Fri, 2008 Oct 31

Books I'd Like My Children to Read

Posted in Books at 14:00 by jmorgan

My wife is about five months pregnant. It’s a boy. We’re calling him Biscuit until we make a final naming decision (and probably after that). Anyway, I was pondering if there’s any particular books I’d like him (and potential future children) to read, in addition to the Bible. Here’s a few.

  1. A Miracle, A Universe which is about a couple of groups of people who seek to “settle accounts with tortures” as the subtitle suggest, in Latin America after the dictatorships of the sixties and seventies or so. It’s a way to illustrate how awful humans can be, and how important it is not to assume torture is somehow okay, without them reading or seeing something (probably graphic) on torture itself.
  2. The Cashflow Quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki. Good information on how to think about money.
  3. Financial Peace by Dave Ramsey. More good information on money, but from the perspective of one who wants to have comfort and security, without necessarily putting the work into wealth building.
  4. Pride and Prejudice. It’s just a good book. And odds of any of our children not reading it or having it read to them is pretty low anyway.
  5. The Unvanquished by William Faulkner. I don’t really know why I think this would be such a useful novel to read, but I really do. I guess because it displays very clearly the foolish things we let divide us from others.
  6. The US Constitution.

Mon, 2006 Oct 09

Version Control for Novels

Posted in Books at 10:56 by jmorgan

I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but I write in this blog almost exactly twice a week. Once for a general blog entry, once for a From Genesis entry. Basically, my reason for blogging is to give me an excuse to write, and I make sure that I take the time to do that twice a week. But I’m not sure what to discuss this week.

Okay, here’s a thought. Version control for writing, say, a novel. I’ve actually written the first draft to one full novel and have fifty-plus pages (I think) of a couple of others, as well as several dozen (I imagine) lesser attempts.

One of the downsides is that I’ll tend to work on one for a while, then stop, then pick it back up later. Leaving me with the question of whether I copy and start a new file (or, in most cases for me, a new database record) and have multiple copies or lose the historical record of what I originally wrote (and I like historical records).

So, naturally, when I discovered subversion, and started using it with source code, I began to ponder using it with novels. The major upside is that it deals well with the issues of the previous paragraph. The downside is that I’m not sure how to make the best use of it. Specifically: as best I understand, subversion (or diff, I suppose) checks lines for changes in text files. This is great for source code, but in a novel, a “line” is a paragraph. Seems inefficient, and might make checking changes more difficult. On the other hand, saving it as an ODF text document would lead to a binary diff (and I have no clue on how that works), which could be more efficient, and allows formatting (not that I would use it), but probably removes the possibility of just glancing through a change set.

Anybody have any thoughts? Experience with this? Anywho, I’m planning to start giving it a try with a collection of novels and stories I’ve been working on for several years.