Vent of Hearing

Pawn Of Paradox, Part 7

Ahem. So, April 25th is next list of shame day.
And gilmae might be on it.
Well, at least PoP won't be on it,

Here is the sneak preview of it before it goes to afec. You can proof read if you like.

Pawn Of Paradox, Part 7

Typical brash Arend. Why couldn't she stay back and not get into trouble, hmm. Tegan Jovanka, former air-stewardess from the country of Arendia. No, Austrailia. Silly mistake. How did I get involved with her? Just her accent makes my teeth grind. There she goes again, running into trouble. You don't see Adric doing that. He is ... was ... is calm, dependable, logical.

Ah, it wasn't so difficult to get the young girl out of trouble. Just a small piece of modest genius and a flash of the sonic screwdriver and we were away. Somehow they have all seemed to have accepted us and we are going off on some quest for something or someone. I really must pay more attention when people are explaining things. I'm having so much trouble recently.

There is some kind of psi power at play on this world. Garion, the king seems to have certain abilities that I've not seen before. The Will and the Word, he calls it, but I'm not certain what part the word plays. It is certain some sort of mind power, but Garion wouldn't divulge the details. He seemed surprised that I was surprised by use of the power, so it is obviously a common trait on this planet. Next stop a boat trip across to the mainland.

The trip allowed me to compose my thoughts and I was able to meditate somewhat on the trip. That is, when Adric wasn't throwing up next to me. Whilst in that state, I was contacted by an entity who gave me much to think about. I'm not altogether certain I believe what he told me, but something is certain. Things are not right. As a Time Lord I have a sense for that sort of thing and he is right. The entity told me to find someone called Belgarath, and I think he does hold the key to this hole business. I'll ask Garion about this man.

Okay, that didn't go to well. Back in chains again. After mildly explaining that I wanted to talk to this Belgarath chap, Garion flew into a rage. He shouted something about a traitor, but I didn't quite hear him as I was being thrown across the room at the time. People can be so melodramatic at times. Anyway, Garion has left us in a cell in Sendaria whilst he goes off to his army and fights a war, where many people will die. No good comes from war. I prefer more direct action myself. Adric was whining again. This is a good sign.

***

'Do you want to know where the Doctor is?'
Polgara turned round, fast. It was a small boy, sitting cross legged on a fallen tree branch.
'What do you know about the Doctor?'
'Oh, this and that. I know where he is, Lady Polgara.' The boy was smiling.
Polgara stepped towards him. 'You will tell me,' she said raising her hand.
'Careful,' said the boy. From out of nowhere, a flute appeared at his lips. 'One step closer, and I play!'
Polgara laughed. 'Do you know who I am?'
The boy laughed back but said nothing.
'Boy, answer me. I *command* you,' she said, gathering her will.

The melancholic flute music finally stopped and Polgara lay there breathing slowly. It was beautiful but ugly. Funny but sad. So full of contradictions. Slowly, Polgara lifted her head from the leafy. moist ground, her head slightly fuzzy. The music echoed faintly through the forest.

She stood up, brushing the leaves off. She was annoyed, very annoyed. But, she know knew where to find the Doctor. She didn't think to wonder how she knew.

***

There was a young boy from Earth
Whose own death caused him much mirth
Shot himself in the head
He watched as he bled
To Faction Paradox he had proved his own worth

***

Polgara swooped down into the Sendarian coastal town. She had seen the devastation from the skies. Transforming herself, perfectly timed so she actually walked to the ground, she saw it close hand. Someone, very powerful indeed, had literally flattened half the town. There was no sign of life anywhere. Her trail to the Doctor was dead. And he was obviously one of the most powerful sorcerers ever to have walked the planet. She took to the air again. The boy had been useless after all. Back to plan A.

***

She was outside the cave. In the darkness there was a movement. There was a blur, she shook her head and in that instant, it was upon her, going for her throat.

***

Tegan surprised us all, again. With hindsight, it should have been obvious that she would have the Will and the Word. My, what a will, and she is always talking. Anyway, once the cell walls had exploded there was no stopping our escape. We'll track down this Belgarath. We'll sort out what is wrong with this world, and be back to the TARDIS for a nice cup of tea.

Buffometer

Aquarion's Buffometer is a must have web application. In future, eveyone should have a Buffometer, to stop those awkward "Have you see Series 5 yet?" questions that must precede any conversation.

However, I think it is lacking is buzzwords. It needs the following
- an XML feed
- it needs to be a web service that can be linked into Google, so you can search for peoples Buffometrics.
- A Buffometerdex website to see everyone latest ratings.
- A Jacob Alertbox deriding it.
- A Dancing Buffy Icon.

Any more?

Badly Drawn Dalek

Spring Garden Images

In the back garden, things are growing.

An apple tree blossoms.

The blossom grows.

A dandelion fights its way through the cracks.

A child plays.

Here, Enjoy our prepacked rubbish

They closed the Deli Bar in our office restaurant this week.

We used to be able to choose from a selection of breads and a varying set of food to go in them. It was slightly more expensive that going to a shop and getting a pre-packed sandwich, but I thought that you get what you pay for. You get choice, you see what goes it, and you could make odd combinations that would never been sold commercially.

And this week, its been replaced with prepacked sandwiches, most of which disappear after half an hour. And they are slightly more expensive than the deli that was slightly more expensive than the prepack sandwiches.

The reason is clear, it was too popular and didn't make enough money. Go down to the canteen and see a queue of five or six people for the deji bar and one, maybe two in other sections. Clearly, not enough people were having a cooked meal, nearly twice the cost of the deji bar sandwich.

At the same time, the resturant management have issued a survey. One of the questions was how often you visited the resturant. I have crossed out once a day, and replaced with never, writing the following at the side.

"Seen as you've removed the Deji Bar, I'll be bringing in my own food. Thanks for removing it, you've saved me money. I do wonder if this will be read, as the last survey I filled in indicated I only visited the resturant to eat at the Deji Bar. I also indicated I'd like a wider selection, but you don't seem to have listened to me."

p.s. once false alarm on the labour front so far this week. see journal tomorrow for more details.

New Master Index Page

I've finally designed and implimented the main index page for this website. Go to http://www.dellah.com/index.shtml to get the latest everything.

Features of the index page.
- Shows the latest journal entry.
- Latest Vent with summary + a list of older items.
- Last ten weblog posts.

It is a new CSS redesign, following the ideas presented in Daily CSS Fun enabling me make it far easier to maintain and change. This also sits well with the next stage of my plan where, you, the user will be able to decide where to put things on the page. I.E. want Vent to be the main feature? Select it, and it will be changed simply using a different stylesheet. I'm not 100% certain if this is going to work, but I think its a worthwhile idea to persue.

Experimental Images

I'm starting to use my new camera a little bit now and for your delight, a small selection of silly pictures.

A close up black and white image of Emilia

Cats Eyes. Our cat, Bianca

A small blue flower

Bob the Builder Nativity Scene

A Small Toy

Slight Site Tweak

From the Orient now has a recently updated comments section so that Aquarius can see if anyone else comments on my posts.

The calendar has finally been removed (see gilmae for details).

A Library Application

Last night, I finished another book (I finished two in a weekend) and thought what I would put in a review of the book. Then I thought of a really neat application that would control the book review process and much more. It would, of course, be written using the xPlod database, and handle the output to this webpage and updating my .sig to reflect what I was currently reading.

It would maintain output on what I was reading, what I'd like to read, what I've read but haven't reviewed, what I've reviewed, and what I want to do with the book after reviewing. By that I mean what, physically, I'd do with the book. Space is valuable. I couldn't possibly keep all the books I own or will own on a bookshelf. There just isn't enough wallspace. In one respect what I do with the book is better than a 1-5 rating.

***** Gets a place on the bookshelf. (wow, impressive)
**** Into the loft. (Worthy of a reread)
*** Give to friend/relative (Not a bad book, but not worth keeping)
** Give to charity (Not a good book, give away)
* Burnt (A bad book; A Charity Shop wouldn't be able to get rid of it)

Anyway, I spent sometime speccing out the database design, wondering if I needed to map the changes Aquarius made to the insert statement to the rest of the commands, making a note to work out how to update it via email before realising I could have spent the time better by just reviewing the books.

Also, visit What Do I Know - Library to see someone who has used MovableType to manage his library.

Galileo's Daughter, by Dava Sobel

Summary

The story of Galileo's life as he struggles against the Catholic church in his quest for scientific knowledge. He is helped in his task, by the unwavering support of his loving daughter, Sour Maria Celeste.

Review

I thought this book would be the story of Sour Maria Celeste and her relationship to her father. Whilst touching on the work of Galileo, I expected a lot more of the personal life of his daughter. However, Sour Maria Celeste was confined to a convent at the age of 13 and such a book would not have been fulfilling. Instead it is the story of Galileo himself, his work and his religion. On the whole, it is a better book than I was expecting.

The only way we see the relationship between Galileo and his daughter is through the letters they wrote each other. Part of the reason that Sour Maria Celeste plays such a small part in the book is that we only get half the correspondence between them. For whatever reason, the letters that Galileo sent have been lost. When the two lived close together, it is as if a shroud has been placed over the readers head as Galileo visits his daughter instead of writing to her.

More interesting is the battle between science and religion. This is both an external and internal struggle for Galileo. It wasn't apparent to me before reading this book, but Galileo was a deeply religious man. Not only did he have to fight the authorities, he had to fight his own beliefs. Clearly, the internal struggle was the easier one as he was able to realign his views based on his new findings.

Galileo was also adept socially. He was able to manipulate and befriend a number of sympathetic people in the Catholic church to enable is book to be published. However, it was because he had managed to gain a number of high-powered enemies at the same, that his book was bought to the attention of the church as was banned. It was only result of a (false?) repentance that Galileo wasn't killed for his beliefs. Even when, he is finally imprisoned for his crimes, he is able to turn it to his advantage and remained under house arrest in very pleasant surroundings.

The end of the book returns to the title of the story as with a poignant moment, Galileo's body is finally allowed to be placed under a fitting monument for someone who was the "father of modern scientific thinking". Alongside his body is the unnamed skeleton of a young woman. It is his daughter.

Conclusion

This book is not exactly a page turner. It slowed in the middle part of the book that dealt mainly with his daughter. Read if you are interested in science history and its relation to the church, or the works of Galileo.

Amazon review

Journal Entries

Journal Entries have been pushed out to their own site Continual Slanders. The latest five appears on the right.

Now, the meta entries are the majority on vent, so I'll shut up now, write the dellah.com index page, and produce some proper content.

Index Fixed

Cast your eyes a short way down the page and you will no longer see in the index a link to this entry. All by the power of Python. All hail Python etc etc.

However, I'm not too happy with the way this is working. It takes too long to display the page. Now, the page is generated dynamically, and I'd like it to be static. What I really need is for MT to fire off some code to Castalian to regenerate the index pages. Grabbing an RSS feed should be done in a similar fashion, poling the feed every 15 minutes or so.

Using Python to extract information from an RSS feed.

Prerequisites

Python version 2.x (or later)
Python extention with XPath module (using 4Suite here)
The Castalian engine

Description

With the use of XML and XPath, it is relatively straightforward to process an RSS feed (Note: this demo is limited to RSS 0.91 for now). Simply travel over the nodes and examine the tagname, extracting what you want. With the use of castalian, it is very easy to display this information in your webpage. I have chosen to include the Castalian page using SSI, but there is no special need to do this. You can display the .cas page directly.

This is an example RSS that I'll be working with. It is from my weblog. The format is easy to follow. Each item has a title, description and link.

<?xml version="1.0"?>


<rss version="0.91">


  <channel>


  <title>From the Orient</title>


  <link>http://www.dellah.com/orient/</link>


  <description></description>


  <language>en-us</language>


  <item>


    <title>The List of Shame</title>


    <description>Oh no, the List of Shame has its own webpage. Oh woe is me....</description>


    <link>http://www.dellah.com/orient/archives/000082.shtml</link>


  </item>


  </channel>


</rss>

Here is include directive used on this page :-

<!--#include virtual="http://www.dellah.com/temp/
newrss.cas?rssurl=http://www.dellah.com/orient/index.xml&numvars=5"-->

As you can see I call newrss.cas with a couple of parameters. The first is the location of RSS feed and the second is the number of items you want to display on your page. If you do not specify this item, you will return everything in the xml file.

newrss.cas takes the parameters in and runs a method in another script, displaying the result on the screen.

  result = r.processRss(rssurl,numvars)

  for rr in result:

    response.write(rr)

The real work is done in rssEvalute.py and the processRss method.

    path0 = "channel/item"

    fd = urlopen(rssurl)

    try:

      dom = xml.dom.minidom.parseString(fd.read())

    except:

      return ['Currently unavailable\n']

    fd.close()

    items = Evaluate(path0, dom.documentElement)

Here we set the XPath expression we are going to transverse, and read in the RSS file. The Evaluate function creates item elements relative to the path we set.

Next, for each item we examine it's child nodes.

  for nodes in item.childNodes:

    if nodes.nodeType == nodes.ELEMENT_NODE:

      if nodes.tagName == 'title':

        counter = counter + 1

      if (nodes.tagName == 'title' and ((counter < numitems + 1) or numitems == 0)):

        try:

          title = nodes.firstChild.data

        except AttributeError:

          title = ''

What this piece of code is saying, is that for each node, if it is an element, check to see if it's name is 'title'. If it is 'title', make the python variable title the value of the nodes first child. If this is empty, set it to a null value, so we can still build the html.

Doing the same for description and link, we can build a simple html link and return it to be displayed in your HTML file.

      if title != '':

        itemres = '<a href="'+ link + '" title="' + descr + '">' + title + '</a><br />'    

        rssresult.append(itemres)

Source code

Download (pythonRSS.tar.gz)