Slashdot Mirror

Every now and then a map I drew about 15 years ago of a fragment of a quasi-mediaeval European town shows up. I was fed up of American maps of "mediaeval cities" in which there were perfectly square city blocks with a FedEx drop-off box on every corner.

Pro Fantasy used some of my pictures and plans of castles from my pictures and texts from old books Web site, so I link back to them, but as far as I can tell their products or for Microsoft Windows. They gave me a free Castles program, but I didn't try it under WINE.

On Linux today I'd probably look at using either Grass (a fairly complex GIS program for the hard-core enthusiast) or a vector-based drawing program such as Inkscape.

It's useful to have a drawing program that handles layers (Inkscape does these days), and a vector-based rather than bitmap program is good because (1) the maps print OK, (2) when you ditch that old 640x480 screen and go for 24,000 x 9,000 pixels :-) you can still find the map, and (3) you can zoom without it getting blocky, and (4) you can edit it later.

If you insist on using a raster/bitmap program like GIMP, use a separate layer for everything and keep text layers as text for as ong as possible, so you can edit them. Maps with spelling errors look really stupid. Plus it's neat to be able to go back and add detail during the campaign.

If you give the players a copy of the map file, export it to a bitmap first, with the layers containing your own notes well hidden! Or first save the file, then carefully delete the layers you don't want them to see, and then save a copy under a different name and send that. But that process is error-prone especially if you're tired.

I sometimes gave players incorrect maps, e.g. badly remembered or done with "poor cartography", and they'd end up piecing the truth up from the obvious contradictions. E.g. one had an entire country whose existence was censored :-)

There are a number of clip-art fonts around with map symbols. Some are commercial (I'm sure you respect commercial licences, since you want the GPL to be respected, right?) such as Adobe's Carta, but there are some free ones too. There are also some low-cost fonts especially for making RPG maps by David Nalle at Fontcraft's Scriptorium. I think they have some non-Free non-free software for Microsoft Windows too.

An alternative to clip art fonts is to make your own symbol library, e.g. by drawing pointy muontains and so forth with a pencil, colouring them with crayons, and scanning the result before and after adding colour. You could then trace these in a program like Inkscape, too.

Liam

I've been working on scanning images from antiquarian books for a few years, and recently started opening the process up so others can help out. The current state is at Pictures from old books; the new collaborative site will be fromoldbooks.org (since there are textual transcriptions as well as images), probably in a month or so.

If I expand the example to find all occurrences of part 1976 (ignoring dates, of course).... it becomes clearer, sorry if I was too terse.

As for data that fits well into the relational model and data that doesn't, consider trying to do precise queries on mixed content data, in which text and markup is interleaved. The most common approaches in the past to this were either to store the entire mixed content (e.g. a paragraph) as a single blob or long text column or to split it up into separate items.

If you store a paragraph in a blob you're stuck, and have to retrieve the whole thing and do the query client-side.

Stored procedures can help, of course, and that's where built-in XPath and XQuery engines start to shine.

If you "shred" the paragraph into separate items... since it's a tuple of unpredictable length (a list) you end up using a column, with lots of yummy joins to put it all back together, but then you can ask questions like, "to which versions of the motherboard do these three words apply, the domestic version or the military ruggedized version?" for example.

If it all sounds like full text stuff, that might be because documents have been sufficiently intractible for relational databases in the past that people have had to rely on doing vague searches based on which words appear in them.

Even though I was the author of a text retrieval package a long time ago, it's clear that these systems don't meet people's real needs, just as CSV files don't remove the need for relational databases.

At most businesses the majority of information that isused on a day-to-day basis is in memos, reports, electronic mail, letters to and from customers, quotes and other documents, as well as product documentation and specifications.

Managing more of this data can be very productive, if done with care.

Best,

Liam

I'm glad to see a library doing this.

Their scans are low resolution -- I don't just mean the thumbnails, but the actual scans they took, which are at up to 400dpi. This may be a good compromise for them, but isn't really archival quality: a lot of detail gets lost from engravings even at 800dpi. These days I generally scan at 1200di before down-sampling for the Web.

You can also see evidence that they laid the books on a flat-bed scanner. Well, I usually do the same, but the best results are obtained using a wooden frame to hold the book open at 90 degrees (so as not to strain the spine, and so the pages lie flat) and using a large format film camera. I imagine the Canon EOS-1 (16MPixels) would be useful, but at 1200dpi an image that's eight inches by ten inches would be over 100 megapixels (109.86 in fact). Texture in engravings is made by lots of very fine lines close together, and when you combine that with ink spread, the high resolution is needed to stop the gaps between the lines from dissolving into a grey mush.

You can see (and download) some of the images I've scanned (mostly public domain for people to use) at my Pictures From Old Books Web site.

I don't have resources to scan hundreds of entire books as they're doing, but on the other hand I don't sell the images either.

It just feels good to share the contents of these old books with people instead of keeping them locked up on the shelves! And that's what I want to see libraries doing, too, so despite any problems I see with their first attempt, I still think it's neat!

Liam

1. it's often orders of magnitude faster
   
2. it finds things that tools like grep can't find.

Don't confuse art with graphic design which uses artistic techniques to solve problems.

If you need to make icons, yes, you need some creativity, but you also need to understand some basic things about icons: the way people recognise shapes means you shouldn't make them all square, for example.

If you are trying to express your inner angst, or to speak about the indescribable horrors being wrought upon poor innocent $VICTIMS in $COUNTRY, or you wish to share the calm serenity of the spirit (I'm not actually mocking), and you do so in pictures, in words, in sculpture, in music, you're making art.

If you're designing a dialogue box, a window, a page of text, you're using techniques like composition, alignment, framing, proximity, similarity, contrast and you're doing graphic design.

Of course, an accomplished artist also uses these techniques, so graphic design is really just a subcategory of fine art, but with a stronger focus on purpose - often a purpose imposed from outside.

There are lots of good books on technique, and if you use them you can produce solid, workable designs, just as studying how to write will help you to produce workable essays or documentation without making you into a poet.

I have a short reading list (uses Amazon referrer links) that may help.

Reading the docs briefly tells that this works by connecting through "proxies" before the actual servers. The proxies will provide the anonymity because they don't know what the transferred data is and servers don't know what the client's IP is, only the proxy's.

I guess this is fine as long as anonymity is all you want, but I don't see this getting mass attention. It's just yet another IRC network. Don't know about you but I'm sick of having different IRC networks, it'd be so much easier to just connect to "IRC" and be able to talk to everyone. Allowing everyone to run servers which all could talk to each others would effectively do this, just like SMTP protocol with emails. There's a few projects that have been meaning to do this, but none of them is anywhere close to a working implementation AFAIK.

Some links: irc+, irc++. Also jabber does pretty much the same, but it seems much more about instant messaging than containing all IRC's functionality.

McLuhan was a visionary, yes; even he didn't predict the extent to which media would be controlled. See Transnationale for information about who owns which media company.

There are several more or less independent Media firms and portals - this is a snapshot taken from several, last Summer.

I once went to a Linux Users' group meeting in Toronto, held in the building where Marshall McLuhan taught, which was an interesting experience.

It is clear that we have to act to keep any independent news at all. Compare the BBC with CNN, and then realise that, in effect, these are both government organizations. Luckily, in the US, the New York Times and its subsidiary, the Boston Globe have more balanced reporting than CNN; perhaps they have to, to stay alive.

When your news is controlled by the government, so are your opinions. Example: are the computers being resisted in Cuba because the country is trying to keep its culture and way of life in the face of increasing globalisation, or is it because computers are a luxury they can't afford (don't pretend they increase farmers' productivity when the farm workers have them) or is it to control the spread of ideas? To look at that in detail you'd have to ask whether photocopiers and printing presses are controlled.

The article is openly anti-communist: it wants everywhere to be like America, and measures Freedom in terms of American-ness, it seems. I want to measure Freedom differently.

Freedom is the ability to form your own opinions and to act on them. Freedom must be tempered with Responsibility towards other people: you are not free to limit other people's Freedom. Opinions must be based on Information and Understanding, and Society must work hard to make that possible. In a truly Free society everyone can go to college or university to study to the limit of their abilities. In a truly Free society, Rights are replaced by real choices.

How do we get there in the West, when we have been so tied to the idea that Freedom means Power over Other People?

Perhaps hactivism is part of it. But it has to be aimed at education, at flow of information, not simply at sharing bigoted ideals and corruption.

What Freedom we have, will only stay, will only grow, if we share it.

Standard linux kernels lack the high-speed, conceptually easy to grasp, message passing facilities of, say, QNX or AmigaOS. There is a patch to allow QNX-style message passing in linux - here, but I've never tried it.

The AmigaOS message passing (by reference) is scarier, since the AmigaOS only has "cooperative" (i.e. nothing except for semaphore locks) memory protection, but this means it can be blindingly fast, even with arbitrary-sized messages, since all that is actually done to send a message from process 1 to process 2 is passing a pointer...

• Pricing.

  It is notoriously difficult to get pricing information for QNX.

  I have heard differing reports on comp.os.qnx, including that it is "very expensive, hundreds of dollars per system," or, on the other hand, the vague answer of "you can license it reasonably economically." (With no definition of what "reasonably economical" means, of course.)

• If people should start thinking of QNX, then they should also start thinking of:
  • VSTa

    A copylefted system that "lifts" ideas from QNX and Plan 9

    It looks like development has not been terribly active lately.

  • MIT Exokernel

    Again, not terribly active, but an interesting OS kernel.

  • EROS

    Eric Raymond thinks it's mindblowing, so the Eric Raymond Personality Cult should all be preparing to drop Linux in favor of EROS. (Of course, it isn't yet capable of self-hosting, which indicates that it's not all that useful at this point. But, to cultists, usefulness is irrelevant...)

  • Possibly even Hurd

    It's different from the other options; certainly not a tiny OS option...

  • eCos
  • RTEMS

    Which, like QNX, appears to be used in some reasonably critical system environments...

  • Fiasco

    Which is a "lighter microkernel than Mach"...

  • On Linux, people interested in QNX should almost certainly look at SRR -- QNX API compatible message passing for Linux

    This is the critical programming abstraction that QNX uses heavily which isn't all that widely used on traditional UNIXes, namely asynchronous messaging.

  These are all interesting alternatives, albeit not all being of identical levels of interest.