a very good tax. I'm arguing that it has consequences in rural areas which act directly and diametrically against the cause of land reform.
First I'd like to introduce the two characters of a three act drama.
Nae Gods, an' precious few heroes: no place for racism in Scotland
Nationalism in Scotland is in ferment, on the boil, full of interesting ideas and cross-currents. We're enthused and stimulated by preparation and campaigning for the referendum. Ideas from the left and right are encountering one another, and sometimes we're a bit shocked at what we see.
Dennis Canavan is right. We do have to keep our eye on the ball. We do have to work together to achieve the win, because we still do have a hill to climb. So maybe I'm talking out of turn. I've already taken a pop at the old left, and now I'm going to talk about what I see as the misty-eyed romantic right: the idea that there is an authentic culture of Scotland, a true ethnicity: and that that culture, that ethnicity, is Gaelic.
What started me running is this multi-part article on the (generally excellent) Newsnet Scotland website. The article, too, is generally accurate. However, I believe it stretches a point about the extent of Gaelic in early medieval Scotland until it creaks. And in that creaking I hear an echo of special pleading which sounds to me distinctly racist.
The old Left, and the new Scotland
Unity and discussion: need for friendly criticism
One of the themes we heard repeatedly at the Radical Independence Conference this weekend was calls for nationalisation: nationalisation of the banks, of Grangemouth, of the oil industry. This makes me very cautious. Of course, conference speeches are not places for nuance, for detail. It's possible that those who urged nationalisation did not mean the statist, centralising nationalisation of 1945. So I'm cautious rather than hostile.
My intention in this essay is to set out the reasons that I'm cautious. This isn't to criticise anyone; it isn't to be hostile to anyone. As Dennis Canavan said, we must keep our eye on the ball; we must achieve independence, and to do that we must work together as a broad front. We don't need schisms, splits. I'm not seeking to promote those. I'm seeking to start a discussion.
Implementing Milkwood in Java and Clojure
I was recently given, as a coding exercise by a potential employer, this problem.
It's an interesting problem, because the set of N-grams (the problem specification suggests N=3, so trigrams, but I'm sufficiently arrogant that I thought it would be more interesting to generalise it) forms, in effect, a two dimensional problem space. We have to extend the growing tip of the generated text, the meristem, as it were; but to do so we have to search sideways among the options available at each point. Finally, if we fail to find a way forward, we need to back up and try again. The problem seemed to me to indicate a depth-first search. What we're searching is not an 'optimal' solution; there is no 'best' solutions. All possible solutions are equally good, so once one solution is found, that's fine.