ODT to RTF converter

July 1st, 2009

Recently I discovered that OpenOffice can’t really generate RTF files, so I wrote my own converter. It’s rather basic, just handles italic, double space, paragaraphs, and centering. However, for what I need it for it works a lot better than the built-in OpenOffice export ability.

The program is written in Java and you can get the jar file here: ODT2RTF.jar

It’s completely self contained, and includes the source files. Go and have fun with it!

If there is interest, I will expand its capabilities.

The Devil Loves Me

June 16th, 2009

On a business trip to California I had the good fortune to bump into two pretty famous actors in the Baton Rouge airport. On the left is Ray Wise (a.k.a. the Devil from the television show “Reaper”). On the right is Paul Wilson (a.k.a. one of the two Bob’s from “Office Space”). Who else would the Devil be travelling with besides a corporate killer?

I got both their signatures. Ray Wise wrote “The Devil loves you.” But hey, his portrayal of the Devil was one of my favorites — up there with Tom Baker’s Dr. Who.

Eragon was self-published!

March 9th, 2009

It surprised me to read the the best-selling book Eragon was self-published. Apparently the author managed to sell 5000 copies before going to a publisher.

I’ve had a book on submission to a certain publisher for almost a year now. It makes me wonder if I should sell on Lulu while I have the book submitted to a regular publisher. Would this cause any problems for anyone? Would publishers/agents notice or care?

Battle for the Sphere is done!

December 12th, 2008

I’ve been working on a science fiction novel for about 2 years now titled “Battle for the Sphere.” Yesterday’s snow day was the impetus I needed to dig in and finish the second pass at editing. I’m sure there are still things that can be fixed, but I feel that getting the manuscript to this point was a major victory.

The story is about a primitive people called the Kushar, who were once a mighty starfaring race. The book follows their leader, Ketzhura, as she sacrifices, deceives, makes alliances and fights to bring her people back to their former glory.

My goal was to have this revision done by Christmas — that is roughly the time I’m expecting to hear back from Baen about the book I have on submission with them entitled “Lady and the Necromancer.” If, by some miracle, they want to publish it and ask if I have anything else I can now say, “Yes. Yes I do.”

Currently BFTS is 123,000 words — something like 490 pages.

Cajun Snowman

December 11th, 2008


Global warming took a holiday today in Baton Rouge. We awoke to a major blizzard, and being the Northerners we are, we immediately went out and constructed a snowman and engaged in battle with snowballs. We then came in and had hot chocolate.

Insanely, LSU remained open despite reports on the radio of accidents “too numerous to count.”

My little boy is home from school, however, as the Kindergarten has a snow day. Not something we ever expected when we moved to the South. And I’m sure it wont last — already the consistency of the snow is becoming more like sleet. We are hoping, however, that our Cajun snowman will last a few days, even after everything else melts.



Hands-free Cell vs. Talking to a Passenger

December 6th, 2008

One often sees studies claiming that even talking on a hands-free cell phone impairs driving. The next logical question one asks is whether talking to a passenger presents the same problem.

The answer, apparently, is no, and there’s a study to back up that assertion (citation below).

It seems that actual passengers have a tendency to talk about the traffic situation, helping the driver to focus rather than distracting him/her. Perhaps also, knowing that another person is watching the road provides an incentive to drive better.

Curiously, one of the signs of “bad driving” in the study is leaving extra space between your car and the car in front of you. In my opinion, that’s a sign of better driving — but I don’t believe my difference of opinion on this point affects the conclusion of the study.

This study and its results suggest other follow-up studies:

  1. Would it help to equip cell-phones with cameras, allowing the caller to see the road?
  2. If a passengers are blind-folded, do conversations with them suddenly become distractions?

In any event, I believe that when I tell my wife or daughter that they’re doing something incorrectly, it helps them to drive more safely (even if they think it is annoying).


Article: "Passenger and Cell Phone Conversations in Simulated Driving," Frank A. Drews, PhD, Monisha Pasupathi, PhD, and David L. Strayer, PhD; Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol. 14, No. 4. k

Wyrms

October 16th, 2008

I’ve started to listening to books on CD in an effort to ease the monotony of driving to and from work. My present choice is “Wyrms” by Orson Scott Card. So far I like the book quite a bit, but this one quote is priceless:

“He won’t be awful, Lyra. The negotiators would never have come this far if he had a second head growing out of his shoulder”

“Nobody gets second heads anymore,” said Lyra. “They have a vaccine for it.”

Poor child, thought Patience. She was usually bright enough to understand such an obvious iron as that.

Here’s the Google book search result.

A Good Opening….

October 3rd, 2008

Wouldn’t this be an interesting opening hook for a story? I have some questions about how this *could* happen, but it helps that it did.

Big fossil found in paleontologist’s yard post-Ike from PhysOrg.com

Dorothy Sisk and Jim Westgate are scientists at Lamar University. They discovered the fossil tooth in the front yard of Sisk’s home in Caplen on the devastated Bolivar Peninsula.

Westgate believes the fossil is from a Columbian mammoth common in North America until around 10,000 years ago.

Danger! Made up words ahead!

October 1st, 2008

Just last night I was working on a perl script to parse the space opera I’ve been working on for two years. The script reads my novel (a 105k word odt document) and automatically generates a dictionary in rtf format, merging in definitions from another file, providing me with statistics on the number of times the word is used and the number of scenes in which it appears, and identifying words which need definitions.

As you may have guessed, I’m just the sort of person who reads xkcd.com.
So I was particularly dismayed to see today’s comic:

Needless to say, I’ve invented a good deal more than 5 words in writing this book. Why, there are at least five made up words to describe the ranks in the Viztrel navy!

However, I was somewhat comforted when I saw the mouseover. It reads “I’m looking at you Anathem.” Anathem, of course, is one of Neal Stephenson’s latest offerings. So it seems that, whatever people think of my book when it is finished, I will, as a word inventeror, be in good company.

Learning Haskell

September 6th, 2008

If you do any programming, you may have heard of a strange language called Haskell. It’s gaining rapidly in popularity, and has many cool features.

  1. Implicit Strong Typing - It provides the compile time error checking that one gets with C++ or Java generics, but it deduces types on its own without explicit programmer input (of course, the programmer can over-ride this if needed).
  2. Functional - This is a limitation that results in a strength. Functional programming means once you assign a variable you can never change it. This restriction on the programmer frees the compiler to perform many optimizations.
  3. Shared Transactional Memory - Sometimes it is too inconvenient to program without mutable state, so Haskell provides you with an escape hatch from functional programming. With Shared Transactional Memory you can write sections of code that modify memory arbitrarily without fear of deadlocks or race conditions.

Check out the tutorial: Learn Haskell now!.