News You Can Bruise for 2006 April 28

I am in Bakersfield taking care of my mother and it is stressful. Today I got a little freelance work done though.

I heard from Michael that the Ruby cookbook is in the neighborhood of 900 pages. That's as big as the second editions of the Perl and Python Cookbooks, which makes sense because it's got about as many recipes. We just didn't know before because the wiki doesn't automatically generate the Docbook output that gets printed on pages.

900 pages! I wrote a Neal Stephenson book! (Sumana: "Does it have an ending?" Me: "No, it just kind of ends." Sumana: "Yup.")

The I Ching calculator from Dirk Gently--online! I always pictured the error message as being displayed in the same font as the rest of the calculator output instead of a wacky Comic Sans-meets-Dingbats font, but Marvin in the Hitchhiker's Guide movie didn't look like I expected either, so I'm accustomed to the bitter Arcturan Mega-gin of disappointment.

Most book reviews are only in passing about the books they're reviewing. Usually I find this annoying but this "review" of three books on evolutionary development is a good introduction to a topic I didn't know the first thing about. Now I know the first thing but not the second.