Still I’m really looking forward to getting into this book and the rest of the A Song of Ice and Fire series.¹ It has been recommended to me numerous times.²

I hesitated previously because I don’t like to start series that have not had their endings written. I made that mistake during high school in reading the first 8 tomes of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series — and I mean tomes, each book comes in around a thousand pages of tiny print. Twelve books and twenty years later, the author is dead and the story is still unfinished. I can’t see myself revisiting that one.

A Song of Ice and Fire has 4 books written and 3 more planned.

What has forced my hand a little is that a HBO adaption is imminent.³ But mostly no other highly recommended books comes to mind.

1. Could Martin’s choose cheezy titles for his book and series?
2. It’s the most popular fantasy series according to the “Internet Book List“, a fact I learned from Wikipedia.
3. HBO doing fantasy fiction is very exciting in itself!

This will allow me to enjoy a couple books that have images that are too small to get any of the details out of.

Although, I was now tempted by the possibility of getting technical books in the Amazon Kindle format, I was immediately disappointed that there is no way to copy text or search!

Below are some features to be added in the near future:

• Create notes and highlights
  Along with viewing the notes and highlights you created on other Kindle devices, you will be able to create and edit notes and highlights.
• Search
  You will be able to search to find a word or a sentence in the book you are currently reading.
• Zoom and rotate images
  Click on an image to see an expanded view and rotate it if desired.

I missed the news about the Apple-HTC Patent Lawsuit (Google Android) until tonight when I found out about it on Mark Jaquith’s blog.

I’m happy that these cards of Apple are finally on the table. I think Apple’s Multi-touch¹ related patents have been hanging over the heads of other hardware and software developers.

I don’t think I’ve ever found myself agreeing with John Gruber more:

“No doubt some of you are nodding your heads and see this as justification for Apple’s suit. But life isn’t fair. Great ideas make the world better. Apple can rightly expect to benefit greatly from the ideas embodied by the iPhone, but they can’t expect to reap all of the benefits from those ideas.

That’s the nature of implementing insanely great ideas. The bar has been raised, and, yes, Apple did most of the lifting. That’s how it goes.”

John Gruber, “Daring Fireball: This Apple-HTC Patent Thing“, Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Right now people are in their venting phase. What comes next?

Is there an effective protest against the Apple-HTC patent lawsuit? Particularly something that Apple customers should do?

I can’t see enough people caring, particularly on the eve of the iPad.

May 5th quotes from the comments:

Ian wrote “I think Apple customers should use one finger at a time in protest.”

Mark wrote “Apple has to operate in the system as it exists.”

Terry — how can I just choose one — wrote “I do think that holders of software patents should be forced to do some sort of licensing because of the chilling effect they’re having on innovation.”

1. Multi-touch is a touchscreen technology which allows gestures done with multiple fingers simultaneously to send complex commands to the device.

Christoph Niemann's illustration of spooning

I don’t remember who gave me the link to Christoph Niemann’s brilliant illustrations¹ in “Good Night and Tough Luck”, but often at night this image comes to mind.

It expresses so well my nightly ritual of trying to find a mutually comfortable place for my bottom arm.

My old standard was trying to weave it under her pillow above her head. The trouble with that move was the cold wall my wrist invariably is up against.

The challenges are currently heightened by my wife being pregnant.  The slightest variation to her pillow position affects her comfort.

Most recently I’ve been straight arming it at my side, but my arm tends to fall asleep, accelerating my turning over to actually fall asleep.

Where do you put the arm under you?

1. Spooning image ’09spooning03.jpg’ by Christoph Niemann. Published September 14, 2009. Original caption “The opposite of a mosquito is spooning: mosquitoes are awful, whereas spooning is super. The one thing I haven’t really figured out is where the person in the back is supposed to put that bottom arm.”

“It turns out that the International Intellectual Property Alliance, an umbrella group for organisations including the MPAA and RIAA, has requested with the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its “Special 301 watchlist” because they use open source software.”¹

By Bobbie Johnson, “When using open source makes you an enemy of the state“, guardian.co.uk, Feb 23rd, 2010.

Canada is already “special”. We, Canadians, welcome these innovative countries!²

1. The information above was dug up by Andres Guadamuz, a lecturer in law at the University of Edinburgh.
2. Hat tip for the link: Zé Fontainhas.

I’ve enjoyed not being able to keep up at all.

The sprint is on to feature freeze!

There’s going to be a patch sprint of sorts for 3.0 this week. Please grab a ticket, triage, patch or test:http://core.trac.wordpress.org/report/32. The feature freeze is March 1, so everything still on that report in 7 days from now will be punted to a future release.

There are a few incomplete tasks out there that need to get done to finish implementing new features (both small ones on that report, and the major 3.0 features). If you’re interested in helping but aren’t sure where you can, venture over to #wordpress-dev.

Andrew Nacin on wpdevel, Feb 22th, 2010

Jane Wells puts up a “Patches Welcome” sign on a “a handful of small UI enhancement tickets that are low priority for the hardcore devs, but that I’d still like to see make it into 3.0.” Jane will “try to post a couple of pet tickets each day throughout the sprint week that is coming up.”

Better, stronger, faster blog network creation and management will be huge!

Mostly I can’t wait for the twenty ten theme, and the slow death of the (poorly) justified text that may have been the Kubrick themes only shortcoming.

PS. Emphasis above and below (bold) is all mine.

PPS. WordPress 3 will look so good in the title of the next technical book you write

Wednesday, Feb 23, 2010 Update: Jane has posted “Menus, the Merge, and a Patch Sprint!“ with details on the WordPress Development Blog, including the tidbit that WordPress 3 will have much improved menu management.