Gavin Duley's Weblog

Still nothing of interest

Mon, 28 Jul 2008

Changes to the weblog
The weblog has been moved to a new address -- http://gpd.eu.motd.org/weblog -- to make use of SDF-EU's new MOTD service. This allows SDF'ers to install and use weblog, wiki and photo gallery software. It has been available to SDF'ers for a little while, but is new to SDF-EU. If you've been following this blog with RSS, the new URL is http://gpd.eu.motd.org/weblog/index.cgi/index.rss.

If you tried to view this weblog over the weekend and kept getting 500 Internal Server errors, my apologies. These resulted from me trying to install the WriteBack plugin, to allow comments. So far, no luck. Oh well, I'll have to keep trying.

posted at: 13:18 | path: /this_site | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 25 Jul 2008

The best way to set up a new VPN...
This looks like the best way to set up a new VPN to me... :-)



(Comic from xkcd.com, with thanks).

posted at: 08:24 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 19 Jul 2008

More LibraryThing
Well, I've added two more shelves of books, plus more ones that are just lying around. In many ways, I can't help thinking that a software package would do the job better in that it would probably allow me to export my library to other formats -- there are a couple of GPL'ed programs out there. Still, I'm enjoying doing this.

One thing that I hadn't really thought about, though, is the 'social networking' aspects of the site. Though I'm not a great fan of this in general, it does seem to give this site that 'something extra....'. It's interesting being able to see how many others have a particular book that you also have, and what they think of it. Some of my books are also owned by loads of people (eg American Gods by Neil Gaiman), others by just one or two people (eg The Bumper Book of Lies by Chris Bell, also available online for free at www.chrisbell.co.nz), a few by no one else at all (eg An Indian Summer by Sacheverell Sitwell).

The one thing that vaguely worries me a little is that a person's book selections can say quite a bit about them as a person. I'm not certain exactly what mine says about me (especially given that it is fragmentary so far), or whether I want that much information out in the "public realm". I'm probably being paranoid here, but anyway.

For the moment, here are some random books from my library, care of Library thing:



posted at: 00:44 | path: /books | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 18 Jul 2008

LibraryThing.com
Well, I joined this site a few months back, and sort of half-heartedly added a few books. Most I added by creating a text file containing ISBNs and a few notes. It was able to grab the data it required of amazon.co.uk. A few books it didn't seem to know, so I had to add by hand. I used a cameraphone to take shots of the covers for a couple of them, and this seemed to work surprisingly well.

At the moment, I've just added one shelf of books, plus a number of others that were within reach at the time (aka: on the floor next to me). If you want to add more than 200 books, you need to pay up. This is only US$25 for 'life time membership', though the fact you can't currently export your library to a file does worry me a little. I'm not really certain I'll ever have the time to add all my books, either.

Oh well, for the moment a small subset of my library can be found at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/rockhopper_penguin. It may or may not get more complete.

One other thing I'm hoping to try is their Free Advance Review copies. I've added my name for a book, and hope I'll get one. There are, of course, more people who want copies than there are copies...

posted at: 06:07 | path: /books | permanent link to this entry