Noel Rappin Writes Here

I hate Microsoft Word. That’s not the only thing that caused me to want to do this book this way, but it’s in the top five. That’s what we in the writing biz call “a grabber”. Right? Feeling grabbed? The usual complaints about Word aside — it’s bloated, the UI is hopelessly busy, managing complicated layouts is nigh impossible… um, it’s possible I’m not leaving those complaints completely aside. Let me try again.

With respect to this request to link to early web stuff, I think the oldest HTML page I coded that’s still online is my Georgia Tech home page, circa 1997-8. Note the creative use of ugly nested tables. I don’t think that any of my earlier web stuff has survived… no, wait, one other thing. The site dates to, I think 1997, it can’t be much earlier because it has a broken Java applet (which was basically just a fancy animated gif).

I’m granting myself amnesty for about six months of unreviewed books to mention a couple of recently read books. Pirate Sun, Karl Schroeder I think that of all the authors I enjoy, Schroeder is the most criminally under-read. If you like SF, I tell you that Virga – the background of Pirate Sun and its two predecessors – is the coolest SF construct since Ringworld. Schroeder could write novels in it for the next forty years and only scratch the surface of what’s possible.

It’s been a while since I lost my geek heart to a TV show that was so obviously doomed. Which brings us to The Middleman, on ABC Family of all places. I had been avoiding this on the grounds that it was just a silly-looking summer series and also the whole obviously doomed thing but a series of positive mentions on io9 and other Web sites (including a plug by Justine Larbalestier) led me to try the thing once.

I have about seventy-million little things to say about this movie. I will try, and probably fail, to keep this brief. Spoilers definitely ahead: The movie is really, really good. It’s not flawless, but it covers it’s flaws through a very strong sense of what Batman means and doesn’t mean as a character, and also because it’s very intense. The movie spends most of the time feeling like its on the very edge of chaos and conflagration – it’s probably the first time that I’ve genuinely felt that the hero wouldn’t “win” in superhero movie.

It seems like I’m forever mentioning that I’m not posting here as much as I’d like. I said a while back that between here and the Pathfinder blog I’d be posting two to three times a week. Turns out that’s actually been more or less true, just that all of it has been on the Pathfinder side. I do miss it here, and there are a few big genre/geek things in the last couple weeks that I really wanted to write about here, where nobody can interrupt me.

If you see RiffTrax at a party, say “Hi” from us. That’s what Joel Hodgson said about the relationship between the two different groups of Mystery Science Theater 3000 alumni roving around the country skewering bad and pretentious movies. Hodgson’s group, is Cinematic Titanic, while Mike Nelson’s group is called RiffTrax. The two groups have a different approach to making fun of movies, although the personnel differences seem to be more a matter of geography then any long-simmering feud.

Just a quick mention that part 1 of my article series on using Rails to write iPhone apps is online at IBM Developerworks. Parts 2 and 3 will be published sometime in the rather near future. In other notes, Pathfinder has updated the company blog URL to http://www.pathf.com/blogs. Individual authors now have unique pages, I’m http://www.pathf.com/blogs/noel rappin. Recent pieces there include a quick welcome to RailsConf, and a two-part article on HTML and code markup in Rails, available here and here.

A couple of recent life, the universe, and everything notes: I realize I’ve been away from here for most of the last couple of weeks – a side project has been eating up a lot of time. I should be done with in next week, and back to posting here more regularly. I know, I always say that. I’ll be at RailsConf 08 later this month, and I’ll probably have some number of copies of Professional Ruby on Rails to do something promotional with, but I haven’t exactly decided what.

I’ve been doing some web development for iPhone and Mobile Safari lately, not least because of a series of articles that will be showing up in IBM DeveloperWorks soon. I was using the iUI toolkit, which contains a number of CSS styles and JavaScript event handlers to make iPhone Web apps look and feel somewhat like native iPhone applications. As I was working with iUI, I realized I was building up a library, so I converted everything to a Rails plugin: rails_iui.