17 June 2003
It arrived from Amazon.co.uk this morning, after I ordered it on Saturday. This despite them estimating it would take 1-2 weeks. I’m looking forward to reading it, as I quite liked both films, despite (or perhaps because of) their differences. What I was hoping to do was read the book then outline how each interprets it and how effective this is.
Unfortunately that will have to wait. Because I ordered this and, depending on how you define that book, got what I ordered. There are a few differences between what’s displayed and what I’ve received. The ISBN is the same, at least, but the cover has Clooney and the gorgeous McElhone on the front. Amazon say the publisher is Distribooks, but the book bears the mark of Folio SF.
Can you guess what it is yet? See if the cover helps:
Yep, French. Does it say that on Amazon UK ? No, it doesn’t; take a look for yourself. So while
À dix-neuf heures, temps du board, je me dirigeai vers l’aire de lancement. Autour du puits, les hommes se rangèrent pour me laisser passer ; je descendis l’échelle et pénétrai à l’intériuer de la capsule.
Dans l’habitacle étroit, je pouvais difficilement écarter les coudes. Je fixai le tuyau de la pompe à la valve de mon scaphandre, qui se gonfla rapidement. Désormais, il m’était impossible de faire le moindre mouvement ; j’éetais là, debout, ou plutôt suspendu, enveloppé de mon survêtement pneumatique et incoproré à la carapace métallique.
may be one of the great introductions in history, I have only slightly more understanding of it that I would if I’d bought the original Polish version. I took Spanish for three years, German for four, but French for just one, and that at primary school as an extra-curricular thing.
So that was a disappointment. I rang Amazon because I wanted to actually talk to someone, properly, about this and find out what had happened. They said that they didn’t want to send a replacement because the same thing might happen again, and the ISBN is right, so they’ll email me. They haven’t done so yet.
Picked this up because I’m a big fan of the series. Like the new Championship Manager game, the developers have added loads of superfluous ‘prettiness’ while making the game less usable — much as I didn’t want to use that term about a game, it’s true — and therefore making me want to return to the good old days.
More specifically, I don’t see why the Sprite’s wings have to be animated on the combat screen when the Sprites aren’t doing anything, or why the combat screen is now isometric, making it hard to properly judge hexes, even with the grid on. Nor do I understand why instead of saying ‘easy,’ ‘normal,’ ‘hard,’ etc. there are now stupid little icons to represent the same thing. Or why you can only build one of two unit-producing buildings, but it doesn’t give you the prospective unit stats right there and then, where they would be useful.
There is some nice stuff, but I don’t feel like writing about it now. More disappointment today.
I think this is officially the worst bit of code I’ve ever written, from an aesthetics standpoint:
"""""""" & LastModified & """"""""
It came from blending Conditional GET with my URL neatening and MIME type fixing that I do on my RSS feeds.
Yesterday something fairly crazy happened to the database. This weblog is built on the rather shaky assumption that each entry has an ID, that this ID is an auto-incrementing number, and that there are no gaps between these numbers. So when I had a bit of trouble posting about iTunes, The Decemberists, and Marianas, everything broke. For some reason the auto-increment had incremented by 62 rather than the more traditional 1. 62! Thankfully it wasn’t too hard to fix, using the CSV export feature of DBAdmin. I then edited the text file, imported the data into a new database, and uploaded that.
I also fixed a bug in Saltshaker. I was doing the CDATA sections by just encoding the delimiters then adding them, but when I tested the feed in SharpReader
]]> showed up at the bottom. All looked well in Firebird until I took a look at some other feeds with CDATA sections. While my delimiters showed up, theirs didn’t. So I looked at the source and found MSXML was escaping the delimiters automatically. One quick trip to DevGuru and a bit of Googling later and all was well again. I’m now using Document.createCDATASection to, well, create a
CDATASection.
I’m enjoying using the XML DOM but still learning, and this sort of thing makes me think it’s even cooler. Also, good on SharpReader for only displaying the closing CDATA delimiter and not the opening one. While it made the problem a bit less obvious it meant that things weren’t too bad while I fixed it.
It’s available from the BBC . Some quick predictions that won’t survive one match of the tournament itself: