the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Usage Statistics for blue.paulbeard.org – February 2003
I had considered removing search engine hits from my logs and from my traffic reports, just to be sure I was measuring actual readers.
But I see from this report that, contrary to what I believed, robots are not the bulk of my traffic. Looks like less than 25%. Still high but not the majority as I was thinking it might be.
I may still extend the lines that block NIMDA but it’s not as urgent as it was.
MacWhispers.com – Whispers From Around The Mac Community
Information from a variety of sources reports that Apple is near a beta release of their long-rumored professional word processing application. Details of the software are fascinating.
The new package, said to be named “Document,” includes 100% import and export functionality with Microsoft Word files, but goes much farther than that venerable word processor has ever managed in giving the user a full-scope document development environment (a term used by one of our sources in describing the new product).
I thought I had posted something somewhere that I fully expected Apple to be reworking OpenOffice just as they used the core of Konqueror for their own product.
I was close, I guess. It makes sense for Apple to do this, especially if they can keep up with file formats (MSFT has said for some time they are going to an open and/or XML based file format, a la AbiWord: we’ll see).
When I see how well the Koffice or GNOME office apps work (I haven’t found anything they lack yet), I have to wonder if a well-designed and integrated suite of office apps wouldn’t be all one needed.
And there’s always the specter of these running on x86 hardware: one less reason to sweat a switch is all your documents are accessible.
Yesterday, for the first time in 2 years, I received a paycheck. So this means I can start putting life as we knew it back together.
As you can see, I’m doing my bit to share the wealth. More to come.
Amazon.com: Crossing Platforms : A Macintosh/Windows Phrasebook: Explore similar items
Frank recommended this book and it may be worth buying. I’ve used the helpful suggestions I’ve gotten but alas, there’s a lack of consistency to be dealt with. I have tamed the folder view problem, mostly: I now seem to get the Details view when I open a folder, but I still have to adjust the column widths so I can see the %&^%&^ file name.
And from what I can tell, your local preferences are ignored when you open folders on a networked drive. You get what you get and that’s never what you want.
Another annoyance: if you have a folder/window open, and realize it’s misnamed or could be more appropriately named, you can’t change the name in the title bar where the text is plainly editable. No, that’s a search engine dialog box. How could think it was anything else?
Continue reading “help may be on the way”
EFF “Information Infrastructure (Global/National)” Archive
EFF “Information Infrastructure (Global/National)” Archive
Interesting stuff here.
I am struck by how little has changed and in some case how some predictions have been flat wrong (Microsoft was in the twilight of its dominance in July 1994? Hardly).
Need to catch up on more of this stuff.
MIT Conference Takes Aim at Spam E – mails
Spam filtering software looks for patterns that suggest an e-mail is spam. But the spammers are constantly evading them, finding new ways to arrange text to make the messages unrecognizable as spam.
Yerazunis’ presentation on his CRM114 Discriminator language was a centerpiece of the conference. His filtering technique “hashes” the messages, matching short phrases from the incoming text with phrases that the user previously supplied as example text, catching spam that might not exactly match standard spam text. He claims that the system has higher than 99.9 percent effectiveness; it can be downloaded for free and is compatible with SpamAssassin or other spam-flagging software.
“This thing is even more accurate than humans,” he said.
NewsForge: The Online Newspaper of Record for Linux and Open Source
The Largo solution is to put four terminals in the break room, and load them only with Mozilla and Evolution, and encourage workers to surf, chat, and play online all they want during their lunch hours and other breaks.
Many IT shops might hesitate to put in something like this; those that run PCs would need to supply and maintain four complete computers, including (no doubt) Windows, so they’d need to have virus software kept up to date and take care of all the other chores that go along with running a standalone computer. But none of this applies in the Largo IT scheme. The four thin-client units in the break room were purchased for $2 each on eBay and take no maintenance, and besides the client pieces all you have is keyboards, mice, and monitors, and these are not costly items. The biggest thing that makes this sort of niceness possible, though, big enough that it’s worth saying over again, is no maintenance!
This is a great example of what can be done when you focus on the essential needs and resist the feeping creaturism.
Continue reading “right-sized IT”
DaveNet : First essay of the year
Recently a reporter asked me if all this michegas about weblogs isn’t just the Web, and I said of course it is. The first website, done by Tim Berners-Lee was a weblog in every sense of the word. All we’re doing is lowering the barrier, making it easier to get in. That’s a big deal of course, but in another sense, it’s the same thing again and again, every year for the last decade, and each time through the loop it’s bigger, because it gets easier.
This resonates with me because a large part of my working life has been engaged in simplifying the work of publishing.
From cold type to photo-offset to desktop publishing to the internet, it’s been all about using technology to remove the distance between inspiration and publication.
I may have to add Dave to my reading list.
A story of packages: SFS, Debian, and FreeBSD This gets to a piece of Debian-ese that seems a bit counter-intuitive at first: you can’t compile and install a Debian package in one step. Rather, you download the source package, compile it, build a Debian .deb package binary. Once you’ve got that binary package, you can use the Debian standard tools to install it. (RPM is the same way.) Actually, you can install pre-compiled RPM packages but you’ll eventually run into issues. RPM is widely-adopted across the bazillion Linux distros, but none of them are equivalent: their RPMs don’t always work across distros. The interesting thing about this is that in some way it runs counter to the cathedral and the bazaar hypothesis: in this case, the cathedral — the single source — does a better job of making solid, well-documented code work than the bazaar — the wild and woolly world of linux. Learning this once was enough: I have no desire to work with linux again. Of the distros, Debian and Gentoo seem the most engaged in making support and upgrading relatively painless. To no one’s surprise, they lack the gleaming GUIs of RedHat and Mandrake. Darwin is experimenting with RPM and if anyone can make it work, Jordan Hubbard’s team can.
My first full day of work in almost 2 years and my first in a university.
It’s more different from the grubby commercial world than I imagined. In a morning orientation with my boss, she recalled her initial impressions of her first days. In relating it to a friend, her wise friend replied that she had now entered a medieval world. As I went through the day, I realized how true that was.
The central concepts of the medieval, or more correctly, the feudal period was the fiefdom, the rigorous caste system and its resulting lack of mobility. You were what you were.
That may take some getting used to, but after all this time out of the workplace, what wouldn’t?