Here are a few routes I enjoyed recently:

Cambridge to The Coast

Clare College to Clare Village

South Loop

I also tweaked the styles of the frontpage, using the CSS3 text-shadows. I like text-shadows.

You will need Safari 3 or Opera 9.5 in order to see the changes.

and show to the driver. However, printed e-tickets won’t fit in the ticket barriers at the station, so I assumed it would have to work differently.

I was pleasantly surprised by how it worked: you buy your tickets online using your credit or debit card, and get a confirmation code.

Now when you go to the station, you simply insert your card into the ticket machine, enter your confirmation code, and the tickets are printed on the spot! A very nice and efficient way of using the internet to buy tickets in advance and save queuing time, if I may say so. One might complain about the British rail system, but the Dutch railways clearly aren’t this advanced yet…

Only one small nitpick: I wish one could enter a confirmation code manually, so I don’t have to write the supplied confirmation code on a piece of paper and take it with me.

So, unarmed with that useful knowledge, my chosen course of action was to copy the matrix into Excel 2003, make the cells square and look for patterns. Sounds simple. It wasn’t. I tried setting the column width and row height to a certain value. Compare the following two pictures:

Yes, the A1 cell is actually square. So why the two totally different values, and no way to input mm/pts into those dialogs!? Stumped, I Googled, and got what I asked for. The row height is apparently specified in pts, but the column width… I quote from Microsoft’s official documentation:

The standard column width in Microsoft Excel is 8.43 characters; however, the actual width you see on the screen varies, depending on the width of the font defined for the Normal style of your workbook. Changing the default font also changes the column width.

…

The pixel width is stored internally in Excel for positioning data on the screen.

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The number that you see in the Column Width dialog box is the pixel width retranslated into character units (based on the Normal font) for display.

What!? That approach possibly made sense back in the day, when all fonts were fixed-width. Specifying the column width would then give you the number of characters that fit in each cell — still, who dreamed up 8.43 as default value? However, in this day and age with proportional fonts, this method of inputting the cell width is ridiculous, and is only there as a legacy from the program’s DOS origins.

After searching a bit longer, I found some VBA macros to specify column width and row height, and eventually stumbled upon the admittedly simple technique of changing the cell size by dragging the column/row separators. You then get a tooltip showing the pixel width/height of the cell, so you can drag until you hit the correct width.

However, by this time I was sick and tired of Excel, and had opened OpenOffice Calc. There you can simply specify the width/height of a cell using any unit you desire; unburdened by legacy UI, OpenOffice Calc uses a sensible UI. It may be an Excel clone, but at least it doesn’t copy all its stupidities.

BTW, talking of using the right tool for the job, whoever thought using Excel as a drawing tool was a good idea?!

They had been ‘almost done’ for months, but I never sat down to finish them properly. The main improvement in the filters is a significant speed optimization when searching large tables (and I’ve found some reference tables of more than 900(!) entries on the web) but the filters have received tweaks in most other areas as well.

My next JabRef todo item is to write custom export filter documentation, as several very useful features are not yet documented in the offical help pages.

One of the benefits of open source software is that I can simply look at the source, instead of discovering the features through trial-and-error

Then Josh and the band came up, and immediately started racously with To the Dogs or Whoever from his latest album. It is a fantastic song, though it may have taken quite a number of people by surprise as the new album hasn’t been officially released yet in The Netherlands (thank god for buying over the internet!).

The new songs worked really well with the old classics such as Me & Jiggs and Harrisburg (see setlist) from Golden Age of Radio — no songs from Hello Starling this time around. My personal favourite from the new album, Temptation of Adam, worked really well on stage, and it is battling with Wings for the position of my favourite JR song. The second encore consisted of a solo version of Thin Blue Flame. Admittedly I am not a huge fan of this song when played with a full band, however, this solo version was so intense that I finally heard the beauty of the

song. The only bummer of the show was when Josh came back for the first encore, playing Bruce Springsteen’s The River acoustically, and the air conditioning droned on rather loudly. Nevertheless, he did this classic song more than justice, and it was greatly appreciated by the audience!

All in all, I tremendously enjoyed the show; it is a pleasure seeing Josh playing on stage, with a huge grin on his face for most of the duration of the show. I’m not very good at writing reviews, but let it suffice to say that I must have been grinning about as much as Josh throughout the show! I’m still a bit undecided, but I feel I must rank it superior to the show I show in Dublin (which was recorded for the In The Dark live album), as the setlist selection was simply so good and the band played with such skill and enthusiasm!

As a footnote: while writing this post, I started thinking about the number of times I’ve seen Josh playing live. For my future reference, here it is

• support for Damien Rice (early 2004; Paradiso)
• Josh Ritter (27 May 2004; Paradiso, Amsterdam)
• Josh Ritter and Tom McRae double bill (12 November 2004; Oosterpoort, Groningen)
• Josh Ritter (13 May 2006; Vicar Street, Dublin, Ireland)
• Josh Ritter (31 May 2006; Paradiso, Amsterdam)
• Josh Ritter (10 September 2007; Melkweg, Amsterdam)

If he ever visits your home town (or any town within traveling distance), be sure to visit his show!

We must rip out all the epilogues in the books that we have read

and although I greatly enjoy his music, I must strongly disagree with him: I love epilogues.

I realized this again after finishing the latest Harry Potter, The Deathly Hallows, last weekend.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, and as is customary for me, I thoroughly enjoyed rereading my favourite passages. I read the book at a record pace (roughly in an afternoon and an evening) but enjoyed rereading parts of it for more than a week.

I’ve read some reviews where J.K. Rowling was compared with Charles Dickens, for her ability to conceive such elaborate stories with an abundance of characters. I must agree with that, though I definitely think Dickens a better writer, if not merely for their shared penchant for happy endings. This bring me back to epilogues.

The Deathly Hallows finishes with an epilogue, and although some (or many?) might find it slightly mawkish, I enjoyed the ending after such an epic story. It gives a nice sense of closure, and leaves you happy.

The best epilogue I ever read, was in John Irving’s “Life according to Garp”. There it is a complete chapter, detailing the later lives of various of the characters. They are short glimpses into the lives of characters you’ve started to love throughout the book, and with a bit of imagination they’re like mini novels. It is a fantastic ending of a fantastic book.

It would actually be an interesting experiment, to write an epilogue, before actually writing the story itself. Trying to write the history of the characters, whose future live you’ve already sketched.

Internet Browsing

Obviously one needs a browser nowadays. The Opera Browser is my browser of choice and has been for many a year. It also doubles as my e-mail client and newsfeed reader. Can’t live without this piece of software.

File Management

TotalCommander sports a slightly spartan interface, but provides awesome file management power! Based on the classic Norton Commander two-pane interface, this file manager allows me to easily move and copy files, compare directories, access zip/rar files, rename files with RegExp, type in commandline commands, access FTP servers. It’s a real one-stop shop for keyboard power users!

Image Viewing

Irfanview has been my default image viewer for years. It can open virtually any image type (as long as you download the optional plugins) and is very fast. It has useful batch operations and basic web album generation. It could use a UI cleanup, but otherwise does its job handsomely.

Text Processing

I seldom use regular office suites nowadays, having switched to HTML+CSS for simple tasks and to LaTeX for reports and such. For LaTeX processing I use MikTeX as backend, in combination with the TeXnicCenter TeX editor. For my reference management I use JabRef which uses BibTeX as its file format. This reference manager allows me to keep track of references and PDF articles, and has good export options.

For editing HTML/CSS/JS and any plain text file for that matter, I currently use SciTE partly due to its syntax highlighting for a large selection of file types. I have no need for fancier text editors, and therefore SciTE suffices for me.

PDF creation and viewing

Being able to create PDFs is a necessity nowadays. Using the GhostScript backend, and the CutePDF printer driver I can create a PDF from any application. As for viewing, slow as molasses doesn’t even begin to describe Adobe Acrobat Reader on my PC. For fast PDF viewing I use Foxit reader. Its only drawback is its inability to function as a browser plugin. The other thing currently missing in my PDF arsenal is a free application which allows basic editing and merging of PDFs.

Virus Scanner and Firewall

A (free) virusscanner is always good to have lying around, and AVG has always served my needs. As for firewalls, I have tried a few and have currently settled on Comodo Firewall on suggestion of a friend.

Chatting and Downloading

For my MSN/ICQ chatting needs, I use Trillian. It is a bit heavy on my limited CPU and RAM, but I like it nonetheless. For downloading I’ve switched to the μTorrent bittorrent client. It’s one of the best programs I’ve ever used, and the webinterface is very useful if you want to monitor and control your downloads from a remote location.

Work…

For my university work, Matlab is indispensable and therefore finds itself a spot reserved on my hard drive.

MIA

So what is missing from my list? For most of my current tasks I have found solutions with which I’m happy. There are nevertheless some gaps.

For example, I have never really settled on a mediaplayer, and use anything from WinAMP and Media Player Classic to Windows Media Player. Suggestions are always welcome…

I’d been keeping tabs on this topic, and saw it spreading slowly through the Opera blogging sphere. There have been a few wishes prevalent throughout, and I will not include them in my list, though I thoroughly agree with them: developer tools and automatic updates. I personally don’t care much for another popular request: inline spell checking (I have it turned off in any word processor I use. Using a spell checker is a lousy excuse for not thoroughly proofreading your text).

Now, without further ado, here’s my list:

1. M2 improvements
   At the top of my list, and for good reasons. I’ve been using M2 as my main e-mail client since the very early Opera 7 days. It has been a while since I could say I loved M2, nowadays it is mostly a matter of not having found a better e-mail client (which still says something about M2’s qualities).
   Some improvements in performance when fetching newsfeeds are apparently scheduled for Kestrel, but I’m mostly interested in new functionality.
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   In no particular order, a selection of what I would like to see in M2: ability to perform actions without actually filtering (e.g. adding labels based on search matches, automatically forwarding e-mails), being able to ‘fix’ broken threads, support for Request Receipt (it’s an absolute necessity in business settings), grouping newsfeeds in folders, removing attachments, supporting vcards for contacts, etc.

2. unified back-end
   Things like history, bookmarks, notes, blocked content, cookies, users js etc. are all intertwined and should be treated as such. Currently Opera’s back-end consists of a hotch-potch of file formats. This is also reflected in the diverse UI’s for the various components, and lack of integration between them. A unified backend for these systems would probably also make it possible to create a truely powerful site manager, for Wand, cookies, prefs, and User JavaScript.
3. UI cleanup and polish
   I’m a stickler for consistency, and that, unfortunately, is not a label you can attach to Opera’s UI. Parts of the UI still date back to Opera 7, notably the dark harsh blue of the dialogs, compared to the smoother grey-blue of the standard skin. Look at Firefox’s preferences, and at Opera’s. Then honestly tell me which one is cleaner and clearer.
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   I rest my case.

4. CSS3 print support
   I’ve started using HTML+CSS for laying out letters and reports as well as webpages. I would like to see some of the features offered by Prince in Opera as well.
5. search bar
   If I’m not mistaken, by default Opera doesn’t use incremental search on webpages, but instead displays a search dialog when you press ctrl-f. Replacing that dialog with a search bar (such as in FF) would not only provide incremental search to a far greater number of people, but would also allow for more search options such as case sensitivity, RegExp, forward/backward, etc.

I won’t tag anyone else, as it feels a bit too much chain-letter-esque… but if you read this, and would like to consider yourself tagged… go ahead!