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Monday, October 24, 2005
Reading List: Le Ciel lui tombe sur la tête
- Goscinny, René and Albert Uderzo. Le ciel lui tombe sur la tête. Paris: Albert René, 2005. ISBN 2-86497-170-4.
- Credit me with some restraint--I waited ten whole days after volume 33 of the Astérix saga appeared before devouring it in one sitting. If it isn't sufficiently obvious from the author's remark at the end of the album, note that planet "Tadsylwien" is an anagram of "Walt Disney". The diffuse reflection of the countryside in the spherical spaceship on p. 8 is magnificently done.
Posted at
22:10
ISBN-13 Support in Book Recommendation Tools
On January 1, 2007, the venerable 10-digit ISBN identifiers for books will be replaced by 13-digit "ISBN-13" codes which fit within the EAN-13 scheme. There is a simple procedure for converting existing 10-digit ISBNs to the new scheme, but any program which accepts ISBNs will have to be modified to accept new, fully general, 13-digit ISBNs as of 2007. I've upgraded the book recommendation form on this site to accept 13-digit ISBNs as well as the traditional 10 digit variety. The computation of the check digit for the 13-digit ISBN is completely different than the algorithm used for its 10-digit predecessor; it's arguably less robust in the face of human data entry errors, but at least it dispenses with the "X" character--ISBN-13s are all numeric. If you've built ISBN processing tools based upon these scripts, you may wish to download the latest version and update your code to handle ISBN-13s. Note that Amazon.com is currently completely clueless about ISBN-13s--if you submit a 13 digit ISBN, even one which simply encapsulates a known 10-digit ISBN with the 978- prefix, it will come up unknown.Posted at
00:50