I am sorry about the tone of my last post; I don't mean to belittle your excellent efforts. I am glad of your good work. I'm just a daddy with a child who needs my time, and so I must move on, as I don't have a pressing need yet, just a curiosity, and I know I will be able to solve the problem of LaTeX to epub when the time comes, probably using tex4ht and some post processing. I was interested because I have written plenty of LaTeX for many years, and know I'll want to do this conversion in the future.
For future reference, filing bugs in a project with an unrelated entity generally does not achieve anything...
I expect the Fedora maintainer will probably do something sensible with this; why do you declare this authoritatively to be not the case? Upstream also seems to be in a half-baked state.
* LLVM/Clang 2.9 or higher is required to build Etoile
* libobjc2 1.4 (other ObjC runtimes such as the one packaged with GCC won't work)
Okay, I've only 2.8 of LLVM/Clang, and libobjc-4.6.0-10.fc15.x86_64. I'll move on. I'll write my own solution in Perl when I need it.
XHTML, generated by some code I wrote, with hyperlinks and cross references and semantic markup in the code listings generated by clang for [Objective-]C[C++].
In the process of compiling this on Fedora 15, I raised bug 728744, and worked around those problems. The compilation of ETClassMirror.m failed with "incomplete implementation of class ‘ETClassMirror’ [-Werror]". I'm tempted to leave this for now, as this doesn't seem sufficient reason to learn Objective C, and I have other things to do.
It is based on plain text and allows cross linking, references, equations.
http://orgmode.org/
Let's see:
Org-mode is like a Swiss army knife. People use it for Getting Things Done (GTD), as a Day Planner, as a Notebook, for Web and PDF Authoring, and much more.
Now why isn't dissertation and thesis there in that list? I wonder. Hmmm. Let me think now....
The learning curve is such that for any even moderately long document, it is worth learning latex from scratch rather than using a word processor.
Once you're used to it, it is so much simpler to use.
When teaching in Hong Kong, a fellow lecturer was asked to create a template for exam papers. He did so in Word, but using inconsistent spacing, manually created using the spacebar and other blue-collar methods. I wrote my own style sheet in LaTeX, and my exams conformed to the Departmental Standard better than his model did. One problem is that many users of Word and other word processors have not invested sufficient time in learning how to create actual style sheets that take care of formatting rather than using low-level manual processes that look inconsistent and amateurish. The effort required to understand how to do this well is not much less than that required to understand how to produce good results in LaTeX.
Your code, after suitable modification by a persevering programmer, is the solution to the question posted in this ask.slashdot article.
Since you are the original asker of the question, I see you are after a better answer than that you created yourself. (Silly me!). Okay, I'll see what I can do, even though I will write Perl (but good Perl!)
Thank you very much; you have asked many good questions on the tex4ht list, and the answers have also been illuminating. Your script is very specific to your "SANDINISTA DISSERTATION" (copied and pasted from the script). It assumes a very specific file layout, but does not have defaults that cope with the basic simple case of a LaTeX file that includes some images. But thank you for making it available; I think it (and your discussion on the tex4ht list) will help me write a simple program to cope with the basic case.
It may be impertinent of me, but I offer this gratuitous advice: the additional effort to write a generally more useful tool is not great; you can simply write a script to call it with the options that apply to you. Your code can also create directories if they are not present, and give more specific help for the first time user of your program rather than exception backtraces. I guess this is the difference between code written for a specific purpose by a researcher and that by a programmer who wants to make a generally useful tool. I appreciate that your main effort is your research, and that it is generous of you to provide your useful code, which others such as I can benefit from. Your code, after suitable modification by a persevering programmer, is the solution to the question posted in this ask.slashdot article.
I very strongly suggest you use TeX4ht to convert what you have into an intermediate format of XML, and then postprocess it and clean it up to create a master copy in a well-known and robust XML format like DocBook or TEI, and start from there. There are then plenty of good tools that will let you create multiple outputs, including eBooks, web sites, topic maps, even Braille and voice output...and of course LaTeX, to regenerate your original, if needed.
Among all the noise in this "discussion", this is the first post that actually addresses the problem.
The level of "English, Philosophy, History, Art and the like" reached in an Australian school is not high, as evidenced by the low standards of discussion in some General Studies classes in UNSW. I don't know of the standards in US schools. Are you sure you need to know nothing else besides computer science?
The word "pirate" has been hijacked from the meaning of robbing ships at sea using violent threat to meaning copying a CD. This hijacking is convenient to the record industry, but I object to its use here. I do think that robbing ships at sea using violent threats is wrong.
We have about 600 servers built into very diverse and complex systems, mostly each a few machines clustered with LVS.
We have four people with rotating on-call support duty, but we all mostly develop new code rather than spend most of our time supporting the ISP.
All is built with free software. The most important thing is that we have an excellent configuration management system (built in house), which as far as I can see is better (for us) than puppet. All system and application configuration is totally automated using that system, allowing:
Rebuilding a machine after a failed disk replacement (or replacement with a spare) takes 10 minutes to kickstart, 10 minutes to run the configuration manager, back in service.
We only backup data; backup is simple and automated, requires few resources
Configuration of members of a cluster is reliably the way it should be.
Firewalls are established automatically only allowing access to clients, and communication between master and slave servers (MySQL, OpenLDAP).
Master-slave relationships are automatically created, and need only be stated implicitly.
Monitoring and alarming is implemented automatically.
While this is a different situation from the article, it indicates that the number of people required is to a large extent determined by the degree of automation and the discipline of rigorously implementing that automation. Without configuration management, life is much harder.
I live in Australia, and find it quite rare to find Linux based netbooks in shops.
Indeed; in Sydney I was told at the shops (that I had time to check) that only Windows was available on the Eee PC 1000. I bought one, formatted the disk and installed Fedora 12 and am very pleased with the result. It'll be handy at the Linux Conf in Wellington next month.
Eh, has Linux server administration really come into this? Hire knowledgeable admins that can script stuff. Linux is perfect for scripting such configuring and set up. You just need to do those scripts once and you're ready to deploy them on all systems after minimum installation.
If you're a large company, just develop your own solutions, its far better than using someones elses. Just look at google or any other succesfull company.
I agree.
We have our own home-grown configuration management system; an open source version of it is available here.
In large systems, a system administrator is a developer. You write software that integrates your configuration management with Nagios, with your kickstart system, with your auditing system, that writes your firewalls.
RAID 1 hopefully prevents that a server will go down and it makes it possible to easily replace a bad disk.
At the fairly large ISP I work at, all servers run Linux, and wherever redundancy is not easily implemented otherwise, we use software RAID so that if a disk fails, the system can keep going, and the hot-swappable disk replaced without any outage. We use only software RAID — RAID 0 for syslog servers where write speed is an issue, RAID 1 for disk redundancy, RAID 5 for redundancy and larger volumes, and RAID 6 for some larger systems. Even where we use 3ware RAID cards, we still combine the individual disks (exposed as JBOD) with software RAID.
This RAID is totally distinct from backup, which we do to a number of large filers, but we only backup data. Configuration management is the critically important tool that makes it possible to restore the OS and software with its configuration after a failure. LVS is the other important tool for redundancy.
Monthly caps are dumb and don't address the problem the colleges (and ISP's in general) are having. The problem is not the amount of bytes transferred per month, it's the total available bandwidth available at any point in time. The issue comes when there is more requests for bandwidth than is available.
While you have a point, this is not the only issue. Some ISPs pay massively for overseas data volume, and need to keep that to a minimum. Of course, there are many strategies towards that. Capping downloads helps there.
I work in a large ISP, and this is the way we manage updates for the
various Linux platforms we use. Quite simple, really. You can build
tools that help: diff between the downloaded updates and what you have
in your own repository, and mail you the ones that you are not using.
I find lwn.net's security
pages useful in keeping track of what security updates
matter to us.
Professionalism... It's arriving at work... in proper attire.
I thought my professionalism was related to my dedication to making
everything work better, my cooperation with my teammates, my keenness
to learn and my two engineering degrees.
Now I realise that my shorts and tee-shirt have been holding me back
all along! I'd better ask the sales guys where I can buy a suit
like theirs.
Great general programming book: "The Practice of Programming" by Kernighan and Pike.
Kernel hacker Val Henson wrote an excellent review of The Practice of Programming. I bought the book on the strength of that recommendation and find it is the most useful book I have read on programming in the last ten years.
I had a group of three students presenting their final year project to
me and a another assessor, when a storm of pornographic pop-ups
appeared on their Windows computer, causing them great embarrassment.
I understood the cause to be malware that had been installed
unintentionally, arranged for another computer for them to show their
presentation with, and thought no more of it.
That such an event could cost a person their career and result in them
spending one year fighting this in various courts reminds me that it is
time to reread Kafka's The Trial.
Slashdot Mirror
I am sorry about the tone of my last post; I don't mean to belittle your excellent efforts. I am glad of your good work. I'm just a daddy with a child who needs my time, and so I must move on, as I don't have a pressing need yet, just a curiosity, and I know I will be able to solve the problem of LaTeX to epub when the time comes, probably using tex4ht and some post processing. I was interested because I have written plenty of LaTeX for many years, and know I'll want to do this conversion in the future.
For future reference, filing bugs in a project with an unrelated entity generally does not achieve anything...
I expect the Fedora maintainer will probably do something sensible with this; why do you declare this authoritatively to be not the case? Upstream also seems to be in a half-baked state.
* LLVM/Clang 2.9 or higher is required to build Etoile
* libobjc2 1.4 (other ObjC runtimes such as the one packaged with GCC won't work)
Okay, I've only 2.8 of LLVM/Clang, and libobjc-4.6.0-10.fc15.x86_64. I'll move on. I'll write my own solution in Perl when I need it.
In the process of compiling this on Fedora 15, I raised bug 728744, and worked around those problems. The compilation of ETClassMirror.m failed with "incomplete implementation of class ‘ETClassMirror’ [-Werror]". I'm tempted to leave this for now, as this doesn't seem sufficient reason to learn Objective C, and I have other things to do.
It is based on plain text and allows cross linking, references, equations. http://orgmode.org/
Let's see:
Org-mode is like a Swiss army knife. People use it for Getting Things Done (GTD), as a Day Planner, as a Notebook, for Web and PDF Authoring, and much more.
Now why isn't dissertation and thesis there in that list? I wonder. Hmmm. Let me think now....
The learning curve is such that for any even moderately long document, it is worth learning latex from scratch rather than using a word processor.
Once you're used to it, it is so much simpler to use.
When teaching in Hong Kong, a fellow lecturer was asked to create a template for exam papers. He did so in Word, but using inconsistent spacing, manually created using the spacebar and other blue-collar methods. I wrote my own style sheet in LaTeX, and my exams conformed to the Departmental Standard better than his model did. One problem is that many users of Word and other word processors have not invested sufficient time in learning how to create actual style sheets that take care of formatting rather than using low-level manual processes that look inconsistent and amateurish. The effort required to understand how to do this well is not much less than that required to understand how to produce good results in LaTeX.
Your code, after suitable modification by a persevering programmer, is the solution to the question posted in this ask.slashdot article.
Since you are the original asker of the question, I see you are after a better answer than that you created yourself. (Silly me!). Okay, I'll see what I can do, even though I will write Perl (but good Perl!)
Btw, that script is here: http://www.johanneswilm.org/download/compile
Thank you very much; you have asked many good questions on the tex4ht list, and the answers have also been illuminating. Your script is very specific to your "SANDINISTA DISSERTATION" (copied and pasted from the script). It assumes a very specific file layout, but does not have defaults that cope with the basic simple case of a LaTeX file that includes some images. But thank you for making it available; I think it (and your discussion on the tex4ht list) will help me write a simple program to cope with the basic case.
It may be impertinent of me, but I offer this gratuitous advice: the additional effort to write a generally more useful tool is not great; you can simply write a script to call it with the options that apply to you. Your code can also create directories if they are not present, and give more specific help for the first time user of your program rather than exception backtraces. I guess this is the difference between code written for a specific purpose by a researcher and that by a programmer who wants to make a generally useful tool. I appreciate that your main effort is your research, and that it is generous of you to provide your useful code, which others such as I can benefit from. Your code, after suitable modification by a persevering programmer, is the solution to the question posted in this ask.slashdot article.
I very strongly suggest you use TeX4ht to convert what you have into an intermediate format of XML, and then postprocess it and clean it up to create a master copy in a well-known and robust XML format like DocBook or TEI, and start from there. There are then plenty of good tools that will let you create multiple outputs, including eBooks, web sites, topic maps, even Braille and voice output...and of course LaTeX, to regenerate your original, if needed.
Among all the noise in this "discussion", this is the first post that actually addresses the problem.
The level of "English, Philosophy, History, Art and the like" reached in an Australian school is not high, as evidenced by the low standards of discussion in some General Studies classes in UNSW. I don't know of the standards in US schools. Are you sure you need to know nothing else besides computer science?
The word "pirate" has been hijacked from the meaning of robbing ships at sea using violent threat to meaning copying a CD. This hijacking is convenient to the record industry, but I object to its use here. I do think that robbing ships at sea using violent threats is wrong.
The board meeting minutes were published on lwn.net more than three days ago.
While this is a different situation from the article, it indicates that the number of people required is to a large extent determined by the degree of automation and the discipline of rigorously implementing that automation. Without configuration management, life is much harder.
I live in Australia, and find it quite rare to find Linux based netbooks in shops.
Indeed; in Sydney I was told at the shops (that I had time to check) that only Windows was available on the Eee PC 1000. I bought one, formatted the disk and installed Fedora 12 and am very pleased with the result. It'll be handy at the Linux Conf in Wellington next month.
The article raises valid points.
I rest my case based on the evidence above.
\the syntax is just to arcane.
Perhaps the syntax of English is just a little too arcane as well?
I personally know of exactly one company that uses Perl at the moment, and that's only for text cleanup.
Perhaps you don't know many companies :-)
Eh, has Linux server administration really come into this? Hire knowledgeable admins that can script stuff. Linux is perfect for scripting such configuring and set up. You just need to do those scripts once and you're ready to deploy them on all systems after minimum installation.
If you're a large company, just develop your own solutions, its far better than using someones elses. Just look at google or any other succesfull company.
I agree.
We have our own home-grown configuration management system; an open source version of it is available here.
In large systems, a system administrator is a developer. You write software that integrates your configuration management with Nagios, with your kickstart system, with your auditing system, that writes your firewalls.
I know Microsoft has trained everyone on the gospel of NTFS but it isn't a big selling point. One difference is that FAT gives you...
Another thing vFAT gives you is a wonderful file system so innovative that Microsoft can sue Tom Tom for using it.
RAID 1 hopefully prevents that a server will go down and it makes it possible to easily replace a bad disk.
At the fairly large ISP I work at, all servers run Linux, and wherever redundancy is not easily implemented otherwise, we use software RAID so that if a disk fails, the system can keep going, and the hot-swappable disk replaced without any outage. We use only software RAID — RAID 0 for syslog servers where write speed is an issue, RAID 1 for disk redundancy, RAID 5 for redundancy and larger volumes, and RAID 6 for some larger systems. Even where we use 3ware RAID cards, we still combine the individual disks (exposed as JBOD) with software RAID.
This RAID is totally distinct from backup, which we do to a number of large filers, but we only backup data. Configuration management is the critically important tool that makes it possible to restore the OS and software with its configuration after a failure. LVS is the other important tool for redundancy.
While you have a point, this is not the only issue. Some ISPs pay massively for overseas data volume, and need to keep that to a minimum. Of course, there are many strategies towards that. Capping downloads helps there.
I agree with you in other respects.
I work in a large ISP, and this is the way we manage updates for the various Linux platforms we use. Quite simple, really. You can build tools that help: diff between the downloaded updates and what you have in your own repository, and mail you the ones that you are not using. I find lwn.net's security pages useful in keeping track of what security updates matter to us.
Professionalism ... It's arriving at work ... in proper attire.
I thought my professionalism was related to my dedication to making everything work better, my cooperation with my teammates, my keenness to learn and my two engineering degrees.
Now I realise that my shorts and tee-shirt have been holding me back all along! I'd better ask the sales guys where I can buy a suit like theirs.
It seems that this article referred to by the main article speculates incorrectly, saying that:
whereas Alan actually wrote:
a few lines below.
Kernel hacker Val Henson wrote an excellent review of The Practice of Programming . I bought the book on the strength of that recommendation and find it is the most useful book I have read on programming in the last ten years.
I had a group of three students presenting their final year project to me and a another assessor, when a storm of pornographic pop-ups appeared on their Windows computer, causing them great embarrassment. I understood the cause to be malware that had been installed unintentionally, arranged for another computer for them to show their presentation with, and thought no more of it.
That such an event could cost a person their career and result in them spending one year fighting this in various courts reminds me that it is time to reread Kafka's The Trial.