In praise of LuminusWeb
Well, I've just finished my first in-anger, for-a-paying-customer, website in Clojure. Essentially it's just a very simple CRUD system; it landed on my desk last week in a rush because the agency which had been supposed to be building it had drawn some pretty pictures and then thrown their hands up in the air and said 'this is too hard'.
It wasn't a requirement it be written in Clojure; in fact, until I tacked a credits line on the bottom of the pages saying 'Powered by Clojure' I don't think the customer knew that it was. I estimated four days on a fixed price basis; I think this was fair. In fact it took six, but I worked over the weekend so the project hasn't been delayed by my overrun.
Some of the overrun was unforeseen — the agency who abandoned the job had built the forms in JotForm, and they proved to be so horrible that I had to rewrite them from scratch — the HTML was bizarrely bad, and none of the field names were meaningful. Also, the pretty pictures drawn by the agency were all fixed size — they didn't flow or scale. I admit I'm a snob, but if a website is going to be identified as my work I want it to be right. So now, it is right (well, mostly; the navigation does something ugly and not very usable if you shrink a desktop browser window too small, but I haven't yet found a workaround for that which fits with the design). Now, it uses media queries to distinguish smartphones, tablets and desktops, and serves the appropriate CSS for each. Yes, that cost me time, too, but in my opinion it's worth it.
On Rascarrel Shore
When I was a wee boy, we used to go down to Rascarrel shore fairly regularly, and I used to play pooh-sticks in the burn from the wee footbridge. It wasn't, as a boy, my favourite beach, being stony and windswept, but it was under a mile and a half from our house up at Nether Hazelfield, and the old medieval road from Rascarrel shore up to Rerrick, although by then abandoned, ran by the end of our lane and was still recognised by the farmers as a public right of way. By the time I was ten, I was permitted to walk down to Rascarrel on my own.
Rascarrel was not a pristine shore. It was part of a populated landscape. It had been occupied by the barytes miners, by miners for coal and copper, by fisherfolk and by smugglers over the historical period. John Thomson's map of 1832 shows a coal mine and a smithy on the shore. There are dwelling sites all along the bay. The beach itself is rocky, and strewn with large, rounded pebbles; there's nowhere that's sandy, nowhere to launch a boat, and few places where it was easy for a child to get into the water to swim. Consequently, as a child, I preferred Balcary for sailing and Red Haven for swimming. But Rascarrel was our nearest beach, and the only one I could get to by myself, so I went there often. There is a natural rock arch which I've loved all my life and have many photographs of, and several minor caves.
A first look at Tchahua
For anyone interested in the story I'm working on, this is a first look at my model of the city of Tchahua. The deep water quay is front right; the bridge (front left) is roughly modelled on the medieval London Bridge, but without the buildings that were built on it.
Obviously the castle (centre right) is the Residence; I've shown the outer ward walls lower than the inner ward, partly because for defence you would want to be able to shoot down on them if the outer ward was captured, but partly because it's a different phase of building — the outer ward would have been added when the deep water quay was developed. Facing the Residence (middle of the picture) is the guildhall and and a couple of large buildings which I'm currently vaguely thinking of as probably inns. I suspect there should be a religious building somewhere but I haven't got that worked out yet — there may be several temples because I don't think the Dragon cult is a state religion so there are probably other cults.
Upstream of the bridge — left of picture — is the old harbour, which older, smaller ships could access through the lifting span of the bridge; the two large buildings on the quayside there are the silk warehouse and the spirit warehouse. I think the spirit warehouse is the one nearer the Residence, but again that isn't certain.
More grief creating formatted documents
I write my fiction using a 'word processor' which is in fact no more than a hacked together set of shell scripts. To produce final proof output, I need a tool to render my text into nicely formatted PDF or Postscript. I do this by way of HTML, but I still need a tool for the HTML to PDF step. For years I've used Prince, which is very good indeed. It has three problems from my point of view
- It's proprietary software, and although you can legitimately use it for free, if you do it prints its own logo on the cover page of your document;
- It's too expensive (US$ 495) for me to be able to really justify a license;
- And finally — for me this one's the killer — it doesn't run on Debian, and because it isn't free, you can't just compile it yourself.
It does run on Ubuntu, and consequently I do run Ubuntu on one of my machines just so that I can run Prince, but I now want to run my fiction through my continuous integration toolchain, which runs under Jenkins on my server; and my server runs Debian.
Restating the case against Land Value Tax
Note that I'm not arguing that Land Value Tax is inapplicable in urban areas — on the contrary, in urban areas it may well be a very good tax. I'm arguing that it has consequences in rural areas which act directly and diametrically against the cause of land reform.
First I'd like to introduce the two characters of a three act drama.