Review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

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I just finished reading “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson and thought I would give my thoughts.

It is the story of a journalist (Blomkvist), who seemed to me entirely believable despite having high moral principles, who has been duped into printing a libellous story by a Swedish billionaire who has gained his fortune by criminal means while pretending to be legitimate. Blomkvist is sent to prison for the story and is then hired by another eccentric retired industrialist to hunt for somebody whom, he claims, killed his grand-daughter many years before. He gives Blomkvist a dossier he has collected over the years and the promise of rich rewards including secret information which will uncover the gangster’s criminality.

The book is advertised as a gripping page-turner but on several occasions I got really bored with all the tedious and apparently irrelevant details. Having heard it was a good book I persisted and and skipped forward. I’m glad I did because when Salander comes to help  Blomkvist,   things start to get interesting.

Salander is the girl with the Tattoo. She claims to be Sweden’s best hacker, and uses this skill to obtain information for a security firm. Her personal life is a mess, and is a ward of court. She hates authority and the police and has almost no morals (the exact opposite of Blomkvist in fact). The character is believable, although I am not sure I believe that anyone whose personal life is so disorganised could be mentally well organised. A well organised person tends to want their home well organised too. Disorganisation is just too inefficient and wastes time.

With her help, three quarters of the way through the story, we find out who the murderer is and I felt bored again. He takes Blomkvist prisoner and I did not really care if he killed him or not. Luckily I kept reading, or at least skimming, and I’m glad because this turned out not to be the right murderer, and the hunt for the real one went on.

The security aspects of the story were thought provoking. For example at one stage Salander says “it takes thirty seconds to download a programme from the Net that can crack Word’s encryption protection”. That had me running to the Internet to check. There are programmes which can crack open a password-protected Word document by brute force, trying millions of different passwords a minute. But in fact if you chose the right encryption method and a suitable password, Word is pretty secure. For details see:

http://www.oraxcel.com/projects/encoffice/help/How_safe_is_Word_encryption.html

I have to admit that as a result of reading this, I changed the password and encryption method of my important documents.

I had a number of niggles with the book. Not just the boring passages. The author (or at least the translator) writes time as 8.00 instead of 8:00 and spells program (meaning computer software) as programme.

But in general it’s a 7/10 book. I like the rapid switching between very brief scenes as both characters conduct their own lines of investigation. That keeps the action moving, and makes up for the boring parts.

Taking a big risk, letting people comment on the History of the Universe website via Facebook

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Several years ago I allowed people to comment directly on pages in History of the Universe but tended to get some not very interesting comments (a bit like the comments I make in this blog, you might be thinking?) so I took the comments out. I also had a forum in there for a long time, and while there were a few thoughtful comments there were thousands of pages of spam.

The problem is that I did not have time to moderate all the comments I get from 800,000 visitors a year.

Now I’m hoping that, by only allowing people to comment if they are signed into Facebook, I will get some genuine comments. Even if they’re adverse, at least they will gain HOTU a tiny bit more publicity and so, perhaps, more visitors.

We’ll see. I’m going to upload the new pages in the next few minutes.

The upload was easy. The hard part was trying to get the moderation to work. I failed. It might be because of something my host (GoDaddy) is doing, but I am unable to moderate comments. All I can do, if they get out of hand, is to remove them from the site.

Pity, but perhaps it will be worth it to gain a bit of wider exposure thru Facebook.

Ways to Save #7: Focus on your priorities

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The best way to save time is to borrow a tip from the business world where “time management” is an oft-repeated mantra. And the fundamental premise of excellent time management is to do the most important tasks first.

Don’t waste time on trivia, tempting as it may be to get the easy things out of the way first. While you are doing that you are wasting precious moments when an important job is sitting unattended.

No, the best policy is to focus, Focus, FOCUS on the things that really matter. So now all you have to is figure out which things they are…

Joomla-ing again. Still trying to learn how to use it. I cannot resist a challenge

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I want to publish a piece of my writing and I don’t think this blog is the right place for it. I think a Joomla site would be better.

Joomla is a Content Management System (CMS) which allows one or a thousand users to manage a website in what is supposed to be a simple way. I have tried about four times to understand how to use it, without success. But I cannot allow a piece of software to defeat me, so I am once again trying to set up a Joomla site.

This was stimulated because GoDaddy (which hosts my sites) has just upgraded to the latest version of Joomla. Previously I was nervous about using it because they were installing an older version.

Ok, so that will be my work for the next few hours.

Two hours later

In the past two hours I have managed to change menus, added a Google Adsense banner and begun to explore how to get rid of the large image at the top of the screen. It seems that it comes down to editing either PHP code or CSS style sheets.

So clearly Joomla is as horrible to use as I thought it might be. The reason, of course, is that it’s free software so nobody really is responsible for making it user friendly.

Is it worth spending some more hours on it? It seems you can configure banners to display for limited time and to track clicks. That might be useful one day, but I still feel I could do the same thing myself in half the time by just writing PHP code. What’s the benefit of using Joomla if you’ve still got to edit code?

Also, because there’s a big MYSQL database in the background, the whole thing is pretty slow.

Ah well, time for lunch…

After my lunchtime stroll I decided to try JUST ONE MORE TIME to make Joomla work by finding a user-friendly template… It’s 15:09 now. I’ll see how long it takes.

Two more hours

Now it’s 17:09 and I’ve managed to add a template which allows me to do some stuff (even tho I STILL have to edit CSS code). But I’m learning to handle menus, categories, articles, links etc etc. It’s slow going, but worth persevering a little in case it turns out to be useful. For example, I can use it to restrict access to pages for only certain visitors. If I could make this a subscription service I could perhaps generate a little money that way, once I’ve got Cosmic Monopole as a flash-based system. Perhaps?

A few hours later

To make the page look presentable is difficult. Finally I decided that for now I will not use Joomla to present my writing. I am too busy with other things to find the time to make the pages look good. Pity, because potentially it could have been an excellent system.

Editing History of the Universe eBook

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Long gone are the days when an author could just write a book and let somebody else get on with the process of publishing it. Now you have to design a book from the beginning with eBook publication in mind. My primary market is the Amazon Kindle, since the only viable alternative at the moment is to publish through SmashWords and that route is filled with difficulties, whereas Kindle publishing is relatively straightforward.

When I say “relatively”, I chose my word carefully. Even publishing a simple book to a Kindle can be tricky, and the History of the Universe is by no means simple. It is filled with hundreds of images and thousands of cross-references. It took me many hours to work out the best way to produce it, and I am still learning. Here, for example, is a small sample of the instruction manual I am forced to write so I will remember how to fix problems in future. As background you might need to know that I am writing the document in Word and using MobiPocket Creator to convert to mobi.

Import htm into opf

  1. Copy HistoryOfTheUniverseWordFiltered.htm into HistoryOfTheUniverse2 folder
  2. Open HistoryOfTheUniverse2\Historyoftheuniverse2.opf
  3. Delete Publication Files Table of Contents and HistoryOfTheUniverseWordFiltered.htm
  4. Drag and drop HistoryOfTheUniverseWordFiltered.htm into Publication Files
  5. Goto Table of Contents and Add a Table of Contents for h1 and h2

Guides should already be ok.

Build and check warnings

Errors are as follows

Error: Images from AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word\images

In Word, images can be sourced from

{ INCLUDEPICTURE “C:\\Users\\PhilBrown\\AppData\\Roaming\\Microsoft\\Word\\images\\pennypresslogo.jpg” \* MERGEFORMAT \d }

Instead of

{ INCLUDEPICTURE “images/adsorption.png” \* MERGEFORMAT \d }

Fix problem

Problem is caused because image is embedded in document instead of having a link. Can replace with link or search and replace.

In latter case, show Word View field codes

Select Search Options Match case to stop images being replaced with capitals.

Fix Method Fails

18-1-12

This method fails if the image also has a link, since the hyperlink is shown by field codes and masks the image source.

Eg \images\frontpageebook_01.jpg

So need to fix the source by editing html at end

Wyken Seagrave’s Blog Indexed by Google

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It’s been live for five days and, without having to be asked, the kind folks at Google have popped along and indexed this blog. Fame, fame, fame at last!!

I think therefore I’M PROBABLY WRONG

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Rene Descartes wrote “Je pense donc je suis,” (I think therefore I am) in his Discourse on Method in 1637.

I have taken the liberty to change it to:

I think therefore I am probably wrong

This was one of those ideas which sometimes pop into my head to lighten up my day.

In Time Crystal it is something which either Alex or George might say.

History of the Universe website now has lots of new features

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There are now lots of new features on the History of the Universe website such as easy access to the current location within the site, much easier retrieval of advanced information, repair of some broken links and a wider range of useful links than ever before.

Visit the site and let me know what you think.

Ways to save #1: Make a litre of tea in a flask

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I am going to blog ten ways to save either time, money, energy or all of them. Here is number one.

Make a litre of tea in a flask

I used to make about five cups of tea every morning. I would use these times to take breaks from writing. I would always throw away the last centimetre of tea in the cup (a habit picked up in childhood when there were always tea-leaves in the bottom of the cup). Often I would throw away the whole cupful, if it had gone cold while I worked. I usually drank little or nothing in the afternoon.

It used to cost me five tea-bags, five sweeteners, boiling 2.5 litres of water and about 300 ml of milk

Now I make a litre of tea in a flask twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Each one costs me two teabags, four sweeteners, 1.2 litres of boiled water and 100 ml of milk. I throw away little or nothing. At the end of the day I know I have drunk my quota of two litres of liquid.

There is a downside, of course. The taste is not so good as in a cup and I do not have regular little breaks from work. But in fact I get more work done, so this can be seen as a benefit!

The bad taste arises (at least in a hard-water area) because of deposits inside the flask. This can be removed by adding a little bicarbonate of soda and a little hot water and swishing about for a while.