Weblogs

And other ongoing concerns.

• News You Can Bruise is my main squeeze, weblog-wise, since 1997. Now you can read the best NYCB entries, as voted by readers. And me.
• My del.icio.us feed is connected directly to my prefrontal cortex. My wife also posts to this feed.
• I contribute to the group weblog Spam as Folk Art.
• The Future: A Retrospective is an audit of a 1989 book of technological predictions. It ran from June 2007 to March 2008.
• From 1998 to 2001 I edited and wrote for the geek humor site segfault.org.
• From 1993 to 1996 I ran Da Warren BBS and Grill.

Nonfiction

Books

• RESTful Web Services (O'Reilly, 2007). With Sam Ruby.
• Ruby Cookbook (O'Reilly, 2006). With Lucas Carlson. 2007 Jolt Awards Finalist
• Co-author, Beginning Python (Wiley, 2005).

Article-length

• Unit Testing Your Documentation. (O'Reilly Network) 2006.
• Building and filling out templates with Python and Cheetah. (IBM developerWorks, 2006)

Technical papers

• The Ultra Gleeper: A Recommendation Engine for Web Pages (CodeCon, 2005)
• Beyond the Config File: User-Friendly Configuration For Web Apps: (Pycon and EuroPython, 2003)

Fiction

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.

• "John Versus the Sreps" - Post-scarcity teenage angst. 2007. Unpublished.
• "The Eyes of Ceres" - Golden Age-style semihard SF. 2007. Unpublished.
• "Vanilla" - Mundane space opera. 2006. Unpublished.
• "Mallory" - Mundane cyberpunk. 2005. Published 2008 in Futurismic.
• "Jake Berendes West Covina" - 2000. Subversion through fiscal policy. Self-published.
• "Grunion Time" - 1997. Magical realism without the magic. Incoherent but very short. Self-published.

Short-short

A lot of very short one-off fiction goes into News You Can Bruise. Here's some of it.

• The panspermia cannon.
• The last scene of a screenplay: "Gravlax".
• Some 101-word stories in the style of Anacrusis: Phyla, Sumana, Malcolm, Silas, Fast Jack, and Leanne.
• Fake interviews with a deep-sea coffinfish and Transformers producer Tom DeSanto.

Bagatelles

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

• Some comics created under constraints from NYCB readers: "'Kangaroo' Jack Masters in Caution: Filling Is Hot!". Constrained Cat and Girl fan comics: "In the Black", "The Best Strategy", "Going Outside".
• Another travelogue, of my trip to PyCon 2003.
• Tonight's Episode: Show titles for a long-running, pop-culture-obsessed police procedural. When it jumped the shark, the shark jumped back. R.I.P.
• Doctor Virtual's Cyber-Couch matches the Internet's collective unconscious with the Internet's favorite psychiatrist. 3 episodes.
• Behind the Firewall, an essay on having one's open source software being made proprietary. Written while the pain was still fresh.
• Reddish Purple vs. Bluish Purple, a superior visualization of the 2000 presidential race. Much more sophisticated visualizations were available by 2004.
• Make Dan Complain, a fun game to be played with my one-time roommate Dan Helfman.
• My less successful, incomplete travelogue of my trip to a Linux World Expo in 1999. At this point I stopped doing big complicated travelogues.
• My epic travelogue of a 1998 trip to Texas, 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.
• Do you dare uncover The Forbidden Secrets of crummy.com?
• Jack in the Box and the International Christian Conspiracy, 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.
• The Deficient Adventures of Captain Planet, a five-page collaborative comic book by me and Kristofer Straub. 1997.
• The Race For The White House, a satirical photoessay I did for my high school paper in April 1996. Still pretty funny.

The Work of Others

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

• A gem from the webzine-era Crummy. Kristofer Straub's Cool Site of the Femtosecond.
• The Haunted Author, by Marcus Clarke.
• The Late Benjamin Franklin, by Mark Twain.