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My First Rule of System Administration goes like this:

“The quick temporary hack to fix a problem always becomes the permanent solution, so get the quick temporary hack right.”

I had another good example of this recently. A while back my colleague Pete got sick of having to type

telnet ienabler.canterbury.ac.nz 259

all the time, so he wrote a temporary script called “zz” to do (just) this. Other people (me) started to use it, and now I get annoyed when working on a system that doesn’t have it, and I have to recreate it everywhere I go

It turns out that yesterday’s declaration of a win in this year’s NaNoWriMo was premature. OpenOffice had told me that my word count was 50,024, but when I submitted my world-class prose to the official NaNo validator, it decided there were only 48,800 words. Say what??? Of course there are lots of different defensible positions as to what constitutes a word, but could a 1200-word discrepancy really be down to differing interpretations? Nope. It turns out that OpenOffice’s word count algorithm is broken, and has been for some time. You heard right ladies and gentlemen – OpenOffice Writer wants to be a serious competitor for Word and yet it can’t even count words!

I don’t know exactly what the problem is, but it gets confused by custom quotes (= smart quotes in Word parlance):

“

counts as one word,

”

counts as one word, while

“Hello”

(with curly quotes) counts as two words and

"Hello"

(with straight quotes) counts as one word. Go figure.

Effectively, in a novel context, what this means is that every line of dialogue adds one extra word to the overall count which shouldn’t be there.

This is a known problem, and unfortunately the OpenOffice team show no interest in fixing it, as it’s been present for several versions.

So anyway I pounded out a few hundred more words today, and now I have 51,800 words according to OpenOffice and 50,700 according to the NaNo validator, so I have my win back again. But what a pain.

While in general I heartily approve of the tendency of SF&F books to be parts of series, occasionally it all gets a bit confusing. A while back, for example, I picked up a copy of The Red Wyvern by Katherine Kerr at a second-hand bookshop (at the recommendation of the woman who was returning the book, as it happened). Since I had heard of neither book nor author, I made sure that it was Book One of something before buying it, rather than Book Seven or whatever. Witness.

However I just found out today that the author herself considers her books to be all part of one series, a series in which The Red Wyvern would count as book nine. Things get even more confusing later on in the series. For example, the UBS has one of her books on the shelves, The Shadow Isle, the cover of which states “Book Six of the Dragon Mage”, while Amazon lists the same book as “Book Three of the Silver Wyrm”. And this book is actually the fourteenth according to the author!

So, The Shadow Isle is either book three, or book six, or book fourteen of the series – take your pick. And I still don’t know whether the Book One I have is actually the start of something, or whether I should go looking for an entirely different Book One.

Additional: when I type “The Shadow Isle” into Amazon, hit three on the list that comes back is for “Zojirushi BB-HAC10 Home Bakery 1-Pound-Loaf Programmable Mini Breadmaker”. Say what?