So, I’ve been spending a bit of time recently on a new project which is a hugely interesting one. It basically ties together all my interests.

I was contacted by the Japan Deaf Evangel Mission, (ViBi) who said “Hey, we hear you’re a missionary in Japan and you have an interest in sign language and you can program computers. We need you.” Read more about A little project I'm working on called "changing global Deaf culture"

I’ve wanted one of these for various visualizations I’ve been doing, and nothing has quite worked out, so I made my own. Read more about GeoJSON map of Japanese prefectures

So I play go, and I publish books. Because of the book thing, I keep thinking about new publishing technologies: e-readers, ebooks, HTML5 and so on. I’ve come to the conclusion that go books are an area where e-publishing can bring a real transformative change. Read more about Ebooks and HTML5 should revolutionize go teaching

Sorry to get all evidence-based on you but I’m hearing people panicking and fleeing Tokyo because of the oncoming radiation apocalypse. Now this is the sort of thing that could easily be overtaken by events but let’s have a look at how much radiation is hitting Tokyo right now. Read more about Radiation in Tokyo - how to read a Geiger counter

Since I’m Mr Everything-should-be-Unicode…

Read more about Typesetting with Perl, part iii

% cat cicero.cic 
[% fontsize = 24; bold; lead = 30 %]The Cicero document processing system

[% fontsize = 12; roman; color = "%00ff0044" %]Simon Cozens

[% color = "black"; lead = 14 %]This text is typeset by the Cicero
document processing system.

[% PERL %]
for (6..12) { 
    $stash->set("fontsize",$_); 
    Cicero::typeset("The square of $_ is ".$_*$_.".\n\n") 
}
[% END %]
% cicero cicero.cic
% open cicero.pdf

Read more about Typesetting with Perl, part ii

So, the much-vaunted police.uk launched today, purporting to show street-level crime figures for the UK. I’d provide a link to it, but there’s no point, because it doesn’t work. Instead, I’ll link to this BBC article which says, essentially, that it got Slashdotted. Read more about The Cloud solves everything, right?

So recently I wrote a Perl script to automatically generate cover PDFs for a series of books I’m working on over at Wide Margin. This used the rather good PDF::API2 module to assemble the text and graphics onto the PDF. Now I’ve got the book in my hand, I’m a little bit disappointed by the typesetting of the blurb on the back cover.

This graphic shows the problem:

Guess how I solved it? Read more about Typesetting with Perl

So much digital ink has already been spilled on the subject of Wikileaks that I wasn’t sure there was any interesting contribution left to make. But yesterday I was helping to teach our MA course on leadership and organisational change, and we were looking at the idea of the third wave and what it means for organisations.

During the session, I mentioned that I thought Wikileaks was an incredibly important demonstration of what Manuel Castells calls decentered interconnectedness. At which point Rob said “and look for the rest on Simon’s blog in the next few days.” Which I took to be a challenge… Read more about What Wikileaks says about us as a species

I piped every single books-versus-ebooks article I could find into Dissociated Press, and the result is… yet another books-versus-ebooks article.