Check­ing on my semi-dead pro­ject­s, I found that one was al­most fin­ished but I had for­got­ten about it: rater

In or­der to make it re­al­ly use­ful, how­ev­er, I need a C pro­gram­mer that can turn this python pro­gram:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import sys
from socket import *
serverHost = 'localhost'
serverPort = 1999

s = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM)
s.connect((serverHost, serverPort))
print "Sending: ",' '.join(sys.argv[1:])
s.send(' '.join(sys.argv[1:])+"\n")
data = s.recv(1024)
sys.stderr.write(data)
sys.stderr.flush()
sys.exit(int(data.split(' ')[0]))

In­to a nice func­tion that nev­er fails and nev­er leaks mem­o­ry (of course, it should re­turn in­stead of ex­it, this is just ex­am­ple code ;-).

If that's done, I can re­lease rater as a use­ful tool, which should find a home in many qmail in­stal­la­tions (and maybe oth­er us­es).

I im­ple­ment­ed sto­ry trans­la­tion to­day, and why not start with this one.

Here it is Win­dows: mi eX­Pe­ri­en­cia

You start a blog, you like some­thing an­oth­er guy wrote, what do you do?

1. Link and write a nice com­­ment

2. Add it to del.i­­cio.us, have feed­burn­er show it in your "Links of the day" fea­­ture?

3. Copy the whole thing, in­­­clud­ing the name of the au­thor, not fol­low­ing his very lib­er­al li­­cense, ig­nore his re­quest to fix it, and piss him of­f?

If you chose op­tion 3, then you will get along just fine with this guy!

I have de­cid­ed to make this blog avail­able al­so in Span­ish start­ing yes­ter­day.

Since it's gen­er­at­ed by my own soft­ware called Bartle­Blog, that meant I had to im­ple­ment ev­ery­thing so each post can have mul­ti­ple trans­la­tion­s.

And it's start­ing to work. You may no­tice sev­er­al things:

• Be­low the ban­n­er there is an "Avail­able in En­g­lish - Es­­­pañol" thing.

• Each Post has links to the dif­fer­­ent tran­s­la­­tions for which it's avail­able.

The lo­ca­tion and styling of these el­e­ments will change, and they may be bro­ken in dif­fer­ent ways for a few days. Sor­ry about that.

There will al­so be a "Lat­er­al Opin­ion en Es­pañol" RSS feed soon.

Up­date: here it is

And that's sad, be­cause I don't ask for much!

I have read ev­ery­thing for the last three years in some sort of Sony Clie. First a SJ30, and af­ter its sad demise in a coke ac­ci­den­t, a SJ20 and am very very hap­py with them.

Now, as usu­al I may be a bit ec­cen­tric in that my favourite for­mat for ebooks is TXT files. They are easy to man­age, you can read them on any­thing, and they are gor­geous to look at if you use Palm Fic­tion, the best etext read­er by far for any plat­form I've seen.

Now, what do I wan­t?

• e-ink dis­­­play

• A dis­­­play that does­n't take a sec­ond to re­fresh

• One week of bat­tery life

• A way to put a bazil­lion texts in it us­ing some sort of card (I have about 3500 books in zTXT for­­mat in a mem­o­ry stick right now)

• Light (be­low 300 gram­s)

That's al­l. OK, I al­so want it to be cheap and at least open-ish, since I would pre­fer to be able to write apps for it, but that's sec­ondary (I nev­er wrote a Palm app any­way).

And sad­ly, the Kin­dle fails in:

• Not cheap enough ($400????) Plus a sub­­scrip­­tion for most use­­ful stuff??

• Not fast enough re­fresh­ing the screen, ac­­cord­ing to the de­­mo video. And even if you can live with the slow­­ness (I prob­a­bly could) it flash­es in an in­­­cred­i­bly an­noy­ing way.

• Not open enough (they charge you to up­­load files to it by email?)

• It's in­­­cred­i­bly ug­­ly. It looks like a gad­get from Star Trek: TOS. That's se­ri­ous­­ly not good. I know that was not a re­quire­­men­t, but ba­­by je­bus cried a lit­­tle when he saw it.

Of course the e-Ink dis­play looks great as usu­al, and the bat­tery life is ex­ce­len­t, and we are get­ting clos­er to a de­cent pro­duc­t, but not there yet :-(