Regularly Expressing

Harry Potter was born on July 31, 1980. That makes him 30 today. Wow, he’s really getting old! You know, I always thought we’d get a series of books entitled “Harry Potter, the Aurer.” Maybe it will still happen.

My theory is that this could be the beginning of a whole new line of offbeat romance novels: http://www.genomeweb.com/node/940177?hq_e=el&hq_m=708634&hq_l=1&hq_v=4cb508f503. Imagine the book jacket, “Where can a modern girl of the 50th century BC find a real Caveman, Jill asked herself…”

Just a little calculation… Assume a 60 watt bulb and a telescope with a 138 foot diameter. We will assume all photons being emitted from the light bulb have a frequency of 550 Hz (green light). At a distance of 1 astronomical unit, we can still get nearly one photon per second from that light source.

60 watts/(1 au)^2*(138 feet*.5)^2/(h*550e12Hz)/4 = 0.8 photons per second.

The key insight to getting true-type fonts working was finding this page:
http://www.go2linux.org/msttcorefonts-true-type-fonts-on-linux.

I had to make some minor tweaks to get this to work. Here’s how my session went:

yum -y install rpm-build cabextract xfs ttmkfdir
rpm -ivh http://dl.atrpms.net/all/chkfontpath-1.10.1-2.fc11.x86_64.rpm
wget http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
rpmbuild -ba msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
rpm -ivh /root/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm

“Cult of the Red Tears” is finished! This is the sequel to my book “Battle for the Sphere.” I began writing it on Dec 11 2008. Today, Dec 30, 2009 it is ready for reviews.

I began working on my rough draft of my novel “Cult of the Red Tears” in December. I have been struggling to get to the end, working every spare moment I could find. Yesterday afternoon I began to realize that I have already written way past what should have been the ending. This morning I hunted through the text for the right spot and wrote, “End Book One of the Viztrel Unity War.”

So when I say “rough draft” I mean that it reads like it was translated from the original ancient Islandic by a non-native speaker (that’s a description I heard at Armadillocon of what a rough draft should read like). Many scenes are out of order, many scenes need to be added, but the general shape of the book is there, lurking in the miasma of words.

I was thinking about the future of display technology. I imagine that it will become cheap enough, at some point, that we will cover our walls, ceilings, and tables with displays (possibly 3D displays). One consequence of this would be that we’d have practically zero possessions. Most of what we have — decorative items, books, games would all become virtual.

The only things you would need:
1) Items for food preparation: The kitchen might contain just a food printer / heater / cooler — eliminating the need for a variety of appliances, gadgets, and tools.
2) Furniture – All of this would be infinitely customizable, your household 3D printer could make/remake what you needed. You would probably need to supply your own cushions (unless someone figures out how to print those as well).
3) Plumbing.

In this brave new style of dwelling moving would be simple. Just transfer your “desktop” to a new location. Probably many of you will chafe at this idea, finding it too cold and impersonal. In reality, though, it’s just the opposite. Your dwelling/environment will be tuned to you and radically customized. A hotel will feel much more like home.

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?