Clearing the undo history of this image will gain 428.6 MB of memory.

Image editing is going much better with 8 Gigabytes of memory. I've been able to get three or four images done for FromOldBooks.org in the time it used to take to do one.

On the other hand, the only reason I get any images scanned and edited at all is because I get too tired to do much else; it's pretty insanely busy here.

Unfortunately, Google's ads almost entirely stopped working on my Web site (Google downgraded my pagerank from 8 to 4 a few months ago), and with the fall in the US dollar (it's been bushed), we're struggling a bit more than we'd like. OK, a lot more than we'd like.

Luckily, my spam says that I won the UK Microsoft email lottery, and the prize is either (1) all of Nigeria, or (2) more spam. Speaking of which, SpamAssassin seems to be working better after a one-line fix (I filed a bug for it). Or at least its not complaining as much.

So, today's image (no, I won't post them every day) is an ammeter from an 1892 book:

Cats and Dogs

It's been the rainiest July on record here - and the month isn't over yet, of course. We discovered that the swimming pool can indeed fill above the top of its liner.

And during the storms, the dog, who is possessed by a daemon, becomes uncontrollable. or controllable only with difficulty.

I still miss being able to have time to concentrate, to focus enough to write reasonable amounts of code, to program. Working at W3C means I get to have a vague warm fuzzy feeling about helping the world a teeny bit, but it isn't always enough compensation.

In what little spare time I have, I scan pictures from old books. Soemone recently made a set of photoshop brushes from the 16th century demonic seals from the Goetia, and they two sets have each had over 900 downloads (they are here

and here if you are into such things). I have well over 2,000 images now, with sometimes fairly substantial extracts from the books, captions and other metadata. And there's an encyclopædia, some dictionaries of slang (including Brewer's Phrase and Fable), most of a vitriolic satirical political dictionary from the 1790s, and a bunch of other stuff.

Most of the text is in XML, so every now and then I update the XSLT that makes the HTML files and add smarts to find more cross-references. I want to do geotagging and links to maps, but this is harder than it sounds because the placenames I have are usually from when the books were published, not today.

Today's addition is some pictures of fonts, from a book I bought in Boston a couple of weeks ago, although these are not font samples as most people here would expect them to be, I suspect :-)

I did get to do some programming recently, though, and added some XML support to my ancient text retrieval package, lq-text. The changes aren't yet released, until I finish with some UTF-8 issues, but if you are interested, drop me a line. I wrote a short paper on it for the Balisage markup conference, too. I hope soon I'll use lq-text for the search function on my Web site, alongside the XQuery-based search that I have now.

Spending time on XML as character strings makes the world of RDF seem even further away, but I'm reading an interesting book on Ontology Matching to make up for it, inbetween scanning pictures and working on stuff for XQuery and for XSL-FO 2.0.

Now it's time to go and sedate the dog with some herbal calmer.

After playing with "ajax" a little for random images on my pictures from old books Web site, I spent some time investigating other XQuery engines, and in parcticular what used to be Sleepycat's dbxml, and is now Oracle Sleepycat DB XML.

I was using the Perl interface, and maybe that's a mistake, because it's obvious that they don't spend as much effort on it as on the C API. The documentation is very minimal, for example. But in the end, and after uninstalling all unwanted versions of bsd db from my laptop, it worked. Query time went doewn from 11 seconds to 2 seconds, partly because the 11-second version is starting a JVM for each query, partly because dbxml is in C, and partly because I had to remove some features from the query because I couldn't get them to work.

After help from one of the people maintaining the software, I discovered that I'll be able to get the other features to work. The search engine on my Web site isn't actually too slow for most queries (try it here) but it's using more memory than I'd like, and there are some queries on my photographs that do take too long.

The good thing about using XQuery to develop these things is that it's relatively easy to make changes. So maybe some changes are coming.

Still catching up after two weeks of vacation, which in turn was after a couple of weeks away on business with only a 4-day gap at home in the middle. And I'm about to go away again to Montreal, for Extreme Markup. Which should be a lot of fun, it's one of the more interesting conferences I go to.

Spent some time thinking about what to do about the future of XML 1.1. Will write something up in a while; it's not pretty. But maybe we can salvage something good.

Also spent time thinking about stylesheets on the Web, something even less pretty. But it while be a while before I have a coherent write-up for that one.

Installed Mandriva 2007 Spring on my desktop computer; pleased to note that the hardware seems to work better than it did in Microsoft Windows XP.

Uraeus, you probably know this, but it really helps if you eat some yoghurt every day while you're on antibiotics. Make sure it's yoghurt with the live culture in it.

etbe, you can combine the water systems. For example, have a hot water tank that's heated with passive solar energy (pipes on the roof) and is at a relatively cool temperature, and then on-demand heating to top up the temperature.

Today we go home from vacation, or rather, star going home: Clyde and I have been staying at the Cree Village Ecolodge in Moose Factory, Ontario. Tonight we take the train, the Polar Bear Express, to Cochrane, where we will stay overnight, and then tomorrow we take a bus to Timmins, an hour and a half away, where we can take a 'plane to Toronto, and thence to Kingston, Ontario, and from there drive home.

It was nice to have network access while we were here. I admit, though, I spent some time transcribing more entries from a very cynical 1790s political dictionary, e.g.:

Corruption, “the oil which makes the wheels of Government go well.”

I'm also starting to catch up with writing captions for photographs, and thinking about writing some more articles on using GIMP and other tools to clean up digital images, both photographs and scans.

Looked at the Open Library demo site. It has more of a Web 2.0 feel than a careful librarian feel, and it seems to me it would benefit from more of a synthesis. But it's early. It turns out that there has been a lot of progress made in the past few years on transcribing texts, but the ones done carefully and well are generally kept behind academic non-commercial-use-only walls, so instead we get to see the ones that are done badly, for example by running unattended OCR over 17th century texts with errors in almost every single word. And of course engravings scanned at such a low resolution that you can hardly tell if they are engravings of photographs. As higher-resolution digital beak ends get more affordable (e.g. 500 megapixel) this will change.