Regularly Expressing

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.

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?

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.

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


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:

Here’s the Google book search result.

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.

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!.