TITLE Leonard's Writing

I write professionally and non-. If you'd rather do something than sit
around and read, check out <a href="/features/">Crummy Features</a> or
<a href="/software/">Software Calculated to Drive you Mad</a>.

<h1>Weblogs</h1>

<p>And other ongoing concerns.

<ul> 

<li><a href="/">News You Can Bruise</a> is my main squeeze,
weblog-wise, since 1997. Now you can read <a
href="/nb/nb.cgi/category/nycb/site-meta/Best%20Of%20NYCB">the best
NYCB entries</a>, as voted by readers. And me.  </li>

<li><a href="http://del.icio.us/leonardr">My del.icio.us feed</a> is
connected directly to my prefrontal cortex. My wife also posts to this
feed.

<li>I contribute to the group weblog <a
href="http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sumanah/cgi-bin/nb/nb.cgi/portal/spam">Spam
as Folk Art</a>.

<li><a href="TheFuture/">The Future: A Retrospective</a> is an audit
of a 1989 book of technological predictions. It ran from June 2007 to
March 2008.</li>

<li>From 1998 to 2001 I edited and wrote for the geek humor site <a
href="segfault.org/">segfault.org</a>.

<li>From 1993 to 1996 I ran <a href="/warren/">Da Warren BBS and
Grill</a>.

</ul>

<h1>Nonfiction</h1>

<h2>Books</h2>

<ul>

<li><a href="RESTful-Web-Services/"><i>RESTful
Web Services</i></a> (O'Reilly, 2007). With Sam Ruby.

<li><a href="RubyCookbook/"><i>Ruby
Cookbook</i></a> (O'Reilly, 2006). With Lucas Carlson. <a
href="http://www.joltawards.com/2007">2007 Jolt Awards Finalist</a>

<li>Co-author, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0764596543/"><i>Beginning Python</i></a> (Wiley, 2005).

</ul>

<h2>Article-length</h2>

<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/09/07/unit-testing-docs.html"><i>Unit Testing Your Documentation</i></a>. (O'Reilly Network) 2006.

<li><a href="http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-pythcheetah/index.html"><i>Building and filling out templates with Python and Cheetah</i></a>. (IBM developerWorks, 2006)

</ul>

<h2>Technical papers</h2>

<ul>

<li><a href="/software/UltraGleeper/IntroPaper.html"><i>The Ultra
Gleeper: A Recommendation Engine for Web Pages</i></a> (CodeCon, 2005)

<li><a href="/software/PyCon2003/Beyond%20The%20Config%20File.htm"><i>Beyond the Config File: User-Friendly Configuration For Web Apps</i></a>: (Pycon and EuroPython, 2003)

</ul>

<h1>Fiction</h1>

<p>I've been writing fiction since I was 12, but only recently did it
become good enough to show people and try to get published. Fiction is the art of the counterfactual, so I write science fiction: it's
got the biggest counterfactuals.

<ul>

<li>"John Versus the Sreps" - Post-scarcity teenage
angst. 2007. Unpublished.

<li>"The Eyes of Ceres" - Golden Age-style semihard SF. 2007. Unpublished.

<li>"Vanilla" - Mundane space opera. 2006. Unpublished.

<li>"Mallory" - Mundane cyberpunk. 2005. Published 2008 <a
href="/2008/04/01/mallory-by-leonard-richardson/">in
Futurismic</a>.

<li><a href="Jake-Berendes-West-Covina/">"Jake Berendes West
Covina"</a> - 2000. Subversion through fiscal policy. Self-published.

<li><a href="Grunion%20Time/">"Grunion Time"</a> - 1997. Magical
realism without the magic. Incoherent but very
short. Self-published.</li>

</ul>

<h2>Short-short</h2>

<p>A lot of very short one-off fiction goes into <a href="/">News You
Can Bruise</a>. Here's some of it.

<ul>

<li><a href="/2005/08/31/0">The panspermia cannon</a>.

<li>The last scene of a screenplay: <a
href="/2005/06/30/1">"Gravlax"</a>.

<li>Some 101-word stories in the style of <a href="http://xorph.com/anacrusis/">Anacrusis</a>: <a
href="/2006/06/06/1">Phyla</a>, <a href="/2006/04/18/2">Sumana</a>, <a
href="/2006/02/10/0">Malcolm</a>, <a href="/2005/04/01/2">Silas</a>, <a
href="/2005/01/29/0">Fast Jack</a>, and <a
href="/2004/07/06/0">Leanne</a>.</li>

<li>Fake interviews with <a href="/2003/07/09/2">a deep-sea
coffinfish</a> and <a href="/2003/06/13/0"><i>Transformers</i>
producer Tom DeSanto</a>.</li>

</ul>

<h1>Bagatelles</h1>

<p>Miscellaneous short-form stuff, some of it pretty old.

<ul>

<li>Some comics created under constraints from NYCB readers: <a
href="/2006/02/25/0">"'Kangaroo' Jack Masters in <b>Caution: Filling Is
Hot!"</b></a>. Constrained Cat and Girl fan comics: <a href="/2006/03/30/1">"In the Black"</a>, <a href="/2006/03/31/0">"The Best Strategy"</a>,
<a href="2006/04/18/1">"Going Outside"</a>.</li>

<li>Another travelogue, of <a href="misc/200303-PyCon.html">my trip to PyCon 2003</a>.

<li><a href="misc/Tonight's%20Episode.html">Tonight's Episode</a>:
Show titles for a long-running, pop-culture-obsessed police procedural. When it
jumped the shark, the shark jumped back. R.I.P.

<li><a href="misc/DoctorVirtual">Doctor Virtual's Cyber-Couch</a>
matches the Internet's collective unconscious with the Internet's
favorite psychiatrist. 3 episodes.

<li><a href="misc/firewall.html">Behind the Firewall</a>, an essay on
having one's open source software being made proprietary. Written
while the pain was still fresh.

<li><a href="misc/purple/">Reddish Purple vs. Bluish Purple</a>,
a superior visualization of the 2000 presidential race. Much more
sophisticated visualizations were available <a
href="http://marvin.cs.uidaho.edu/~heckendo/voterPage.html">by
2004</a>.

<li><a href="misc/Make%20%Dan%20Complain.html">Make Dan
Complain</a>, a fun game to be played with my one-time roommate <a
href="http://www.torsion.org/witten/">Dan Helfman</a>.

<li><a href="misc/1999LWE%20Travelogue/">My less successful,
incomplete travelogue</a> of my trip to a Linux World Expo in 1999. At
this point I stopped doing big complicated travelogues.

<li><a href="misc/Texas%20Travelogue/">My epic travelogue of a 1998
trip to Texas</a>, with pictures. This piece marks a turning point for
my writing, where I began to rely less on obscure references and
wordplay and more on...whatever I rely on now.

<li>Do you dare uncover <a href="misc/forbidden.html">The Forbidden
Secrets of crummy.com</a>?

<li><a href="misc/jack_in_the_box/">Jack in the Box and the
International Christian Conspiracy</a>, from 1998 when Crummy still
had pretensions of being a general humor webzine. Despite my best
efforts this article has not started any kind of urban legend.

<li><a href="misc/planet/"><i>The Deficient Adventures of Captain
Planet</i></a>, a five-page collaborative comic book by me and
Kristofer Straub. 1997.</li>

<li><a href="misc/race/">The Race For The White House</a>, a satirical
photoessay I did for my high school paper in April 1996. Still pretty funny.

</ul>

<h1>The Work of Others</h1>

<p>Finally, a few works by other people that I've put up for everyone to
enjoy.

<ul>

<li>A gem from the webzine-era Crummy. Kristofer Straub's <a href="hosted/csotfs/">Cool Site of the
Femtosecond</a>.

<li><a href="hosted/The%20Haunted%20Author.html"><i>The Haunted Author</i></a>, by Marcus Clarke.

<li><a href="hosted/The%20Late%20Benjamin%20Franklin.html"><i>The Late Benjamin Franklin</i></a>, by Mark Twain.
</ul>