Author Archives: wjduquette

Unknown's avatar

About wjduquette

Author, software engineer, and Lay Dominican.

Notebook 3 Markup Design

Posted on by

I’m beginning to contemplate extending and changing Notebook’s preferred markup for Notebook 3. The plan is as follows:

  • Notebook 2 markup (nbm2) will continue to be supported indefinitely. In Notebook 3, you can choose the kind of markup you want to use, page by page.
  • Notebook 3 markup (nbm3) will be based on nbm2, but won’t be identical. It will be extended (i.e., with support for tables) and may have other changes designed to make it easier to use, easier to parse, more powerful, or all three.
  • If nbm3 turns out not to simply be a superset of nbm2, I expect to provide a translator between nbm2 and nbm3 so that you can easily update your old pages if you would like to.

In short, while I’m not setting out to define something entirely different, I’m open to making significant changes as well.

So…if there’s something about the existing notebook markup that you dislike, or something that you’d like to have, please get in touch! (Note that there are already quite a few requests in the bug tracker.)

I’ll give an example: In nbm3, enclosing a word or phrase in stars *really* ought to make it boldface, as that’s a convention most of use in e-mail and other plain text anyway. So nbm3 might handle boldface like this:

  • Star-notation, i.e., *this is bold*, might replace apostrophe notation, i.e., '''this is bold'''; or we might support both.
  • The older <b>this is bold</b> notation will be retained, as it can work in cases where one of the other forms would be ambiguous.

If you’ve got opinions, let them be heard!

I had not realized…

Posted on by

…that blogging was mentioned in scripture. But there, right at the beginning of Psalm 144, I find this:

Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for battle, my fingers for war.

And, of course, what else does a blogger rely on but his fingers?

Landfall, by Nevil Shute

Posted on by

An RAF pilot is patrolling the English Channel, looking for threats to British shipping. A submarine is spotted, and the pilot moves quickly to sink it with his plane’s torpedoes. When he returns to shore, he’s accused of having sunk a British submarine. The pilot claims otherwise, but fragments of a British sailor’s uniform are found floating on the surface near where the submarine went down.

That’s the set-up of this wartime novel; the pilot’s career then takes an abrupt right turn, and therein hangs the tale. Naturally, there’s also the love of a good woman involved, and a lot of interesting stuff happens.

On the one hand, this is probably the weakest Shute I’ve read. On the other hand, I stayed up late one night to finish it. You do the math.

The Innocent Mage, by Karen Miller

Posted on by

This is an intriguing book. Miller’s first, it’s a remarkably clumsy endeavor; the character development is uneven, the characters’ temperaments shift with the winds of the plot, and Miller exhibits the worst ear for names I’ve run into since The Sword of Shannara. I got it to read on a plane, and otherwise might not have gotten very far with it, as the first few pages did not bode well for the rest of the book.

And yet, for all its faults I soon found myself wanting to know what was going to happen. And then there were some really neat bits of misdirection toward the end of the book, where Miller was clearly telegraphing X and then did something from another alphabet entirely. And then it ended with a cliffhanger…well, not exactly a cliffhanger…and so I had to go buy the second book, The Awakened Mage, which finishes the story. So it’s clumsy, yes, but Miller’s skill clearly increased during the writing of it, and I’m curious to see where she takes it.

It takes place in the magically protected Kingdom of Lur, a land inhabited by two races: the Olken and the Doranen. The Doranen, the ruling elite, are nearly all gifted with magical talents; they came to Lur as refugees from a sorcerous war that destroyed their home. The Olken, the native folk of Lur, are the common folk; and they don’t do magic. It’s a capital offense for them even to try. And that’s important, because magic is all that’s protecting Lur from Morg, the evil wizard who conquered the Doranen’s homeland.

Morg. I ask you.

Enter Asher, youngest son of a large family of Olken fisherman. Tired of being under his brothers’ thumbs, he sets out for the capital to seek his fortune…which naturally he finds, far more easily than you might expect. (There are prophecies involved.) And then, of course, Morg is released, naturally, and, well, it doesn’t sound particularly fresh, does it?

And yet there’s something there. I’ll let you know how it comes out.

What She Said

Posted on by

Jennifer linked to Aimee Milburn’s story of how she became Catholic; and one paragraph in particular explains what led me back to the Roman Catholic Church. With no wish to offend my friends of other denominations or faiths, this really is what I believe:

I also realized that if I really, really trust Christ, then I must trust his words that he founded the Church, and the gates of hell would not prevail against it – and so they never have. To say that the Catholic Church failed and some ordinary man had to come along and re-found Christianity is to say that Christ failed. That is the implication in what Protestants say – and Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and any number of other groups who claim to have “found” the truth that was “lost.” But Christ could not have failed – and he does keep his promises, and always has. I trust that. And history bears it out, if you study the history of the faith in the first 1500 years of Christianity. It did not die out, and there have always been men and women of very great faith in Christ, in every era.

Parish Phone Directories

Posted on by

So Jane had a meeting with the RCIA coordinator today, to talk about the RCIA program; unfortunately, she may be the only person in it this year, which means it won’t do much to help her meet folks. Be that as it may, while they were talking Jane asked if she could get a copy of the parish phone directory—and was met with genuine surprise. Apparently we don’t have a phone directory, and the RCIA coordinator had never heard of such a thing.

So to all the Catholics who might be reading this, is this typical? I know that St. James put together a phone directory with photos of the parishioners twenty-five years or so ago, because I remember getting my picture taken for it, so it isn’t completely unheard of…but are they really that uncommon?

By What Authority, by Mark P. Shea

Posted on by

I mentioned Mark Shea‘s book By What Authority: An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition, in my recent series of posts about becoming Catholic. I read it six months or so ago, and didn’t review it at that time, as it raised issues I wasn’t ready to talk about publicly. I leafed through it while writing that series, and decided it was time to read it again, which I have; and this time I’m going to talk about.

By What Authority is, in some ways, Mark’s own story about becoming Catholic. While yet an Evangelical Christian, Mark came across the work of the so-called “Jesus Seminar”. It was clear that John Dominic Crossan et al were off-base, and particularly so in their inclusion of the Gospel of Thomas in with the canonical four. The canon of scripture is what it is, and can’t be changed. But that led Mark to ask where the canon of scripture itself came from. For a Bible-believing Evangelical, that turns out to be a particularly vexed question.

I won’t try to summarize Mark’s investigations and arguments; it’s an interesting story, well-told, which ends with the firmly supported conclusion that the canon of scripture rests on nothing and nothing but the apostolic tradition received by those who determined which books would be canonical and which would not. And if we accept this apostolic tradition, how can we not accept the other traditions handed down by the apostles and their successors?

Suffice it to say that Mark tells the story (and makes the argument) much better than I would have. Intellectually speaking, this book was instrumental in bringing me home to Rome, and probably more so than anything else I read over the last year.