PUBLIC MARKS with search count

loyalty is a two-way street. You can’t expect anyone to be loyal to a company, unless that company returns the sentiment. And a salary and benefits doesn’t count, that’s just economics.

Books need to be a predictable size; they have to be manufactured to a price, stored, transported and displayed. Then they have to fit on home bookshelves. People tend to like books that are easy to read, handle, and store. We generally like and need novels to be certain sizes. If you picked up a diary-sized novel in a series one day and the sequel was the size of a family bible, you'd probably find that annoying. I know many readers won't buy hardcovers and wait for mass market paperback editions simply because the regular size of "MMPBs" fits their bookcase, or is easier to carry around.

So, production editors and typographers do a very clever job of smoothing out that big variation using white space and font sizes to get more words on each page - or fewer. They're so good at doing it that a manuscript of 100,000 words can be made into a book that is identical in overall size to one up to twice the length. Don't believe me? Pick a few books at random, do a word count, and then look at the appearance of the pages. You won't notice it unless you're looking for it.

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Page count doesn't mean a thing. It doesn't tell you how much book you're getting for your money. And, to be brutal, if your evaluation of any book is based on how many words you get rather than the impact it has on you and how well it's written - well, that's just dumb. Sorry, but it is. It's not like a pound of apples for 50 pence being better value than a pound for 75 pence. You're not being short-changed if you get a shorter novel. And left wanting more is not being short-changed. It's what good books are supposed to do.

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So don't get hung up about counting pages. A book is as long as it needs to be to tell the story. Just open it, and enjoy.

Sticky posts are included only for the front page and do not count against the total. This is by design.

When someone creates a pdf the thing can be as many pages as possible, infinitely colourful and any dimension. Looking at this zine it felt considered with the pace of the images, page count and of course the writing.

count all the books in the world. There are 129,864,880 of them. At least until Sunday.

Mail logs are sent to a centralized syslog. I have a simple Python script that tails the common mail log file every 5 minutes, counts the lines that conform to a specific regular expression (looking for a specific msgid pattern), then inserts that count into a MongoDB database.

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# The way views are counted has improved. I learned ten days ago from Julien Hory that Dailymotion counts a view only after a couple of minutes, a time determined as the average viewing time on the site. Before you reach that mark, your view does not count. Cruel, we are not used to this, but it probably gives a much better view of reality.

how to stream iTunes over SSH, I finally tracked down the difficult bits myself and put together a four-line script (five if you count “shebang”):

This lists unique words and word frequencies occurring in a Python string. You can ignore or take account of letter case in distinguishing words, and you can pass it your own inclusion list of characters allowed in words (e.g. is "import123" the kind of word you want to list, or not? It might be if you're a programmer.) By default only alpha chars are allowed in words.