Geek Strums #6

Following on from the last update.

• One weekend, not so long ago, I overdid it and it triggered wrist pain. There seems to be a hysterisis element to damaging yourself with a guitar that I wish I'd known about. I.e. you don't realise you are doing damage until afterwards. It feels fine when you are playing and if you are having fun, its hard to stop and take a break...
  
  
• Related to the above. To build muscle memory in your fingers you need to repeat actions over and over again. Fine but I suggest spread 'em out a bit so that you are not lining yourself up for an RSI attack. Especially if you spend most of the rest of your waking hours kitting Emacs chords :-) I over did it by spending ages working on G-CAdd9-D-CAdd9-G for Time Of Your Life (Green Day) and E7-F barre chord for Major Tom (David Bowie).
  
  
• I am making progress with the theory side. Some time ago, I wrote about the fourness of four being the least interesting thing about the number 4. Today, I would substitute 4 for 3. Lets see... do you mean the third note in a scale? How about the semi-tone distance of a third? Do you mean a major third or a minor third cos the former is kinda like 4 in disguise... Or do you mean the third chord from the diatonic chord set? By the way are you counting up or down?. Or maybe you mean the third inversion? Or maybe the 6/5 chord which is a first inversion of a seventh in which the third is implicit?...As ever, context is king.
  
  
• My fingerpicking is running ahead of my ability to change chords fluidly. This is incredibly frustrating. From my picking hand I hear pleasant, nippy, Simon and Garfunkesque arpeggios for C chords, G chords, A minor chords and then pregnant silences as my right hand hauls itself through the chord changes.
  
  
• Its great fun though. Highly recommended.
  
  

XML and the document format mind bender

"It is entirely possible to have all the benefits of XML and yet retain the ability to just use user friendly, commodity off-the-shelf tools. However doing so - especially with complex document-oriented information - requires something more than just slapping an XML label on the file format." -- XML and the document format mind bender

Tiling an A3 image onto multiple sheets of A4 with Linux

I'm constantly amazed at how rapidly Google finds free Linux utilities that do what I want to do. Some of them very, very obscure. Its one of the really nice things about running Linux day-to-day as one's main environment.

Yesterday, however was different. Yesterday I wanted to find some way to print an A3 PDF on multiple sheets of A4 paper. This is one of those things that sits of the border line between (a) the originating application (b) a stand-alone utility and (c) the printer driver.

I have a multi-stage process that works but is not for the faint of heart. Have I missed something?

Publishing 2.0

I will be doing the keynote presentation at Publishing 2.0 on Wednesday 25 April 2007 in Bletchley Park (yes that* Bletchley Park: Alan Turing, Enigma machines, all that) in the UK.
The event is being organised by XML:UK. I have attended a couple of previous XML:UK events and thoroughly enjoyed them. This will be no different I'm sure.

I will be talking about how a whole series of mini-revolutions currently ongoing in the publishing space add up to a much bigger bang than the three previous electronic publishing revolutions : (1) electronic production for paper (2) CD-ROM distribution and retrieval (3) Web distribution and retrieval.

Number (4) is a humdinger. Come to Bletchley and we'll talk about it.

Linux pre-installed on a Dell box (or any other box)

click here to help make it happen. If Dell can find a model that makes this work for them, you can be sure that other vendors will follow suit. This here snowball needs to start rolling down the hill. You can help get it started.

A logo for REST

Whoa.See top right under the date stamp.

Thanks to my geek strumming adventures I grok the logo (If that is what it is). Even if I didn't grok it, its kinda pretty.

Maybe REST was assigned a logo and I never noticed?

Home truths about computing

"Software cannot be proven correct but it can be proven to be over budget."--Home truths about computing