Stochastic Effluvia

So I finally have been getting my stereo set up again, after having it mostly out of commission for the past year. I still need to eventually measure the walls and get speaker cable that I can run along the baseboards, but what I’ve got works for my purposes right now. To be really honest, I’m ok with wires on the floor, at least until I actually own a place and can run them through the walls.

That said, since I gave my big desktop to my folks, I don’t have a PC to serve music to my receiver anymore. I didn’t think this was that big a deal, as I had purchased an Airport Express with the intention of setting up a wireless bridge (before I realized exactly how much bandwidth overhead is involved in that process and settled for moving the printer to where it can have a wired connection) and amongst other things, the Airport Express has a digital 3.5mm output port to serve music with AirTunes.

I purchased a 3.5mm to toslink cable a while back and today I finally set up all up, only to find that the only optical-in mode on my Denon that accesses all my speakers is DTS. Which is fine — except that the output that itunes sends is not DTS encoded, so it won’t play. It will play in analog or PCM, but only with the front left and right speakers.
There may be a workaround — I can get it to work with the headphone out and a 3.5mm analog to component adaptor. But that’s definitely a step down, since I had coax out of my old PC.

The really frustrating thing seems to be that it’s entirely a software deal of Apple’s. Looking online there are a lot of upset folks.

EDIT: I figured it out — DTS isn’t doable, but I found the 5-channel setting on the Denon, which is really what I wanted anyway.

I don’t suppose anyone has a good grasp of how PHP 5 deals with XML using DOM, do they?  My provider updated their PHP install and broke my website, and while I can get getElementsByTagName to work, I can’t get an xpath query to work properly with the xml feed from the Library of Congress.

So I’ve been building out bookshelves and organizing my books for the past few days. This involves constructing the bookshelf, moving the books out of the way of where it is, filling it up, then repeating the process with the next bookshelf. The last time I moved before the move out to Texas, I made a concerted effort to keep everything in order, to the point that I didn’t fill up boxes all the way. It ultimately resulted in more boxes being used than needed to be, so this time I figured I’d pack based on size rather than on the order. Which means that I’m looking for a needle in a haystack 1600 times as I go through and put the books on the shelves. In some cases, I just remember where something is. In others, I can deductively reduce where I look based on whether or not it’s a large or small book. But it makes the process slow.

It occured to me tonight while doing this that since I won’t have all the bookcases I need built (I will need more than 9, and I only have four and a half at the moment. I can fit either eight or nine in the room I’ll have the bulk of them in, with another for overstock as needed in the media/guest room) when the time comes that I’ve run out I should go through and catalogue where every book is in situ, so to speak. That way I can use the database to find the books for me when the next group of shelves arrive and are constructed, and I won’t have to repeat this process a billion times. Likewise, when it comes time to move again I should take the extra added step of doing the same prior to beginning the reshelving process again.

Of course, God willing and the creek don’t rise, the next time I move I’ll be able to install built-ins. Here’s hoping.

So instead of buying another book, I purchased The Sims 3. I bought the collectors edition with the 2gig flash drive and the sports car. I don’t think it was really worth the extra money, so I wouldn’t get it if I were you.

As far as the content goes, it’s basically the same game the other two have been, but with a couple of neat expansions. The first is that working and school have levels of activity — you can slack off, work hard, just do the standard work, or special conditions for each job. The second is that instead of generalized personality types, you have a set of traits (sort of like GURPS advantages and disadvantages) that make up the overall personality. You also have a series of minor goals that give you happiness points that you can spend for things like being a fast learner, a good socializer, and so forth. The major thing, though, is that you are no longer limited to a set of discrete locations. you can walk around town, visit other Sims homes, and so forth. One thing you can’t seem to do (or at least I haven’t figured it out) is visit your workplace and see your sim at work.

Skills also have uses in the game — you buy recipes at the book store and cook them based on your cooking skill, for example. You can also plant fruits and vegetables and garden. Skills aren’t limited to an automatic set, either. You start out with no skills, and when you gain a point the skill appears in your skill list. Nor are skills directly applicable to work. Instead, you have a series of smiley faces based on your mood and general logic, athelticism, etc….which are affected by skills.

One thing of note for Max — you can collect bugs and rocks and turn them in for cash in the game, as well.

She also asked me how it ran on the macbook pro. Here, I’m not as happy as I could be. It is run as a transgamer emulation, rather than natively, and I think that adds to the memory overhead. Every once in a while one or more Sims will freeze briefly before continuing. I don’t think this is the game freezing — just memory overhead. That may be less of a problem if you have the latest Macbook. I have the 2.54Ghz pro from two generations back with the memory maxed out, if you want the hardware specifics.

Anyway, I know this isn’t the best review in the world — I’m not a big game reviewer — but hopefully that’ll give you at least an idea of the game, and you can always ask questions.

So apparently some conservative group has discovered facebook and written what is essentially a pushpolling app.  Hooray. 

 I was lucky enough not to have any banned books in my district when I went to school (in fact, we read Animal Farm in class), and I think what this kid is doing is a really good thing. 

I took some pictures of the book workshop to put up here today, but I am too tired to do that at the moment.  However, I wanted to say that I heard back and I got the University Press job.  I’ll be working in acquisitions assisting the editor-in-chief, so that’s pretty exciting.

This guy is selling his collection for $300,000.

I’m now in the throes of paper writing season until about Wednesday. One is down, and I have three to go. Luckily I presented on two of the three and have a good idea about the third and my research all done, so it’s just a matter of fleshing out the presentations on the first two and finishing up the third.

Another good thing — I found out I’ve been accepted into the Book Workshop that Texas A&M offers. I asked about any scholarships that might be available (figuring that I’d rather the University pay for this if I can help it) and did not receive one but did receive a break on the price. Enquiring with the Center for the Humanities here also might lead to them paying for it for me. I’ll find out about that early next week. I’m really looking forward to this.

I also applied for the University Press position. I don’t know what my chances are, but hopefully I’ll hear back sometime in the next few weeks. My big worry there is that they’ll want me to come interview while I’m back in California.

In light of all the History of the Book stuff, I’ve been thinking about my book collection. While reading up on Solander boxes before the paper season hit, I found out that the Library of Congress has taken to storing their books by size rather than by call number, so as to keep them from warping due to the tops of larger books placed next to smaller having more give than the bottoms. I’m thinking it may make sense to do something similar, and would cut down on excess materials in the boxes once I have the materials to get them made. My only concern is that the bookshelves I have are five-shelf bookshelves, and I might have to jig up some extra shelves for the mass market paperbacks. I would also have to overhaul my database to add a call number field of some sort, or do it programmatically by Room.Bookcase.Shelf. Or maybe take a page from the Cotton Library and have something indicative of what shelf it is on that acts as the shelf number.

I also revamped the automatic price-checking page in the time I couldn’t sleep, adding in Abebooks functionality. The new page doesn’t do Amazon condition or Type, and I may phase those out eventually now that I’ve got pictures attaching to the records. One question, though — for insurance purposes, do you quote the average price of a book or the maximum price? In the case of some of these, it makes a huge difference.

I tend to do a lot of things out of annoyance, to be honest.  Especially when doing it doesn’t really cost me a lot of money and I can be made to feel like it’s not a drain on my time.

Back in 2005 or so, I decided I was going to keep an online record of my ‘library’ of books.  The reasons for this were supposedly to keep records for insurance purposes, but really the reasons were twofold.  I had recently bought duplicate copies of books because I simply couldn’t remember if I had a copy or not and I wanted to forestall that, and I was really, really annoyed that I had loaned my copy of The Cathedral and the Bazaar out, with my marginalia, and it had subsequently disappeared.  I wanted to know who had what when and moreover, I wanted to be able to email them about it automatically if I needed to.

Since then, I’ve put a lot more work into tracking prices and what books I have than in any kind of email-based book-revenge schemes.  I just don’t loan my books out for the most part, unless I think the person I’m loaning to is trustworthy.  

This is all really background, to be honest, and not necessary for what I want to talk about, but since part of the reason I’m writing this post is to procrastinate on my papers, I figured I’d go ahead and clue you in. And it does come into play a bit in my motivations. I code when I’m feeling vendictive.

Last Friday, we had presentations in our History of the Book course. There were quite a few really interesting talks, but there was one that stood out. It was a couple of guys from Hispanic Studies who were taking the course as part of a digital certificate. They hadn’t had the same sort of interest in the course as everyone else, it seemed, and it showed. But still, not that big a deal. Until they showed their final project — an online ‘collection.’

Now, I am not so petty as to think that what I’ve done is special or unique. There are a lot better products out there, for free, than what I’ve developed, and I use it mostly because I like the fact I can add what I want when I want without difficulty. But what these guys had done was code a series of static html pages with a little bit of javascript to make pictures of the books they had taken rotate. It was intro-level CS 100 sort of stuff, and even at that it didn’t look very good. It wasn’t formatted nicely, and the whole thing felt like a potemkin website.

I like functionality over appearance. That’s why my online presence tends, for the most part, to be pretty bare-bones as far as themes, decoration, etc goes. It’s not that I don’t appreciate something elegant — I just know that I don’t really have the sort of design chops to make something both functional and asthetically pleasing, so I always go for functional. I didn’t say anything during the presentation, but as Friday wore on into Saturday it bothered me, and my inherent sense of fairness.

For our project, my friend Mark and I had done a collation of a book I owned, the edition of Spenser I’ve spoken about here. After doing that, we’d emailed institutional owners of the book as well as rare book dealers to try to get their collations, with the intent of seeing if they matched and to trace the errors where they didn’t. The goal of all this is to see if we could ascertain the reasons for it — if corrections happened on the fly or if errors were introduced during the printing process — and to perhaps be able to pin down some sort of rough chronology of printing errors. I think we’ve done a pretty good job so far, and the project is still ongoing (at least for me). We have an edition of the work from Kansas State coming this week, hopefully, for us to take a look at. It’s not much — minutae, really — but it does fill a void that appears to exist in the study of this particular edition. If notes were still a viable form of academic publication, I think it would be worthy of one. We had done a lot of work.

So it bothered me that this had been passed off as something on the same level as this, or any of the other projects we heard about. But I was nice, and I didn’t ask the questions I should have because I didn’t want to show anyone up. But it still bothered me all Saturday. Until I decided to do the one thing they had that I hadn’t added — pictures — and to do it right.

They had added pictures for insurance purposes, which is really a good idea and something that had occurred to me, but at the time I didn’t have a camera. This recently changed, so that wasn’t a stumbling block.

My initial forays were with my camera handheld with the flash off. This worked in some situations, but it was cumbersome if the light wasn’t good enough, and I ended up with a few blurry shots. I needed something more stable if I was going to make this work, and I also needed a way to position the books so that they would appear relatively square in the frame without having to eyeball it each time. The solution to that, after a quick trip to Michaels, was a rotary cutting mat. It was sturdy enough to feel like it would last and it was ruled so I could place the book square on the surface.

With the mat in hand, and after some careful fiddling with my tripod and a table, I had my setup:

As you can see, the biggest issue was to get the camera downward-facing. Having the camera downward-facing with the tripod set up normally would have ended up with a lot of the tripod in the way and a devil of a time positioning the book. The way I ended up getting around this was by placing two of the legs on a table, then extending the third leg of the tripod over the edge of the table. With the camera canted as you see in the picture, though, this wasn’t a particularly stable setup, so I wrapped the longer leg in cloth and used a weight to force it into a stable position. I’m still not entirely happy with this and I’d like a weight that attaches directly to the leg to forestall the possibility of accidents, but this works for now.

The other problem with a tripod (or at least my tripod) is that pressing the button on the camera can set up enough of a vibration that the photo might end up blurry if it’s a long exposure, which sort of defeats the purpose of the tripod in the first place. Luckily the Canon 50D has a way around this that doesn’t involve buying a remote.

If you hook the camera up to a computer as though you were going to download the photos, one of the options available is remote shooting. So with the longest USB cable I could find of the right type, I was set to go.

The way I took the pictures was to first take a picture of the front cover of the book with the dustjacket on, if it had one:

Next I took a picture of the spine and rear of the book. The intention here is to show if the dustjacket is chipped at all and whether or not there are indications that it’s a book club book, which is sometimes denoted by a numerical sequence on the dust jacket as well as information in the publisher’s text block. This particular book isn’t, as you can see by the ISBN in the second picture:


The next picture taken is of the publisher’s text block. This is important because it is really the only record you have of the particular printing and edition of the book you have. If you have a true first edition (first printing of the first edition) of a book that’s relatively well-known, like House of Leaves or any of the Harry Potter books, it’s considerably more valuable than if you have the 37th printing, for example. You can tell whether it is a first edition, where it isn’t overtly stated, by the number block:

In this instance, the number block runs all the way from 10 to one. When the first printing is completed, the one drops off, and it will run from 10 to 2, and so on. This isn’t a universal — every publisher denotes this differently — and there are guides out there to help you figure out how a publisher was showing first editions during a particular time.

After I have taken the pictures with the dustjacket on, I take it off and repeat the three shots with just the book itself. This is to note any issues that might have happened to the book. Maybe it was stored with the dustjacket off, or maybe the dustjacket was found and added to a book that didn’t originally have one. In this case, none of these were the case, but note that the ISBN is repeated on the rear board of the book:




I then take a picture of the dustjacket of the book displayed without the book itself. This helps to make any holes, chips, and so forth clear. In the case of this book, it actually was longer than the frame of the camera, so I had to do it in three pieces:



Lastly, I take pictures of anything odd or unusual about the book. This might be a former owner’s stamp or bookplate, or in the case of the Silmarillion and my 1965 edition of Lord of the Rings, it’s the maps that were included. I recently aquired this book, so I still had the bill of sale from the bookseller:

I haven’t quite decided what to do with these. I had been throwing them away, but after taking History of the Book I’m wondering if I should keep them with the text. But that’s neither here nor there.

After taking the pictures, I then have to upload them to the website and make sure they append to the proper record. It seemed sort of silly to make that a two stage process, especially since I don’t know how many pictures each book will have associated with it. So I included the upload stuff with the rest of the form to change the record. To make that change, I start by going to my admin page:

Once there, I select “look up a book in your library,” which takes me to this page:

The lookup page is a just your basic search functionality — it lets people limit how the database responds. Since I have only one book with the word anathema in the title, it will return only one result when the form is sent:

The gobbleygook at the top is the SQL query that is used to grab the record — I put it there for testing purposes and haven’t had a need to get rid of it yet. If you select the record, you get the following:

What we’re interested in (finally, I hear you all saying) is the link that says “Update information on this book.” Clicking that will get us to the record change page:

. As you can see, this is a webform that lets me change any of the information we just saw. What we’re interested in is the series of image file upload buttons at the bottom of the page. By clicking on one of those, I can select my photographs for uploading:

I tend to put the images in the order I generally take them in.

After selecting your images, I click on the button at the bottom. The images are then uploaded, the record is appended with a list of the file names, and I’m returned to the record:

Now admittedly my pictures don’t spin around, but I think they’re a whole lot more useful in terms of information about the book, and a whole lot more valuable for insurance purposes.

Coding just the picture functionality was about a couple of hours work, and it is functional, which is a lot more than I can say for the mess I saw on Friday.