Anthony Campbell's blog

To mark the start of a new year and my change of ISP I've updated my home page. I've simplified it quite a bit in the hope of making it easier to navigate. Please feel free to comment.

For information about my published books, both printed and ebooks, please go to my Home Page.

This is one of Hoban's gentler fictions, with a happy ending. It has three narrators who speak in turn: Sarah Varley, Roswell Clark, and Adelbert Delarue. Roswell and Sarah are both wounded people: Roswell drove while drunk and the resulting accident killed his wife, while Sarah was married to an unsatisfactory man who is also dead. Both Roswell and Sarah decide to have bats tattooed on their arms as emblems of good luck. Much of the novel is concerned with their lives come to intertwine, each finding something in the other that had been missing for them up to now. Quite a lot of the story is told in flashback. [More]

Lewis is a financial journalist. Here he reports his experiences of interviewing people in Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and the USA who have been involved in the current financial catastrophe. [More]

A few days ago I had a hard disk crash and had to reinstall Debian Sid. Fortunately I had a backup for my home partition. Mostly things went off smoothly but there were two problems.

1. My scanner

This is an Epson Perfection v330. The drivers for this used to be on Avensys but are now on Epson. I had compling problems with them - dependency failure. I eventually found libltdl3_1.5.26-4+lenny1_i386.deb by googling and was then able to compile things. Someone on a newsgroup says I downloaded the wrong file - it should have been iscan_2.28.1-3.ltdl7_i386.deb, which would probably have avoided the need to find the missing library.

As my correspondent rightly remarks, the Epson site is confusing. This is a pity because the v330 does work on Linux and is one of the few reasonably priced scanners that do. I've seen posts from two people who bought it and gave up trying to get it to work.

2. Printing from my Brother HL5240

I don't like Cups so use Lprng if possible. Before the crash this was working well and I could also print to the printer from another computer on the network. Aftr the reinstall, nothing worked. Eventually, with some useful advice from the Debian maintainer for lprng, I got everything working. There are several things to do.

a. My /dev/lp0 had disappeared. I fixed this by adding the following to /etc/modules:

parport_pc
lp

b. For some reason the Brother filter wouldn't work , though it did before. I therefore used ljet4-filter in magicfilter and this seems to give everything I need.

c. To get remote printing from another computer on the LAN I needed to do two things.

First, I added a line to /etc/lprng/lpd.conf :-

lpd_listen_port=515

Next, I commented out this line in /etc/lprng/lpd.perms:

# REJECT NOT SERVER



These are important; otherwise you will get messages about "connection refused" or "no connection permissions",

The current issue of Nature has an opinion piece on the dangers of sugar. Robert H, Lustig and colleagues say that sugar should be taxed and restricted in the same way as alcohol. Lustig runs a children's obesity clinic in San Francisco. See Sugar: The Bitter Truth by Lustig onYouTube,

This view endorses the central claim of Gary Taubes's book The Diet Delusion. In his lecture Lustig doesn't mention Taubes, but his message is the same as that of Taubes. In outline, this is that reducing calories and exercising more to lose weight doesn't work. The widely promulgated advice to cut down on dietary fat is wrong, because it isn't fat that makes us fat, it's carbohydrate (and especially fructose, which Lustig regards as a major culprit and as dangerous as alcohpl). Lustig even repeats the slogan that Taubes uses: " a calorie isn't a calorie; not all calories are equal."

Like Taubes, Lustig blames much of the mistake on the late Ancel Keys, whose research, he finds, was flawed. Lustig is important because, unlike Taubes, he is a clinician and an academic - Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.

As you may know if you have followed some of the previous posts here, I used icewm as my window manager for a good many years, because I liked its simplicity and unobtrusiveness. As its documentation says, it does its work and gets out of your way. Just what I like.

As time went by I found I was working more with windows in fullscreen mode rather than stacked, swapping between them as needed. Icewm has a menu that allows you to do this, so you know what you have open. But it then occurred to me that I was using icewm as if it were a tiling WM. So why not look into the world of real tiling WMs to see if there was something that would suit me even better than icewm?

I first tried xmonad, which I liked a lot. But, being written in Haskell, it was pretty difficult to configure. So I next looked at dwm, which is visually and functionally similar to xmonad, with quite similar default key bindings. It was simpler to configure than xmonad, being written in C. I don't know C but I found it considerably easier to guess how the configuration file worked than was the case with xmonad, with its Haskell code.

One minor disadvantage of dwm was that to test a new configuration involved restarting the thing, but since I didn't keep making changes that wasn't too serious. What I found more annoying was the lack of anything like a menu to show what other windows were open. In other words, if I was viewing the browser and wanted to switch to, say, mutt, I ended up cycling blindly through the windows until I arrived where I wanted to be - and it was easy to overshoot. Of course, I could also go to tiled layout and choose the correct window there, followed by a return to fullscreen, but it was not very intuitive..

I then had a look at i3. I hadn't done so previously because the docs said it was primarily for developers, but I found that it was pretty much exactly what I was looking for. It's easy to configure, at least in its latest version (4.1) and it has all the features I was looking for (plus others that I don't need). I'll illustrate how I use it with some screenshots.

Here is the default tiled layout, with several windows open. The browser is the selected window in this case. I can easily add another window with Mod+Enter, or I can start a new application using dmenu (Mod+d).



Now I press Mod+w to get the tabbed layout, which shows the selected window (my home page in my browser). Although this occupies the whole screen apart from the upper and lower bars, it is not actually fullscreen. I can change to any of the other windows by shifting to a different tab, either with the keyboard or with the mouse.




If I want true fullscreen (seldom needed), I press Mod+f. Now the bar disappears. In this mode I can't switch to a different window; I must toggle fullscreen with Mod+f again to return to tabbed layout. To shift to a different window I must first press Mod+f again to get back to the tabbed layout.



There is also an alternative layout to tabbed - the stacked layout (Mod+s). which is what I use most of the time.



I emphasise that this by no means exhausts all the options that i3 offers. For example, you can have the windows tiled in a grid, e.g. 4x4, and you can have different workspaces as you do in other WMs. These are called tags in dwm, but they work in the same way. I can see why they would be useful if you had a lot of applications open, but seldom have more than 3 or 4 windows open and using more workspaces would be confusing. (See the official i3 web page for details of all this.)

The main exception is xsane, used for manipulating my flatbed scanner. This opens several drop-down windows, and these work best if you change to floating mode (shift + mod + space). I find it's best to do this in a separate workspace, otherwise it becomes confusing.

Configuring i3 is very easy*; you just edit the config file (~/.i3/config). This is a plain text file. Here is my config, with comments. Note that i3 has a strange idea of the keys to use for moving around: instead of h,j,k.l it shifts everything to the right and uses j,k,l,semicolon. As I'm used to h.j,k,l in vim I changed the default arrangement in i3. If you do this you must also change Mod+h (which by defajult gives a horizontal arrangement of windows), otherwise you will get an error message because you have Mod+h mapped to two different commands.

*These remarks apply to the current version of i3 -4.1. Previous versions were a bit more complicated to configure.

Note: If you ever find that i3 seems to have locked up, so that you can't change to a different tab, check first that you are not fullscreen. If that is not the problem, do Mod+Shift+R to reload, which should make things work again.

Russell Hoban wrote a number of excellent novels, several of which are already reviewed on this site. Between 1987 and 1996 he produced no new novels, but after this nine-year gap he returned to adult fiction with several more novels, working in spite of increasing ill-health. He died at the end of 2011.

Like many of Hoban's novels, this one is a first-person narration. The story is told by Jonathan Fitch, a young man who has lost the girl he loves because she found out that he had been carrying on with a large number of other women behind her back. He bitterly regrets this and is sitting on the floor, drunk and in despair, at the top of the stairs in the Piccadilly Tube station, where he is accosted by the eponymous Mr Rinyo-Clacton. He is a tall powerful man of enormous wealth (though the source of his wealth is never specified). [More]

There was an item on this in today's Material World on Radio 4. in which it was said that schools were going to be encouraged to use free software. So perhaps all is not lost.

On the news today we hear that the teaching of computer knowledge in British schools has been a waste of time and needs to be reorganised. Instead of teaching children to use Word and spreadsheets we should be teaching programming. In other words, they shouldn't be passive users of the technology but should be able to modify it actively through understanding what is going on under the hood.

This seems eminently sensible, but in the next sentence we are told that Microsoft will be involved in the restructuring, which appears to contradict the essential idea of the restructuring. Surely the pupils should be introduced to the idea of free software, which would give them the ideal field in which to learn their programming skills.

But there may be some hope, because schools will be free to develop their own curriculums, so perhaps at least some of them will not allow themselves to be take over by Microsoft.

Darwin wrote this short autobiography for his family between the ages of 67 and 71, starting in 1876. It was not intended for publication, and when it was published, shortly after its author's death, certain passages, mainly those in which he criticised religion were omitted. This was because some of his family members, especially his widow, felt that they should not be included. The present version, edited by Darwin's grand-daughter, Nora Barlow, restored these passages. It also included some other biographical material not reviewed here. [More]

Now that I've updated my website I've been thinking again about readability in relation to line width. I spent a long time on the internet looking at different opinions. One school of thought recommends 'liquid layout', in which the line length is not specified and each reader's browser decides for itself how long the lines should be.

This is quite an attractive option since it avoids the need for sideways scrolling if you have a small screen and doesn't waste space on large screens. But on large screens it also means that text lines are very long, which makes for difficult reading. Some sites I look at have adopted this format but I don't think it makes for readability.

The alternative is to specify the width. (I know there are some hybrid schemes that try to have the best of both worlds but I'm ignoring those here.) If you choose to do that you have to decide on the width to specify. One of the best discussions of this question I've come across is The Line Length Misconception. This argues that the current widespread recommendation of short lines may be excessive and that lines that are 100-110 cpl (characters per line) are perfecty readable. This is followed by an interesting and knowledgeable discussion by readers. There is evidently room for more research.

In the light of this discussion I have settled for the moment on 82 cpl, with a text width of 550px. This is a compromise, of course, but compromise is inevitable. My screens have a resolution of 1600x1200, which is higher than average. The Statcounter survey shows most browsers viewing my pages at about 1280x1024 or even 1024x768. I've viewed my pages at these resolutions and they still look all right to me, so I hope they do to you. Feedback on this question will be gratefully received.

As the subtitle indicates, Paxman's focus in this book is on the effects of having n empire on the British. He does not claim to have written a full-scale history of the empire itself - that would have needed a book several times as long. But he provides a pretty extensive bibliography for those who want more, and all his many quotations are referenced in end notes. [More]

David Cameron tells us that he is 'a committed Christian but vaguely practising'. This, of course, is a very English attitude to religion. I suppose it means that Cameron thinks that Christianity is true but only goes to church once or twice a year, at Christmas and New Year. It also probably means that he has never thought about it very deeply.

In spite of holding this rather illogical position, Cameron insists that we ought to be more Christian in order to uphold morality. No evidence is offered for the alleged dependence of morality on religion, and specifically on Christianity. This on a par with Cameron's insistence on marriage as a guard against family breakdown, which I have written about previously here.

Cameron's view of religion appears to be based mainly on practical considerations. It reminds me of Gibbon's description of attitudes to religion in the Roman empire: 'The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. '

The Swedish TV thriller, The Killing, will be reaching its final two episodes next week. It's not often that a sequel is better than the original* but this one is, at least for me. The first was very good but I'd guessed whodunit well before the end; not this time. The acting, as usual, is first-rate. Well worth catching up on Iplayer if you haven't already done so.

*Another exception to the rule is Through The Looking-Glass, which I prefer to Alice In Wonderland. But I know I'm in a minority here.