I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner, but I’ve released the Kindle version of my Book of Mormon reader’s edition. I’ve also updated the formatting on the EPUB version so it’s nicer (indented paragraphs and all that). Kindle versions and updated EPUBs of the D&C and Pearl of Great Price will come in the near future.
A new-ish poem: Seventeen Steps, a short narrative poem I wrote four years ago but didn’t get around to polishing and finishing till today. I think you could classify it as fantasy.
About a month ago I was thinking about how I want to read more long, hard books — specifically The Brothers Karamazov. Back in college I plowed through Don Quixote in a week for my Comp Lit class (and I still think that’s slightly insane), and I read lots of other long books as well, all because I had a deadline.
Enter Bookkeeper. My coworker Chad and I have been working on it for the past couple weeks and it’s finally ready for an initial release. And we’re super excited.
It’s a reading goal tracker. You give it a book, the number of pages in the book, a start date, and a deadline, along with which days you’d like to read (since sometimes you’ll want to take weekends off or what have you), and Bookkeeper will tell you how many pages per day you have to read to hit your goal. If you miss a day, or if you read ahead, it’ll adjust that number (the red line on the chart).
Right now it’s just available on Github (it’s a PHP/MySQL app), and there are installation instructions in the README. It uses Google Accounts for authentication.
I’m not planning to host a public instance of it, at least not right now, but if anyone wants to do that, let me know so I can forward people to it. And of course anyone is welcome to fork the code and do whatever they want with it.
You add books, then whenever you read, you update the page number (in the upper right). And that’s about it. The list of tabs on the left shows you your current books; the All Books tab will let you also see books you’ve finished and books you’ve hidden (for when you temporarily put a book on the back burner).
On the Account page (the link’s at the lower right) you can export your book/entry data as JSON. We figured it’d be nice to have some easy way to get your data out. (And the link doesn’t change, so you could set up a cronjob to curl the JSON weekly or something if you really want regular backups.)
As we make Bookkeeper more social going forward, we’re thinking it’d be cool to build book recommendations based at least partly on reading curves. Looking at my Well of Ascension reading curve up there, you can see that it starts to go up quickly and it’s ahead of the curve, which pretty much means I really got into the book and must have liked it. That’s not a surefire method for determining which books are good and which aren’t, but we’re interested in seeing what kinds of recommendations we can get from reading data like this.
I’ve been reading The Story of French with my wife and came across a fascinating little tidbit: the English word pedigree comes from pied-de-grue, “crane’s foot”, apparently “a symbol used in genealogical trees to mark a line of succession.” Very cool and not at all what I expected. (The OED has the Anglo-Norman original as pé de grue, by the way, which is basically the same thing.)
Going for something ala the old Wizard of Oz books here. (And just having fun.)
I painted an earlier version of this piece as cover art for my friend Chanel’s book What to Say to Someone Who’s Dying.
Getting PIL working on Lion was a little more difficult than I thought it’d be. (I use PIL in Ink to resize images.) It appeared to install correctly, but when I tried to post something with an image, I got this:
ImportError: The _imaging C module is not installed
I followed the instructions at appelfreelance.com, but libjpeg wouldn’t compile, giving me this error:
checking build system type... mkdir: /private/tmp/PKInstallSandbox.vMj5ds/tmp: No such file or directory
mkdir: /private/tmp/PKInstallSandbox.vMj5ds/tmp: No such file or directory
config.guess: cannot create a temporary directory in /private/tmp/PKInstallSandbox.vMj5ds/tmp
configure: error: cannot guess build type; you must specify one
Turns out TotalTerminal had oddly set $TMPDIR to /private/tmp/PKInstallSandbox.vMj5ds/tmp, which obviously broke other things. I cleared it out (export TMPDIR=) and got libjpeg to compile.
But PIL still gave me this error when I tried to import _imaging in Python to test it:
ImportError: dlopen(/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/PIL/_imaging.so, 2): Symbol not found: _jpeg_resync_to_restart
Referenced from: /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/PIL/_imaging.so
Expected in: flat namespace
Oh joy. When I ran otool -L /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/PIL/_imaging.so, libjpeg didn’t show up in the list, either. I recompiled and reinstalled libjpeg and PIL a few more times. No luck.
The final solution: I installed libjpeg via Homebrew (brew install libjpeg), then compiled and installed PIL (Imaging 1.1.7). That fixed the _imaging.so problem and PIL now works like a charm.
Update: I’ve finished and released this. Sorry it took so long.
This isn’t done yet, but it’s coming along nicely:
It’s a study edition of the Book of Mormon, with extra large outside margins and more line spacing so there’s plenty of room for taking notes. I’ve also moved the verse numbers out of the way so the text stands on its own.
When I finish it, I’ll release a free PDF on here as usual and make a paperback perfect bound hard copy available on Lulu at cost. (It’ll probably be around $20 plus shipping. I asked my local copy shop how much it’d cost to print and bind this — around 580 pages — and they said $60 for the printing costs alone, so it looks like Lulu is going to be much, much cheaper.)
