What I'm Reading

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time

I saw this at the Eglin library and checked it out almost solely because the title amused me. A few pages into it I was laughing out loud (this is LOL) and maybe 2 or 3 hours after that I was on page 100.

The story is narrated by an autistic teenager on a quest to discover the murderer of a neighborhood dog. But it's not like he tells you as it happens; it's written as a book by himself, and his teacher helps him with ways to develop the plot and describe things.

I'll have to write more later. On a similar note, man do I need to return to high school, which is the last time I actually wrote somethign about a book.

More info at Amazon for the curious

I've been enjoying the power of SVG graphics lately through the Inkscape editor at http://www.inkscape.org

It's much easier to compose a nice looking graphic with vector graphics than traditional pixel graphics. The scaling is beautiful and allows you to make things fit even after they've been initially laid down. Another cool thing is the size of an SVG image. Because it's XML-based it's small relative to a PNG or JPG of the same image (I've noticed it's usually about a tenth of the size). Additionally, if you were sufficiently talented in your knowledge of the syntax, you could create a huge graphic in a text editor!.

Mozilla and Firefox have a few builds out with SVG support but I've noticed a few rendering errors with Firefox at least. In other news GNOME has had SVG icon support for the past couple releases. I think we'll all benefit when this gains more support. It's not like it's all that new now even.