The weather’s cooling down for real now - overnight I close my apartment window and use my fleece blanket, and yesterday I actually was a little chilled in pants and a long-sleeved shirt. The weather here, though, tends to have this downward trend made up of dips and peaks, so I hope to get a little bit more warm weather a time or two before it settles into Fall.

The days definitely aren’t as long as they were a few weeks ago. Light starts fading about 8pm and it’s full dark by around 9pm now. The fruits and vegetables still remain pricey, though, and oranges and bell peppers haven’t come back yet. Thus lots of apples and onions for me.

Yesterday we had a birthday/welcome back party for Khovd volunteers. It was really tasty - instant falafel and latkes were fried, yogurt-garlic-dill sauce was made, and chickpeas were boiled and smushed for hummus. Add to that fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, homemade wheat pita bread, peanut butter-chocolate cake, and several melons and you got what here definitely is a feast. We even had leftovers - I suppose that’s what happens when you end up having only two guys at site, one of whom never eats, compared to the four originally.

We watched women’s volleyball and basketball, which was cool, and generally picked on each other, which was of course fun

Lately at work I’ve been starting to get into other interesting things - like helping improve the quality of service at the adolescent reproductive health center in Khovd. I haven’t done anything concrete yet; more reading up and thinking, but I’m looking forward to this as I find I continue to like working with young people. One of the stranger difficulties was finding STI/RH statistics for ages 15-24 in the aimag - my counterpart and I went to the health department to talk to the statistician (doctor; everyone’s a doctor) and he pretty much said he didn’t have them and go talk to the adolescent health center. The thing is, their numbers focus more on their internal intake and testing results, not the whole aimag, and I was curious to see how much of an impact the center has, if any, on those overall numbers, so it wasn’t quite what I was looking for - and they were all on vacation besides. This also reinforced for me the idea that mystery shopper-style assessments for accessibility will be a good tool for checking things out.

Anyway, after then walking to the regional hospital, talking to random people (though technically I didn’t talk; my counterpart did most of the talking based), and looking for the RH one-point service center people (also on vacation), we went back to the office, somewhat bewildered. My counterpart saved the day though by calling different people on vacation (eh, well) until we found someone who actually had the information - and we’re going to go by Monday to pick it up. Yay!

Today has been calm - I’m working on this Yogurt French Bread recipe (which seems more like a sourdough) that needed me to make starter to sit for at least 12 hours. I forgot to add the yogurt after I had made the dough and had to squish back in a cup of yogurt (which was messy by hand; got yogurt all over myself), then had to go to the store to buy more flour. Bleh. Regardless, it’s rising now and I hope to punch it down and bake in an hour or so. It better be damn tasty for all this effort.

As a side note for bread, I think here especially I need to be a little more patient with rising - instead of waiting to it to get to being doubled, I tend to focus on the actual time it says it’ll take and go along. But the brioche I made a bit back was really spectacular because I gave it time…so I’m going to work on being better about that. Of course, when it’s wintertime and the special challenges of attempting to make dough rise in a 40-degree apartment starts, all bets are off.

Oh! and it looks like I will indeed be going to Thailand next year. My 50k frequent flyer miles are enough for a free RT inter-asia ticket, and I’m going to play that up, as it seems like Delta’s mile usage in the US is getting pretty crappy (up to 60k for just a domestic RT?? bah!).

The 1001 nights LaTeX conversion is going well, and I actually found a full-color scan of the original that I’m going to use to make sure I have similar layout. I also found a neat site that covers historical illustrations of the book, including quite a few works that are by now in the public domain, so I’m going to add some illustrations to it too. The only big deviation, I believe, will be the use of margin notes versus footnotes - but that’s easily changed. I’m excited even though it only Volume 1 and who knows if I’ll get to Volumes 2-9.

Finally: Biden? Hmm. I’m curious to see how this pans out - wish I could see/hear the Democratic convention…

• Support for PostgreSQL and MSSQL (with the installation of MDB2 PEAR packages and relevant database driver)
• Configuration options for database port
• Option to custom-enter what hash function you use for external database passwords in the settings section
• Error-checking that won’t make the plugin break when you have no extended data fields
• Fixed the problem of passwords not synching if there was a password change on the external database end but user, who had logged in before to Wordpress, logged in with previous password on Wordpress
• Somewhat uninformative redirect to login page when a valid login has the wrong password.

Generally friendliness, ponies, and rainbows.

If any bugs surface, I’ll update, but otherwise expect another long hiatus.  As usual, download on wordpress.

Here’s the comparison, with the top being the modified version in Sumatra PDF and the bottom being being the plaintext viewed in Firefox (click it to enlarge):

I was talking (complaining) to Bonnie about this - and about the essence of the Gutenberg project, which seems to be preservation of the written product with ultimate forward compatibility, hence plaintext.  However, the text alone isn’t the true product - the layout, the formatting, the illustrations is the true product that should be preserved.  You lose so much context and enjoyment if you can even get yourself through a plaintext version of the book.  Layouts are designed for humans, while I think the plaintext was designed for machines. Accessibility, at least in public health-land, can be described as “the right services for the right people at the right time.”  I think that perhaps for Project Gutenberg, accessibility’s right time is the future and right people are computers.  I mean, it’s cool that they started this in the late 70’s with hand-transcribing texts(!) on mainframes, but the average person isn’t going to really enjoy these materials - they’ll check out Google Books and book scans, which I beef about further down…

That being said, as this is for humans to read, why doesn’t Project Gutenberg also create a nicely-formatted PDF version for download?  They already support a more readable format for pocketpc-like devices, and they’ve sort of started this by having html versions, but in a pdf reader, where you can set it up to view facing pages like a real book, only a PDF will really do.  It could be a final step in their review project they do with Distributed Proofreaders.  Plus, it’s a great opportunity to overshadow the book-scanning projects of Google Books and what-not.  The book scans aren’t “clean” for individual reading (both in font crispness and general page quality), though I think they have their place in a very purist preservation sense.  These newly digitized and proofed copies give you an electronic basis for producing a pdf, and are much easier on the eyes - that’s why, I suppose, when I get a e-book copy from a publisher it’s not a scanned copy of the printed book!  Plus adding in the original (if publicly available) illustrations would give some new life to these older books and increase readership.  And the Gutenmark program usage is truly painless - it took about 10 seconds to do the 1001 nights first volume, which is about 600 pages A5.

The goal to me is this intermediate point on the continuum of fully digital (plaintext) and fully analog (book scans): human readbility and appeal.  Throw in “now” and you have my take on what the accessibility should be.  We want these books read, right?

…

Unfortunately, I just googled this and found out there are already several bands with variants on this name.  So I have to either destroy them all, or resign myself to joining a “a seven piece ska band from the South Shore in Massachusetts”.  Perhaps I can sneakily replace their lead harmonica player…

This is what happens when I read up on Wikipedia about ideal typesetting for fun…

“[they] would attack random travelers on the road, while shouting ‘Laudes Deo!’ (’Praise the Lord!)’ in Latin.”

Sounds like a good enemy for a RPG.

And I just made my first successful brioche loaf! It’s damn tasty…

So, based on the new things I’ve found, I think I could pretty easily migrate to another OS except for a small partition for games.  Slowly unsuckaging myself for the tentacles that are Microsoft…open source is finally fully working out for me!

Work (office basics)
OpenOffice - Does word, powerpoint, excel-like things. Also has a better system for page layout and visio-like drawings in my opinion - except in page numbering and mixing landscape/portrait oriented pages.
Firefox - You know what this is.  I don’t particularly like the new auto-popup as-you-type address bar, but it’s more of the same goodness otherwise.
Free Download Manager - Very useful here in Mongolia.  Supports download resuming without as far as I know putting crap on your computer.  Its website is a bit tricky to find the actual download you want though, oddly enough.
CutePDF Writer - “Prints” files to PDF format.  Have to download the ghostscript link mentioned on their site for it to work.  I think it prints out with more accurate formatting than OpenOffice’s PDF export function.
Sumatra PDF - Simple PDF reader that will run off a USB drive - also saves/bookmarks the last page you had open of individual files if you do the ebook thing.

Work (web/multimedia)
Handbrake - Converts video (VOB files) painlessly into various divx formats, including for ipods
VirtualDub - Make simple video edits/effects for AVI files
Audacity - Record or edit sound.  I believe you have to obtain a mp3 codec separately to make it export to mp3 though - their website explains how.
WAMP - An all-in-one package that runs a local Apache web server with the latest versions of PHP and MySQL.  Can also be set up to run multiple versions of PHP and MySQL or set up as a “live” webserver.  Includes SQLite I believe, but I don’t use it.
CompareIt - Just that.  Compares line-by-line two files for changes.  Useful if you poorly manage documents or code, as I do.  I think it may be shareware rather than open source…
FileZilla - FTP tool.  The latest version lets you edit files based on OS-associated file extensions.
Firebug - Firefox extension for checking code in browsers and examining CSS.
TortoiseCVS, TortoiseSVN - Used on Windows machines for CVS/SVN code management - integrates nicely into your shell context commands.
PuTTY - Blame sourceforge.  Used for SSH and telnet-kinds of things.  Mostly command-line.
GIMP for Windows - Weaning myself off of Adobe, painful as it is.  I still don’t like the windowless setup of GIMP, and I don’t recognize all the editing icons, but it works.  Grab the English-language manual too - it’s a separate download.
Inkscape - I started using this yesterday and was really impressed.  It pretty much does everything I need to do without the price tag of Illustrator.
Scribus - I’ve downloaded and played with it a little, but not enough to know if it’s comparable to InDesign.  The price is right, though, so it may not matter whether it’s at the level of InDesign or just good enough for my relatively simple projects.  Between this and OpenOffice, I may be set.

I tried to use Eclipse PDT for development, but after not even figuring out where the FTP connection piece was, I gave up and am using random trial software for now.

Work (research/academic)
Zotero (with OpenOffice/Word extensions for in-document citing) - This is an amazing firefox addon that lets you download RDF/DOI data (think autofilling of citation fields) from most places, including PubMed, and store the pdf/article in the database, AND you can tag and it’ll do fulltext searches within both citation info and the pdfs on the fly.  The extensions let you cite from it and formats automatically into a lot of typical citation styles with either endnotes or footnotes. Also has some cool timeline features if you want to see a birds-eye view of your citation history.
OpenEpi - Offline or online (but browser-based) interface to a lot of common biostatistical/epi/public health calculations, such as sample size or chi stuffs.  Also explains decently what these calculations are for.  I think for me it’s the replacement to EpiInfo’s utilities components.
WeftQDA - Haven’t used it for real, but it’s a qualitative data analysis tool similar to ATLAS.ti
FreeMind - Used for mind-mapping - multi-branched tree-like structures that are great for group work and discussions or medium-sized planning sessions where you want to focus on gathering all ideas then refining/organizing them
UW proxy tool - Used with Firefox or IE to toggle on or off UW netid authentication when looking for articles and what-not.  Helps for finding full-text versions.
PSPP - A open-source equivalent to SPSS.  It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, but it does have the basics - descriptives, common T tests, and linear regression.  I don’t do more than this anyway - and its interface is almost identical to SPSS and has file compatibility.  Definitely replaces EpiInfo for me from a data analysis standpoint.  The site linked to is where you can download Windows-compatible installers rather than the source code, which is the way it’s typically distributed.

Fun
VideoLan - Great media player - plays virtually anything and will try to fix corrupted files
Songbird - I’m not yet all onboard with it, as it’s missing some major features I like in iTunes (namely, smart playlists and a relatively sane podcast management piece), but maybe the next version will work out…
QuickPlay with ZSNES, Kega Fusion, Nestopia, Project64 - Old video games! And Quickplay serves as a management frontend for the various systems and stuff.  However, just about all of these products have terrible documentation.  If playing on a computer, though, try looking for video filters that say HQ3X, HQ4X, or SaI2X.  In theory you can do netplay too - nothing like playing Dr. Mario over the internet a continent away…
StepMania - DDR clone for computers.  Many many many songs are available online, and with a laptop with tv-out and a usb-based pad, you have DDR for real.  Also has cool announcer packs and extreme (nonstop) modes.
Last.fm - Loosely defined as software, it in theory will help with the dry spell I have here in new music.  Essentially note what you like and don’t like, and it’ll provide suggestions for you, plus biographical/discography info for your current stuff.  Interfaces with iTunes to automagically do this.
KOTOR II Restoration Project - very soon, I’ll be replaying this game bwahaha.  It’s a fan-based project for a massive patch to KOTOR II to enable cut/lost game material, which is significant.  For now I’m playing Phantasy Star on the Sega Master System and Star Ocean on SNES.
Goodreads, Project Gutenberg, TOR website - Reading resources for me - free ebooks, chapter excerpts, and generally helping me keep track of books I’d like to read someday.

Utilities
AVG - I don’t use it as I’m still covered by UW’s McAfee site license, but I’ve used it on others’ computers here and it seems to work fine.
InfraRecorder - Burns CDs, DVD, or makes ISOs painlessly.
WinDirStat - Cool utility for looking at your hard drive’s space usage graphically to identify where you have random large amounts of crap.  Also has cool pacman hourglass-equivalent icon while analyzing your drive.
USBVirusScan - Needs some setup (futzing witha batch file or VBS file), but in the end will execute a program (e.g., a virus scanner) upon insertion of any removable disk.
Spybot - Malware/web-based exploit protection software.  May be becoming obsolete with more virus scanners including this kind of module…
7Zip - Open-source that has the features I like in WinRAR (namely, explorer-style browsing of archives).  Doesn’t have RAR compression support, but it’ll open/extract just about anything.