What is moscontentlink?

Just after I finished moszoomimglink, I created another useful mambot. This one allows you to add a link to any content on your site, provided you know its title. To use it, the syntax is very simple: { moscontentlink:’Item’ } { moscontentlink:’Item’|’Alternate text’ } [Using Ids] For example, if you want to add a link to this section (id=378 , title = What is moscontentlink?), you would have to enter: Continue reading

What is moszoomimglink?

I am one of those guys that writes reports about trips he’s made, and ‘spices’ them up with relevant pictures taken on the road. I like having the prose interrupted by my images, because it’s easier on the eye, because you have a better chance of figuring out if you are interested in a particular ride or hike if you see the surroundings, and just because I am so proud of my pictures. Continue reading

A Short History of Nearly Everything (B. Bryson)

What a fun book to read! Mr. Bryson succeeds in the almost impossible: he writes a book that both explains science and history of science in context, jumping randomly from one topic to another based on personal relationships between the main actors, and succeeding in reconstructing pretty much all there is to know about modern science. What a kick. I followed the book page for page, amused at the links between the scientists and benefactors, seeing how one discipline would gain from the loss of the other; how fashions drive the pursuit of knowledge; how progress in one area facilitates progress in another. Continue reading

The Rule of Four (I. Caldwell & D. Thomason)

Sometimes a book is just killed by its own hype. You will read the book cover and find some absurd hyperbole, and the content has no chance of measuring up to the expectation. For this to happen, the book has to have a certain amount of mediocrity, and the hyperbole must be spectacular. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened with The Rule of Four. If Umberto Eco, Dan Brown and Scott Fitzgerald had collaborated on a book, the result would have been this one. Continue reading

The Fabric of the Cosmos (B. Greene)

In ‘The Elegant Universe", Mr. Greene hints at the fact he is writing a book about the meaning of space and time, the twin brothers that define the physical universe. That’s actually a book very well worth writing, since space and time are entirely strange concepts in physics, radically different than anything else. For one, the twins are usually constructed a priori and simply entered into equations without discussion. That’s troublesome enough. Continue reading

The Eight (K. Neville)

The female counterpart to ‘The Name of the Rose’? I don’t think so. But at the same time, a well-written book that succeeds in translating a numerological fixation into a compelling tale of adventure. Kudos to the author! I should mention: chess is the non-numerological fixation. Everything in chess revolves around the number 8, so that the combination of game and number actually buffers the book pretty well. There is a lot to like about this book, and a lot to dislike. Continue reading

New Mambo Site

Homegrown is nice, but why do your own thing when the rest of the world has moved on? I was fond of my site tool, but after evaluating a ton of other ones, I settled on Mambo, and surely don’t regret it!

The City of Lost Children (1995)

I really wasn’t expecting much from this movie. I had rented it from Netflix because of an affinity hint, but I had gotten some really bad movies that way. This one sounded a little too childish to entrance me, and I was not really too fond of the idea of putting it into the DVD player. Bad reaction! It turns out that ‘The City of Lost Children’ plays in the same category as ‘The Fifth Element’: movies of creativity, fantasy, and fancy in which the childlike nature of the players is just a device to enrapture the viewers. Continue reading

wget - the Universal Web Retrieval Tool

wget – the Universal Web Retrieval Tool If you spend a lot of time on the web researching information, you have probably wished you could store some of the HTML pages you find locally on your machine. Sometimes the site you are going to is really slow, but you have to consult it frequently; other times you know you won’t be able to get to the web, but need to information on the road; and in the third and worst case, it is good to have your diagnostic information handy if your connectivity ever goes down. Continue reading

srdgraph

Prerequisites Well, the utility is a command line tool that uses Perl – so that’s a good start for requirements. You need some recent version of Perl: I used the tool only with 5.8.0 and appreciate feedback. The packages required to run the utility are: GD::Graph POSIX S710 GD::Graph GD::Graph is the graphical core of the utility. It takes care of generating a graph given the data, and you as a user don’t have to do more than presenting it and – voila! Continue reading