Posts tagged as “Webworks”

Uh … What the?

Published February 4, 2016 by centaur

So, as you may or may not know, I’m trying to blog every day this year, and just now, taking a brief respite after my red-eye flight, I decided to extend my tracking spreadsheet from just January to cover February. And when I did so … my tracking graphic suddenly turned into … I don’t know … an origami Pac-Man?

I’m not even sure how this particular chart type could make the above graphic, so I’m not sure how to fix it. This probably should get filed under “if you break the assumptions of a piece of software’s inputs, it will break your assumptions about its outputs.” Best thing to do is probably start over with a new graphic.

-the Centaur

Welcome to 2016

Published January 1, 2016 by centaur

Hi, I’m Anthony! I love to write books and eat food, activities that I power by fiddling with computers. Welcome to 2016! It’s a year. I hope it’s a good one, but hope is not a strategy, so here’s what I’m going to do to make 2016 better for you.

First, I’m writing books. I’ve got a nearly-complete manuscript of a steampunk novel JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE which I’m wrangling with the very excellent editor Debra Dixon at Bell Bridge Books. God willing, you’ll see this come out this year. Jeremiah appears in a lot of short stories in the anthologies UnCONventional, 12 HOURS LATER, and 30 DAYS LATER - more on that one in a bit.

I also have completed drafts of the urban fantasy novels SPECTRAL IRON and HEX CODE, starring Dakota Frost and her adopted daughter Cinnamon Frost, respectively. If you like magical tattoos, precocious weretigers, and the trouble they can get into, look for these books coming soon - or check out FROST MOON, BLOOD ROCK and LIQUID FIRE, the first three Dakota books. (They’re all still on sale, by the way).

Second, I’m publishing books. I and some author/artist friends in the Bay Area founded Thinking Ink Press, and we are publishing the steampunk anthology 30 DAYS LATER edited by Belinda Sikes, AJ Sikes and Dover Whitecliff. We’re hoping to also re-release their earlier anthology 12 HOURS LATER; both of these were done for the Clockwork Alchemy conference, and we’re proud to have them.

We’re also publishing a lot more - FlashCards and InstantBooks and SnapBooks and possibly even a reprint of a novel which recently went out of print. Go to Thinking Ink Press for more news; for things I’m an editor/author on I’ll also announce them here.

Third, I’m doing more computing. Cinnamon Frost is supposed to be a mathematical genius, so to simulate her thought process I write computer programs (no joke). I’ve written up some few articles on this for publication on this blog, and hope to do more over the year to come.

Fourth, I’m going to keep doing art. Most of my art is done in preparation for either book frontispieces or for 24-Hour Comics Day, but I’m going to step that up a bit this year - I have to, if I’m going to get (ulp) three frontispieces done over the next year. Must draw faster!

Finally, I’m going to blog more. I’m already doing it, right now, but one way I’m trying to get ahead is to write two blog posts at a time, publishing one and saving one in reserve. This way I can keep getting ahead, but if I fall behind I’ve got some backlog to fall back on. I feel hounded by all the ideas in my head, so I’m going to loose them on all of you.

As for New Year’s Resolutions? Fah. I could say “exercise more, blog every day, and clean up the piles of papers” but we all know New Year’s Resolution’s are a joke, unless your name is Jim Davies, in which case they’re performance art.

SO ANYWAY, 2016. It’s going to be a year. I hope we can make it a great one!

-the Centaur

Pictured: The bookshelves of Cafe Intermezzo in the Atlanta airport, one place where I like to write books and eat food.

Soon

Published November 15, 2015 by centaur

Soon I will update the Library of Dresan WordPress code. This is in preparation for a site overhaul, but before I get there, I’m trying to radically improve how I do my backups, which involves seriously upgrading the WordPress code.

In preparation for that, I’m backing the site up several different ways, making sure I have the files AND the database securely downloaded and safe. However, something always can go wrong, so keep your fingers crossed.

And if the site mysteriously disappears for a few days, well, you heard why, here, first.

-the Centaur

Word! What are you DOING?

Published November 3, 2013 by centaur

Screenshot 2013-11-03 15.36.00.png

I love Microsoft Word, but when I cut and pasted that excerpt from MAROONED into Ecto and published, I noticed a huge blank gap at the beginning of the quoted passage. When I looked in Ecto's raw text editor to see what was the matter, I found 336 lines of gunk injected by Microsoft Word … a massive amount of non printable goop like this:

<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>

<w:WordDocument>

...

This is apparently XML text which captures the formatting of the Word document that it came from, somehow pasted into the HTML document. As you may or may not be able to see from the screenshot above, but should definitely be able to see in the bolded parts of what I quoted above, for 1183 bytes of text Word injected 17,961 bytes of formatting. 300+ lines for 200+ words. Oy, vey. All I wanted was an excerpt without having to go manually recreate all my line breaks …

I understand this lets you paste complex formatting between programs, I get that, and actually the problem might be Ecto taking too much rather than Word giving too much. Or perhaps it's just a mismatch of specifications. But I know HTML, Word, Ecto, and many other blogging platforms like Ecto. What is someone who doesn't know all that supposed to do? Just suffer when their application programs get all weird on them and they don't know why?

Sigh. I'm not really complaining here, but it's just amusing, after a fashion.

-Anthony

Back to the Future with the Old Reader

Published March 23, 2013 by centaur

As I mentioned in a previous post, Google Reader is going away. If you don't use RSS feeds, this service may be mystifying to you, but think of it this way: imagine, instead of getting a bunch of Facebook, Google+ or Twitter randomized micro-posts, you could get a steady stream of high-quality articles just from the people you like and admire? Yeah. RSS. It's like that.

So anyway, the Reader shutdown. I have a lot of thoughts about that, as do many other people, but the first one is: what the heck do I do? I use Reader on average about seven times a day. I'm certainly not going to hope Google change their minds, and even if they do, my trust is gone. Fortunately, there are a number of alternatives, which people have blogged about here and here.

The one I want to report on today is The Old Reader, the first one I tried. AWESOME. In more detail, this is what I found:

It has most, though not all, features of Google Reader. It's got creaky corners that sometimes make it look like features are broken, but as I've dug into it, almost everything is there and works pretty great.
It was able to import all my feeds I exported via Google Takeout. Their servers are pretty slow, so it actually took a few days, and they did it two passes. But they sent me an email when it was done, and they got everything.
The team is insanely responsive. They're just three guys - but when I found a problem with the Add Subscription button, they fixed it in just a couple of days. Amazing. More responsive than other companies I know.

There are drawbacks, most notably: they don't yet have an equivalent for Google Takeout's OPML export. But, they are only three guys. They just started taking money, which is a good sign that they might stay around. Here's hoping they are able to build a business on this, and that they have the same commitment to openness that Google had.

I plan to try other feed readers, as I can't be trapped into one product as I was before, but kudos to The Old Reader team for quickly and painlessly rescuing me from the First Great Internet Apocalypse of 2013. I feel like I'm just using Reader, except now I have a warm fuzzy that my beloved service isn't going to get neglected until it withers away.

-the Centaur

A Ray of Hoops

Published March 15, 2013 by centaur

So, after my scare over almost losing 150+ files on Google Drive, I've made some progress on integrating Google Drive and Dropbox using cloudHQ. The reason it wasn't completely seamless is that I use both Google Drive and Dropbox on my primary personal laptop, and cannot afford to have two copies of all files on this one machine. The other half of this problem is that if you only set up partial sync of certain folders, then any new files added to the top folder of Google Drive or Dropbox won't get replicated - and believe it or not, that's already happened to me. So I need a "reliable scheme" I can count on.

The solution? Set up a master folder on Google Drive called "Replicated", in which everything that I want to keep - all my Google Docs, in particular - will get copied to a folder of the same name called "Replicated" in Dropbox. For good measure, set up another replication pair for the Shared folder of Google Drive. The remaining files, all the Pictures I've stored because of Google Drive's great bang for the buck storage deal, don't need to be replicated here.

The reason this works is that if you obey the simple anal-retentive policy of creating all your Google Docs within a named folder, and you put all your named folders under Replicated, then they all automatically get copied to Dropbox as documents. I've even seen it in action, as I edit Google Docs and Dropbox informs me that new copies of documents in Microsoft Word .docx format are appearing in my drive. Success!

At last, I've found a way to reliably use Google Drive cloud. Google doesn't always support the features you want, or the patterns of usage that you want, but they're deeply committed to open APIs, to data liberation, and to the creation of third party applications that enable you to fill the gaps in Google's services so that you aren't locked in to one solution.

Breaking News: Google Reader canceled. G*d dammit, Google…

Next up: after my scare of losing Google Reader, a report on my progress using The Old Reader to rescue my feeds...

-the Centaur

Pictured: A table candle at Cascal's in Mountain View, Ca...

Rescuing Google Drive?

Published March 12, 2013 by centaur

Ok, the above is a rescue cat, but the point remains. In an earlier post I understandably got a bit miffed when moving a folder within Google Drive - an operation I've done before, many times - mysteriously deleted over a hundred and fifty files. I was able to rescue them, but I felt like I couldn't trust Google Drive - a feeling confirmed when the very next time I used it to collect some quick notes, the application crashed.

But I love the workflow of Google Drive - the home page of Google Drive can show you, very very quickly, either your hierarchy of folders, your recently accessed files, or a search of all your files, and once you've found a file it appears far quicker than most normal applications like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, or Photoshop. Word, Excel and Photoshop kick Google Drive's ass on specialized uses, but many documents don't need that, and Google Drive is a great alternative.

But what about files disappearing? A non starter. However, there are ways around that problem.

Google Drive of course has the ability to export files. You can even export an entire directory in this fashion. If you really want to get serious, you can use Google Takeout, a data migration tool by Google which enables you to export all your Google Drive data, part of Google's Data Liberation Front.

But all those rely on one time manual operations. I want something that works automatically, so for my money it's the Google Drive API that really comes to the rescue. That enables developers to create applications like cloudHQ, which syncs between Google Drive, Dropbox and several other services. I've tried out cloudHQ experimentally and it works on a single folder.

Next I'm going to try it on a larger scale, though it will require a little re-sorting of how I've got Dropbox and Google Drive working. Most likely, I'm going to need to either uninstall Google Drive from my primary computer and sync all its files into Dropbox by CloudHQ, or else manually unsyc certain folders so I don't get double-storage on this machine.

Regardless, there is a silver lining. Now let's see if it's also a silver bullet.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Me holding Loki, our outdoor rescue cat. He's large marge, let me tell you.

The End for Google Drive

Published March 3, 2013 by centaur

Screen Shot 2013-03-03 at 1.13.54 PM.png

Recently I was doing some task and needed to track down some information. I couldn't find the document I wanted at first in my Google Drive, but once I did, I realized I had several documents, all on the same topic, so I did with Google Drive the same thing I'd done before on Google Drive: I went to the Google Drive folder and reorganized the files.

Big mistake.

Quickly red "x's" started appearing in my folders. More and more "unsyncable" files started showing up in the Google Drive status list. And then a status message popped up: "The files you have deleted are now in Google Drive's Trash."

Uh-oh.

Understand: I had deleted no files or folders. I simply moved them around - and I've done this before. A lot. On Google Drive, not just Dropbox. But something apparently happened in the sync, and Google Drive thought I'd deleted the folders.

So it trashed all those files.

Understand, Google Drive "documents" on your hard drive aren't "documents"; they're little text files with pointers to a location in Google Drive, like this (where UNREADABLE_IDENTIFIER is a string of alphanumeric gobbledegook):

{"url": "https://docs.google.com/document/d/UNREADABLE_IDENTIFIER/edit", "resource_id": "document:UNREADABLE_IDENTIFIER"}

This pathetic little bit of nonsense is all I would have had left of a 200 word start to an essay - if I hadn't acted quickly. I started to look online, and found this alarming bit of information:

https://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2375102
Declutter your Google Drive by removing unwanted and outdated files, folders, and Google Docs from your Google Drive. Anything that you own and remove from Google Drive will be in the trash until you permanently delete or restore them.

Moving Google Docs files out of your Google Drive folder will cause their counterpart files on the web to be moved to the trash. If you then purge the trash, those files will become permanently inaccessible. Because the Docs files in your Drive folder are essentially links to files that exist online, moving these files back into your Drive folder after purging the trash online will not restore the files, as their online counterparts will have been deleted.

OMG! The contents of my documents may be lost forever if I purge the trash. But it gets worse...

http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2494934
If something in Google Drive is moved to the trash, you'll see a warning and you may lose access to it at any time. Read one of the following sections to learn how to restore it to your Google Drive from the trash. When you restore something, it'll be recovered in Google Drive on the web, to the Google Drive folder on your computer, and to your mobile devices.

If the item is in a folder, you’ll need to restore the entire folder to recover any individual items inside of it.

So I quickly returned to Google Drive. Everything you see above with a little red X was gone, all those files and 150 more. I hunted down the Trash (which was harder than you might think, as there was some persistent search in my Google Drive window that was removing the Trash folder from my view) and restored EVERYTHING that I had never deleted in the first place.

Now, this shouldn't have been a surprise. I always knew this could happen, ever since I gladly installed Google Drive on on my Mac in the hope that it would data liberate the Google Documents I had, only to find in my horror that Google Drive wasn't a syncing system, like Dropbox, but a cloud system, which is useless.

In case anyone misses the point: If you use Google Drive to store documents and also have the Google Drive client stored on a machine, Google Drive can get tricked into thinking you've deleted files, at which point it will move them to the Trash, at which point, unlike things you've deliberately trashed, it can delete them at any time - and you'll never get them back.

After some thought, I'm calling a hard stop on all use of Google Documents, except those I'm using to collaborate with others, where the collaboration features of the Google Doc outweigh the potential of risk. I can always save those files to a hard backup of a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet.

But I work for a living as a writer. And I can't work with a system that can arbitrarily trash hundreds of files and thousands upon thousands of words of documents with no hope of recovery just because I moved a folder … correctly.

Like Ecto, I have to rethink my use of these online tools - rethink them in a way that ensures that for every significant thing that I use in some convenient online system, I have a saved copy in an archivable backup.

More updates as I develop a new system.

-the Centaur

Blogging is like a job. One I’m bad at.

Published February 17, 2013 by centaur

One of the things I've always felt about myself is that I'm slow. I have ideas for fiction, but before I ever develop them, I see them brought to completion by someone else. When I was a child, I had a wonderful story involving spacecraft made to look like sailing ships, only to turn on my television to find that it had been done in Doctor Who.

Next I read Drexler's Engines of Creation shortly after it came out and planned a series of nanotech stories, before I'd ever read another science fiction author dealing with the theme. I was in college, still trying to finish my first novel, which I'd updated to include nanotechnology, when Michael Flynn published The Nanotech Chronicles.

Now in the blogoverse, things have gotten worse.

It's bad enough that my evil twin Warren Ellis, a man only one year older than me, has propelled himself to the pinnacle of the writing profession using only whisky and a cane while still blogging more than anyone could believe. Warren Ellis has his own ideas and I don't feel like we're competing in the same headspace.

No, my it's my nemesis John Scalzi, who has not only beaten me to the punch on the serialized novel The Human Division - I'm pretty sure my own designed-for-serialization novel THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE predates it, but my novel is still in beta draft while his is like, you know, released to accolades and stuff - but also somehow seems to have plugged into my brain by beating my blog to the punch on his Hobbit at 48 Frames Per Second impressions and his attempts to tame a feral cat - I mean, come on! Everyone saw The Hobbit but even if Scalzi has a direct pipeline to my brain, how does one arrange to have a feral cat fortuitously run by one's door so one can tame it right when someone else does? Is there a service for such things? Synchronicity Unlimited?

Now dark mental wizard Caitlin Kiernan has beaten me to the punch by blogging about the correct pronunciation of kudzu.

Sigh.

Alright, thanks, Caitlin, for breaking the ice on one of my pet peeves. For the record: if you are recording an audiobook and have a Southern character speaking or thinking, they will pronounce the Borg-like pest vine kudzu "CUD-zoo." A character who lives in another part of the country can call it "kood-zoo" all they want, but in my 38 years in The South I never heard it pronounced that, nor, after nine months of research, have I been able to find anyone from The South who calls it anything other than "CUD-zoo," nor have any of those people ever heard anyone from anywhere call it anything other than "CUD-zoo". (And Wikipedia backs me - it claims the pronunciation is /ˈkʊdzuː/, with the first u pronounced as the u in full and the second pronounced as the oo in food).

It wasn't so hard to say that, was it? Why didn't I say that earlier, nine months ago, when I first heard it in an audiobook (I think in The Magnolia League, but it might have been Fallen)? I know I've been busy, but how hard was it? But, according to the timestamp on the image I downloaded of Loki at the start of this blogpost, I've been at this "little" blogpost for about an hour.

What I'm saying is, blogging is like a job. You find things, reflect on them, and post about them; it takes time to do it right. But I already work two jobs: I've got a slightly-more-than-full-time job at The Search Engine That Starts With A G, and I'm also a slightly-less-than-full-time writer. So this, my third job, has to come behind hanging out with my wife, friends and cats. I'm taking time out from editing an anthology to write this, and that's taking out time from Dakota Frost #3 and THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE.

So: yes, I know. Lots to say, lots to do. Gun control. The Hobbit. Meteors falling from the sky and a drill making its way to a creepy buried lake in Antarctica. I'm working on it, I'm working on it - but two editors have claim on my writing first, and the provider of the paycheck that pays for this laptop has first claim on my time before that.

So if the freshness date on these blogposts is not always the greatest, well, sorry, but I'm typing as fast as I can.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Loki, our non-feral outdoor cat, who has grown very fat and but not very sassy given lots of love and can food.

A Really Good Question

Published December 14, 2012 by centaur

Recently I was driving to work and thinking about an essay by a statistician on “dropping the stick.” The metaphor was about a game of pick-up hockey, where an inattentive player would be asked to “drop the stick” and skate for a while until they got their head in the game. In the statistical context, this became the action of stopping people who were asking for help with a specific statistical task and asking what problem they wanted to solve, because often solving the actual problem may be actually very different from fixing their technical issue and may require completely different approaches. That gets annoying sometimes when you ask a question to a mailing list and someone asks you what you're trying to solve rather than addressing the issue you've raised, but it's a good reflex to have: first ask, "What's the problem?"

Then I realized something even more important about projects that succeeded or failed in my life – successes at radical off the wall projects like the emotional robot pet project or the cell phone robots with personalities project or the 3d object visualization project, and failures at seemingly simpler problems like a tweak to a planner at Carnegie Mellon or a test domain for my thesis project or the failed search improvement I worked on during my third year at the Search Engine that Starts with a G. One of the things I noticed about the successes is that before I got started I did a hard core intensive research effort to understand the problem space before I tackled the problem proper, then I chose a method of approach, and then I planned out a solution. Paraphrasing Eisenhower, even though the plan often had to change once we started execution, the planning was indispensable. The day-to-day immersion in the problem that you need for planning provides the mental context you need to make the right decisions as the situation inevitably changes.

In failed projects, I found one or more things – the hard core research or the planning – wasn’t present, but that wasn’t all that was missing. In the failure cases, I often didn’t know what a solution would look like. I recently saw this from the outside when I conducted a job interview, and found that the interviewee clearly didn't understand what would constitute an answer to my question. He had knowledge, and he was trying, but his suggested moves were only analogically correct - they sounded like elements of a solution, but didn't connect to the actual features of the problem. Thinking back, a case that leapt to mind from my own experience was a project all the way back in grade school, where I we had an urban planning exercise to create an ideal city. My job was to create the map of the city, and I took the problem very literally, starting with a topographical map of the city's center, river and hills. Now, it's true that the geography of a city is important - for an ideal city, you'd want a source of water, easy transport, a relatively flat area for many buildings, and at least one high point for scenic vistas. But there was one big problem with my city plan: there were no buildings, neighborhoods, or districts on it! No buildings or people! It was just the land!

Ok, so I was in grade school, and this was one of my first projects, so perhaps I could be excused for not knowing what I was doing. But the educators who set up this project knew what they were doing, and they brought on board an actual city planner to talk to us about our project. When he saw my maps, he pointed out this wasn't a city plan and sat down with all of us to brainstorm what we'd actually want in a city - neighborhoods, power plants, a city center, museums, libraries, hospitals, food distribution and industrial regions. At the time, I was saddened that my hard work was abandoned, and now in hindsight I'm saddened that the city planner didn't take a minute or two to talk about how geography affects cities before beginning his brainstorming exercise. But what struck me most about this in hindsight is that I really didn't know what constituted an answer to the problem.

So, I asked myself, “What counts as a solution to this problem?” – and that, I realized, is a very good question.

-the Centaur

Pictured: an overhead shot of a diorama of the control room of the ENIAC computer as seen at the Computer History Museum, and of course our friend Clarence having his sudden moment of clarity.

Viiiictory Seven Times

Published November 29, 2012 by centaur

For the seventh time, I've won the National Novel Writing Month "contest", completing 50,000 words of a new novel in just 30 days. Actually, it took me just 29 days. Woohoo!

This year's entry, SPECTRAL IRON, is the fourth book in the Dakota Frost series, my urban fantasy series featuring the best magical tattooist in the Southeast (and she's not afraid to tell you that herself). SPECTRAL IRON was a bit of a detour from the work I was doing to edit LIQUID FIRE, the third entry in the series, but I'm glad I did: SPECTRAL IRON taught me a lot about what makes a book coherent and I can use that to edit LIQUID FIRE.

So what is SPECTRAL IRON about? Originally, I was thinking the story was about a villain that murders ghosts, but now it's looking like the villain is a ghost who's a murderer. Maybe. There are some very interesting plot complications developing. Let me see if I can pull out an excerpt that doesn't give much away. Well, maybe it spoils a minor surprise, but it doesn't give away the plot. This is the kind of thing they'd put in a movie trailer. Regardless ... SPOILERS:

Now, all that was left was to walk down a hundred more yards of train tracks in the dark.

The dolly had left us, but the spotlight had not. The mobile klieg operator wheeled it forward, slowly, tracking me, Ron and Sunny as we walked down the pathetic, waterlogged track. The further we went, the more layers of mystery were stripped off, one by one, by the light.

By the end, we no longer stood in a chasm of night. We merely stood in a dilapidated warehouse loading bay, a long, low brick-walled chamber, weathered with graffiti, with chained-up wooden doors atop its loading dock and beer bottles in the puddles between its train tracks.

“Nothing here,” the Lady Nyissa said. “Nothing obvious, at any rate.”

I stopped before the back wall of the loading dock. It stretched up before us, a mottled wall of brick thirty feet wide and fifty feet high, with a notch cut out of its bottom right by the platform and another cut out the top by a door. Rusted zig-zag metal stairs led up to it.

“Well,” I said, putting my foot on the train-brake at the end of the tracks, staring down at the pathetic mud puddle rippling before us between the end of the tracks and the wall. “It looks like The Exposers have found another Al Capone’s vault.”

Oh, me and my dumb mouth.

From the water erupted a foul spray of black—topped by a bone white mask.

So, there's a few thousand more words of brain dump to go, and then it's back to editing LIQUID FIRE, revising THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, and working on the DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME anthology, oh, and revising my own story for the anthology, "The Doorway to Extra Time" ... aaaa! But at least I have this year's Nano victory to console me:

Regardless, now that Nanowrimo and 24 Hour Comics Day and the Google Holiday Toy Collection are all behind me, I'm looking forward to getting back to my other projects, including all my writing, the Dakota Frost blog, and, heck, I dunno, my wife, friends and cats. Onward and upwards!

-the Centaur

Derailed

Published November 16, 2012 by centaur

Software launches. Anthology editing. I am now officially behind. Time to get back to Nano.

Fortunately I have the next nine days off, starting with tomorrow!

This is why I plan Nano carefully ahead ... this always happens, so you need to plan to have a buffer ... not just getting ahead early, but a place and time to catch up later for if and when you fall behind.

-the Centaur

Just add a dimension

Published November 13, 2012 by centaur

At long last, the project I've been working on at the Search Engine That Starts With A G is live. The Google Shopping 3D experience has been launched to the world. From the blogpost:

Explore products in 360-degree detail on Google Shopping Having trouble imagining what a toy actually looks like from the online picture? Now, when searching for a subset of toys on Google Shopping, you can see 360-degree photos of the products. These interactive images bring the in-store feeling of holding and touching a product to your online browsing. Look for the “3D” swivel icon on the product image to see a toy in 360-degree view, on HTML5 enabled browsers. We’ve also put together a Holiday Toy Collection featuring this enhanced imagery—explore the collection on this site. 360-degree imagery is coming for other types of products soon.

Depending on how you count, we've been working on this project for six months, a year, a year and a half, or two years. We've been in launch crunch proper for six months or so, but planning for the launch began a year ago after the launch of the Galaxy Nexus in glorious 3D WebGL (and yes, it did take us the whole year to get this far, and it was really tight down near the end).

The technology demonstrations that led to that launch and made this launch possible began six months before that, and the actual team that was working on them started just over two years ago - and, honestly, it feels like we've been in crunches and sprints for the entire time. Christmas 2012 seemed both far away and far too soon a year ago. It was barely possible.

But we made it.

I don't share much about the innards of The Search Engine That Starts With A G, especially on a project like this, so I'm going to draw to a close with this thought: I work on a wonderful team filled with fantastic people, geniuses and innovators and hard workers all, and each and every one of them were really critical to making this possible (and I mean that. We had NO slack).

I'd be proud to go into [software] battle with you wonderful guys and gals, any time, any where.

-the Centaur

Pictured: the 3D (well, really 360-degree spinner) of the Lego Jabba palace. Article title shamelessly stolen from Asimov. Final quote thieved from Patton.

Postscript: You know, I said "geniuses and innovators and hard workers all" but it occurred to me afterward that most of what these geniuses achieved is not at all obvious. The greatest things we did in this project are completely invisible; you would only notice them if we had failed. Despite seeming to be very simple - a few links, a 3D icon, a rotating swivel - this project actually was the most technically rigorous one I've ever worked on, including both my PhD and the search engine startup I worked on. So when I said these guys are geniuses, I really mean that - they delivered perfection so great it becomes almost invisible.

You have got to be kidding me

Published November 9, 2012 by centaur

You have got to be kidding me.

I noticed a little extra space on my previous post at the top of a quote I pulled out of SPECTRAL IRON. I wanted to cut it out, so I went to Ecto, my blog client, and switched to its HTML mode. This is what I found embedded in my document as a result of the cut and paste - three hundred and thirty five lines of hidden goop, which looks like it came from Microsoft Word:

<p>

</p>

Charming! Feel like dieting much, Word? Axually, it looks like this may be part of a strategy to ensure formatted cut and paste works in Word and other programs, probably just interacting badly with Ecto.

S'ok, Word. We love you anyway, just the way you are.

-the Centaur

P.S. Pro tip: Option-Command-V pastes unformatted in Ecto.\

BLOOD ROCK is now on Audible!

Published October 10, 2012 by centaur

My second novel, BLOOD ROCK, is now available on Audible! Get it here: http://www.audible.com/pd/ref=sr_1_2?asin=B009NHDIBY Read by the awesome Traci Odom, I enjoyed hearing my own book brought to life and my wife's listened to the prerelease twice already. For a taste of the story:

“Dammit, dammit, dammit!” I cursed, slamming the school doors open and stomping out into the cold January Atlanta air. Once outside, facing bare trees in a bleak parking lot under a graymetal sky, I regretted my words— because the example I was setting was the problem.

I stopped, swung back, and reached one lanky arm out to stop the door from closing. Moments later, my daughter stepped out of the darkness, eyes blinking, whiskers twitching, holding her tiger’s tail in her hands before her like a portable lifeline.

The two of us looked as different as can be: me, a six-foot two woman in a long leather vestcoat, wearing my hair in a purple-and-black deathhawk that lengthens into feathers of hair curling around my neck, and her, a five-footnothing teenager in a pleated school skirt, taming her wild orange hair with a blue granola-girl headscarf that poorly hid her catlike ears.

“It’s OK,” I lied gently, putting my hand on Cinnamon’s shoulder; though we both knew it was very not OK. “We’ll find a school that will take you.”

Hope you all enjoy!

-the Centaur

Dragon*Con Reservation FU

Published October 10, 2012 by centaur

And I don't mean "fu" as in "kung fu".

Once again, Dragon*Con's main hotels have sold out almost a year in advance. The very nice hotel I was in this year, just up the street from The Big Five - the Marriott Marquis, the Hyatt Regency, the Hilton, the Sheraton, and the Westin - sold out before I'd checked out. Three of the Big 5 were sold out by the time I checked that afternoon. The Hilton has rooms at north of $300 a night.

Only the Marriott had rooms, which went on sale at 9:00AM EST today. Sold out by 9:45.

I didn't log on at 9:45, of course. I logged on at 9:00 AM sharp (necessitating getting up at 5AM PST). Dragon*Con's site was overwhelmed, but eventually I got on and got the login information at the very late time of 9:01AM EST. The login information didn't work, for the simple reason that it was wrong.

Sometime around 9:20ish this morning (don't remember the exact time), the overloaded Dragon*Con site (overloaded no doubt by people like me refreshing it looking for the correct Marriott Marquis login information) eventually refreshed and posted the correct login information. (The old data had dropped a digit at the end of the URL). I logged in, after several tries, around 9:21AM (really, pretty quickly), found a hotel room rapidly despite the sluggishness of the interface, and clicked Book.

Nothing.

The site was so overloaded that it wasn't responding to every click event (or, worse, the page got corrupted on download, so the Javascript for the button was broken; it isn't quite clear). I've been around the block, of course, so I had a different browser (Firefox rather than Chrome) and managed to log in there as well, and also found rooms - but the doubles were already sold.

This was around 9:30AM. Shit shit shit!

I continued this reservation. In the background, my original billing had finally timed out, but I kept going on the new one, which seemed to be working. It went all the way to booking, with weird requests for more and more information that kept slowing me down, but still, around 9:39AM EST, I had a correct credit card and was hitting send.

I captured a screenshot of what happened next and pasted it in the head of the article.

That's not a Photoshop, by the way - the "Some of the nights you have selected are no longer available" screen really did say FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU(*). I hit "back" on my previous reservation and, magically, the session wasn't expired. It permitted me to continue to book THAT reservation too, right up to the credit card as before. Same result - rooms no longer available.

And all were sold out when I started over.

I could tell you about my struggles with Expedia, but really, they were minor. I went to Expedia, put in the dates of my reservation, selected Downtown Atlanta, saw the hotels on a map, and picked one. The only problem was that clicking on a hotel closed the map and hitting back took you all the way back to the search screen, but I found a hotel, pretty close, pretty cheap.

Just before I hit "book it" I got a funny feeling and checked the hotel on Yelp. Yelp warned me off - in no uncertain terms - and I started my search again. This time I found an even closer hotel, slightly more expensive, near the Aquarium, with glowing reviews in Yelp and Expedia. Then, I found out I wasn't logged in to Expedia and had to start over. But then, when I did...

So maybe there IS reservation fu to be had here. For one of these crazy cons:

Check your con long in advance.
Find out when they book up.
Check their web site early.
Don't take the web site's word for it on the URL or login information if you're having trouble - look at it carefully, try it in several browsers, and check back to the web site if you have problems.
Try more than one browser if you've got the right information but are still having trouble.
Never, never, never give up - but change tactics if you've confirmed the failure.
Try calling them on the phone (I was doing this in parallel with all of the above).
Try using Expedia or your favorite reservation site - but use a map, or you'll get screwed.
Double confirm your choice with Yelp.
Make sure your credit card is handy and you're logged in to the site.
Make sure your rapid rewards or rewards plus or whatever information is on hand.
Never, never, never give up.

So ... I guess I'll be seeing you all next Dragon*Con!

-the Centaur

(*) Or maybe I just imagined that, and then Photoshopped the screencap to match my imagination. Who knows?

Too busy writing to be blogging

Published September 22, 2012 by centaur

Desperate to finish the draft of LIQUID FIRE, no blogging right now. More news in a bit. In the meantime, if you're interested in what I've written so far, please check out my Amazon Author page, http://amazon.com/author/anthonyfrancis.

-the Centaur

Asymmetric Warfare

Published August 20, 2012 by centaur

Offered without further comment, as part of the series Spam Investigations, because, looking back on that history, I've commented on this before. -the Centaur

Marketing yourself

Published August 11, 2012 by centaur

Recently a colleague asked me how I marketed my books since I "seem to be quite fabulous at it!" Well, *cough* I don't know about "fabulous," especially compared to authors like Diane Duane, Warren Ellis, Scott Westerfeld, and especially John Scalzi, all of whom kick my ass in that department. But I do have some ideas, and they do seem to work. So here we go.

First off, I'd love to say that promoting yourself all comes down to being authentic, but that's not true. We all probably know people who are really authentic who aren't popular - either because their true love is obscure, or because they're abrasive, or because, in the end, they're not really interested in being popular.

So what I really mean by being authentic is not promoting yourself for the point of promoting yourself. Little is more irritating than someone producing an enormous amount of hot air trying to market nothing more than thin air. Ideally, you should do good work, produce it regularly, and then, and only then, try to help people find it.

But even helping people find it can backfire. Most forums, whether online or in person, aren't meant for selling products or services - so marketing language is simply unwanted. So my philosophy for promoting myself is to honestly contribute to the conversation - to do good work online, to produce it regularly, and then, and only then, to help people find my work.

So how do you do that? Well, by blogging and tweeting and Facebooking and plussing, of course. My hope is that I contribute enough to the conversation to make people intrinsically interested in what I say. Once that happens, the work I'm trying to sell to people are my books. Here are the things I do to promote them, as told to my colleague, with light editing:

Have a website and keep it updated - My colleague did this already, so good for her! From a book marketing perspective, my own websites are nowhere near as updated as they should be (as of early August 2012) because I have too much writing to do and I'm using Facebook more, but you can't use Facebook for everything.
Have an individual page for each book - The page for each book should link to everyplace your book is available (again, I've let myself down here, that's out of date on my own Dakota Frost site! Argh!). This is important not just so people can find out what you're doing, but because it also enables ...
Take out a Google ad for each book - The Google ad needs to point to something and you can't point to Amazon or Audible because you don't own those sites. So you have to have a landing page for each book. This has a cost - depending on how much you want to do over the course of the year you could spend a thousand dollars plus on advertising. But it lands people on pages about your book, and then from there to buying it.
Consider blogging - Not just a web site, but an active blog listing the things that you're doing and involved in. More permanent than the other social media that I list below, and something that can refer to as a "master" page for media. My Library of Dresan site is my master site, where hopefully anyone who really wants to know more about what I'm doing can find anything they need to know.
Have a Facebook page for yourself - I actually have one for each series, http://facebook.com/dakotafrost, http://facebook.com/jeremiahwillstone, http://facebook.com/serendipitythecentaur - and update this as often as you can stand without becoming repetitive. Consider setting up your blog so it crossposts to Facebook, but be willing to engage Facebook conversations too.
Take out a Facebook ad for your page - Not as effective as a Google ad, but it slow and steady builds your fanbase. I've found that this builds your fanbase more than anything else you can do, and that Facebook fans are more engaged than anyone else I find in any other medium.
Treat your fans right - Don't just post what opportunities your fans have to buy your stuff, but engage them in the conversation and care about what they say. Your fan count can go down, not just up. People will desert you if you are an irritating toad or only talk to market or even if you just don't ever respond (or produce).
Get on other social networking services - as many as you can stand and still do each one justice. Twitter is a service that doesn't completely overlap Facebook and you can plug it into Facebook or WordPress on your blog. Google+ is another service that seems to have less traction but I've seen a LOT of content on there so it's coming. Consider Pinterest as it seems to have a lot of clickthrough to web sites.
Do everything your publisher asks you to do - My publisher and her team work hard to get my name out there and I accept as many of these appearances as I can. This may not apply to you and what you want to market, but if you have something to market, getting a publicist of your own might not be a bad idea (if you haven't already).
Participate in online and offline communities - science fiction conventions, radio shows, writer's conferences, be a guest at a con, go on a blogtour, give a talk, etc., etc. ... it all adds up. I got published because I took my laptop into the corner of Dragon*Con writer's track year after year, writing away ... and got noticed.

The big thing that you should be trying to do with all the above is:

Create an online presence which is genuine and has enough content for someone who's interested in you to find out more about you, within safety and reason in this crazy Internet stalker age
Use this platform to show people what you have to offer - sending them, via ads and posts and links to pages you control describing the books you've written or the comics you've done or ...
Make it easy for people to then buy what you have to offer - routing people from the pages you control to the places where people can actually buy the books, like Amazon or Etsy or Ebay or Audible or ...
Then produce more great stuff on a regular basis so people are always interested! This is actually more important than the first three. If you really do produce great work all the time, it will serve as its own publicity.

Basically, that's it. I'd love to do more than that (I axually NEED to do more than that because actually part of my writer/developer schtick is that I'm the writer-designer-coder-maintainer of my own websites) but I work for a living and write in all the rest of my free time and still have a wife, friends and cats, so I can only do what I have time to do, and that's it.
Then I go collapse into blissful unconsciousness.

There are some blogs out there which talk about marketing. Bob Mayer talks about it from an indie publishing perspective. My buddy Andy Fossett has written some articles on it from time to time and apparently had some success. Seth Godin has some interesting stuff to say about it. But in the end I just feed my head with those articles. I don't really have a marketing plan.

I do know I need to market myself, and I do by creating a number of sites online where people can read what I write, by working hard to create interesting content on those, and then by hoping people get lost in the content I've produced. That's why I wrote this article - because my colleague found the email that spawned it interesting, so I hope you will too.

That's not enough, of course. There are billions of pages on the web. I make mine visible by advertising them. I'm fortunate that I can afford to do that, but I'm also taking a very long view towards my career - I advertised FROST MOON a year or so before it came out, and it paid off. But beyond a bare minimum of advertising, I don't push it. I sit back and hope people like what I have.

Really, I don't have time to do more - I have to write, so I've produced something people have a chance to like.

Hope this helps!

-the Centaur

Is Spam out of Control?

Published March 3, 2012 by centaur

I don't know, you tell me. According to reports, somewhere between 75% and 90% of all email is spam, and if I read the numbers right, over 99.5% of all comments on this rather minor blog are spam. Yeah. That's extraordinary. That beats it all. -the Centaur