march 8th is international women's day. rock on, estrogen! :+) *** congratulations to d.p. on the posting of their 17,000th e-text! the volunteers who digitize these books are _awesome_people_! *** speaking of women, and d.p. volunteers, juliet sutherland is the volunteer who has donated d.p. the most time and energy, so a special shout-out to her on this day. in a recent post to the d.p. forums, juliet admits to being frustrated by many of the "volunteers versus admins" threads on those d.p. forums. she also notes that her frustration is multiplied whenever she considers that the site does have many problems and that she, as the former top dog, bears a good deal of the responsibility. i've criticized juliet a lot, because -- frankly -- she deserved it. but it's not fun to see that anyone is frustrated, ready to quit... so i'd urge juliet to hang in there... juliet also said she often finds dkretz comments "off the wall". here's a quick note, juliet: he's usually right, and you're wrong. so try to see it from don's perspective as you hang in there... *** i'm in the middle of lots of different threads here, so i'll try and work on finishing them up this week. in no particular order... *** i want to finish my work on gardner's e-text, showing how it can now be auto-converted into various formats, as a way to demonstrate my version of "postprocessing", which seems to be far more direct than the d.p. version. *** i have some messages to post in response to carel... i've started notes about creating a proofing system, for carel and anyone else contemplating doing that. *** i have a pair of posts on the good and bad aspects of roger's roundlessness experiment... i will be finishing up the handful of books that i have taken from roger's site, comparing 'em with his output. *** i'm also going to show you a little perl script i coded which summons up the various pieces of each page of a book on roger's roundless site, and stitches 'em on one webpage, and also lets you "thumb through" the pages of the books on his site, to check them... here's the first draft of that script:

http://z-m-l.com/go/showbarebones.pl

it pulls in the scan and text for each page, obviously, as well as the tweet (if any) and the log file information. under roger's current system per se, it's not convenient to do this on page after page. (although a person _can_ access each of the pieces of information independently.) but really, there's no reason why it shouldn't be easy to "walk through" the pages of a book as it's being worked. the script works for my cinema screen, but i'm not sure how well it will fit on smaller screens. but i'm unlikely to improve it in that regard, since i believe it's unlikely anyone will spend much time actually using the thing... (not that it's not useful; everything i program is useful; it's just that few people here actually use what i create.) i wrote it just to get myself back into some perl coding. notice that i _am_ willing to smooth out this code _if_ anyone really wants to use it, but -- other than that -- i'm just gonna add a few refinements to it and it's done. *** there you go... plenty of meat for this week... -bowerbird