September 2006 Archives

Back in the summer, I worked on an outline of the Book. This work was made quite easy thanks one app bundled with MacOS - OmniOutliner 2. Too bad the tool is payware and doesn't run on Linux.

So, how do I do outlines in Linux? XEmacs is my favourite text editor, but I'm sorry to say, I hate its outline mode. Kind of like using giant spoon to fling paint on the wall: Does the job, but isn't probably the best tool for it, and your fingers will get a funny new colour too.

I tried Zim, but after a good consideration it seems to have a rather wrong... paradigm for my needs. It's more of a note wiki than an outliner. I have a MediaWiki install around, thank you very much. =)

Today's big try was gjots2. Good news: Somewhat sane file format. Can output HTML. Pretty lightweight. Bad news: Debian package is borked due to Python being in transition, so I had to rely on Stow; Don't know what's wrong, but the app seems curiously unstable (hit a key at a wrong time, and the app crashes). But otherwise, it's good, and I like the UI more than I like OmniOutliner's, really (one big edit box). The only lacking thing from my point of view is text styling.

There's this thing called MindRaider, I wonder what it's worth; I couldn't understand the UI at first. Got to see how it works!

Small update: I tried MindRaider. Seems good, but it keeps its repository in one place, has a little bit stiff UI, and it can't export stuff to different formats. And, annoyingly, it complains that I have Java 1.5 installed. Markup features are good though. And as odd as it may sound like, I think I've picked the Emacs outliner - got to just bite bullet and learn the darn thing. At least writing scripts that dump the things to HTML is dead simple...

I have a new friend, and a new enemy.

GNOME Sound Recorder is a neat little application for dictation. It's part of the GNOME Media package. I usually think of sound recording and processing as a job for Audacity or something. But that's sound editing. Basically, here's an app where I can just say "I want to record to a Speex file. I mash record, it gets saved. I mash stop, it stops recording." It's weird - most of the time, I'm just looking at how programs get better and better, have tons of features, and so on, and I've been very happy that Linux gets software like Audacity or Ardour. But here's a bloody simple app. It does exactly what I need for dictation. Nothing else. Doing dictations in Ardour would be a nightmare. Audacity can do it, but still needs to render the result to a file. GNOME Sound Recorder can just record stuff from soundcard, apply some GStreamer magic, and tadah, I get tiny little Speex files, 2 megabytes for 8-minute pointless rambling, or something like that.

And doing dictations has proved to be a really cool thing. I've again found myself organising ideas and getting new ideas while sitting here with microphone and stuff. It also helps me to clear my head a little bit and get some things down. I probably end up talking about same things over and over, judging from my coffee head and tendency to repeat myself. Though there's absolutely no worry that I'll be turning this stuff into a podcast or anything. No way.

My new enemy is EasyTimeline MediaWiki extension, mostly because it's - paradoxically enough - bloody difficult to get it doing anything, and ridiculously limited at what it does. Several required parameters for each timeline, all of which are impossible to remember. Syntax that was designed by some random user when they were bored. Documentation that is most assuredly Not A Tutorial. Good grief. After a good 30 minutes of tries, I managed to get a green vertical bar timeline with the text written with white font on white background. Yay. Apparently, I can't use the precision of days when specifying dates before Jan 1 1800, I need to settle for precision of years for dates before that. Okay, it was my bloody stupid idea to use dates like "630" for these writings. Oh, wait, since Avarthrel has used different calendar systems, maybe I could convert the dates to the earlier calendar, that would push the dates to, uh, 9000s. (Wonder if anyone has tried using those dates in EasyTimeline, let alone specifying dates where there's more than 4 year digits.) And of course multiple different calendar systems aren't even mentioned in the docs.

More like FeatureLimitedTimelineWithReallyComplexSyntax extension... clearly not sufficient for my purposes. I hope there's something better.

Vahthil. Ah'arvhylelfarel'ai halno-uleholyl'y? (Greetings. Do you speak Elvish?)

Yep, conlanging is fun. Over the past few... weeks or so, I've been working on the elvish language. Well, not much has been done, apart of a bit of grammar and sounds. Vocabulary is quite small. I've also worked on something a bit odd, a program to assist me - a dictionary program written in Java. Makes the whole work a lot easier later on.

This has been an eye-opening experience all right. =)

I'd better write a little bit more about this later when I'm more sure of what the heck I'm doing. But so far, I have to say, that making the Obligatory Elvish Language seems to be rather fun and probably far more useful than I imagined. In fact, it quite reminds me of the fun I had years ago, with my first weird artistic language. Wow, this new thing actually has a sane grammar: A bit of old Finnish persevering agglutinativeness, combined with a bit Klingonesque suffixing, somewhat original vocabulary and not at all Klingonesque sounds. I try to not make it as simplistic as Klingon though (not that Klingon's simple grammar is a bad thing at all)...

Oh, and I tried to draw some letters, too. Hope these will look like something.

I'm extremely uninterested to promote my work - my stuff regrettably isn't that good. Someone might read this, for crying out loud. Okay, actually, I kind of hope people would read my stuff, but since I'm kind of unsure, I'd not want to push the stuff to people.

However, I did add Shadows Over Nothross to Common Content, as that seemed to be like an interesting move. Directory of Creative Commons-licenced stuff that nobody probably reads. Wonderful. (And if someone does read Common Content, I hope that picking my most polished story so far won't care people too much. =)

I also noted that no, the only way to get CC stuff properly tagged is to use Ugly Hacks of HTML standard. Web metadata still kind of stinks. =/ My stories on this website now have Creative Commons RDF metadata. Hopefully this will make it a bit more useful and discoverable and all that.

Smallish update: Ugh, new stories on commoncontent says "Added Jul 3rd". I wonder what year? =) Wonder if there's also other directories of creative commons stuff - got to look for some...

(sigh)

I originally wanted to enter Portti magazine 2006 writing competition. However, I wasn't exactly in the best possible mood to write in the summer, not really in the best possible mood to write after the summer, and now, the deadline is behind me. So I didn't enter in the competition. I hope to finish the story when I really feel like it. Best luck to all who did participate, they're probably much better writers than me, anyway!

As for why I've not been writing... well, I don't think I really know. Maybe constant reading through all the junk in Wikipedia's CSD has a harmful effect to one's skills and sense of aesthetics. I've tried to get other stuff to think about, like a couple of books from the library and all that. I hope to get back to the writing track soon again!

And, oh yeah, there's that one story that's still to be reviewed by another beta reader...

[Note, 2008-04-29: I hate scheming in my own bloggery - I have absolutely no idea what story I'm talking about above.]