I have two of the Pagewide printers at work, and one at home (after watching the first one at work for a year, and needing to replace our ~16-year-old LaserJet 4000). They are very fast (although not as fast as some color copier/printers), fairly cheap, and seem to hold up reasonably well (so far; they came out about four years ago). Print quality is also quite good on decent paperâ"I spent quite a while evaluating that before deciding to keep it. And the color was better (truer to onscreen) than our color LaserJet.
The only thing I find disappointing about them is that they only do letter/legal size paper. I'd really like one that could do tabloid with the same technology (but the only option there seems to be color lasers that are no faster than the 15+-year-old one we have, or the aforementioned copier/printers).
In transportation terms, he's looking for a vehicle that can:
transport several people / several tons of kit
rapidly (>100mph)
to / from endpoints without infrastructure (ie. no roads / runways etc.)
over inhospitable terrain...but is not a helicopter.
In other words, he wants an airship.:)
There are some airship-quality tools available, including OmniGraffle Pro and the venerable but amazing TeX, especially CONTEXT, and even Apple's Pages.
But if you're dealing with print shops, they're going to expect that your documents have been put together with certain applications, and that's all they'll do. So professional work is going to require professional tools, and that may mean ponying up for Adobe applications until another company decides to challenge them and create a competitive product.
I was going to suggest Hiveminder. I've recently started using it for tracking issues at work as well as home. It has lots of features that can be used to support GTD methodologies. It's also usable via e-mail, although I haven't really taken the time to see how useful the e-mail interface is.
Hiveminder also supports tagging, multiple groups (with different sets of people), and the creation of unassigned tasks for a group (which can be claimed by a member) or assigning tasks at creation. Tasks can have priorities, due dates, and don't-show-until dates.
You can also add notes to tasks, which are e-mailed to the owner (creator) of the task.
Tasks can be shared/tracked through Google Calendar, as iCal shared calendars, or as RSS feeds.
One of my favorite features is the ability to link tasks so that some tasks have and thens or but firsts, which allows you to specify a series of steps that have to be completed in order. The linkage also affects the order that tasks appear, so that later tasks won't show up until after you've completed the prerequisite(s).
There's also a review tasks function, which shows you each task in order and gives you a limited number of choices for dealing with them (check them as done, get rid of them, or stop showing them for a period of time (a week, a month, next Monday, I think), which seems very GTD oriented. I haven't started using that feature myself, though I really should.
Hell BeFS featured a database File System of the likes MSFT still can't create. and they did it on hardware that even Linux would require recompile and lightweight window manager to run on.
Maybe today you'd need a lightweight window manager, but at the time (1997-2000), my 132 MHz PPC 604e PowerComputing machine was smoking fast with Linux, especially when compared with its performance under Mac OS 7 and 8. (I ran WindowMaker back then.)
But BeOS was pretty cool. Unfortunately, it never really picked up enough interest to make it more than a niche OS.
Dr Buckaroo Banzai and his arch nemesis Dr Emilio Lizardo
Buckaroo's real arch-nemeis is Hanoi Xan, head of the World Crime League, who killed his wife Peggy (whose separated-at-birth identical twin, Penny, showed up in the adventure featured in the movie).
Lizardo just represented some unfinished business.
As others have pointed out,.Mac costs Apple money for bandwidth, disks, servers, and so on, so not giving it away for free seems reasonable.
On the other hand, most of the functionality that you get from.Mac could just as easily be provided by free software solutions that might be provided by your employer, your (non-Apple) ISP, or even by you on a machine in your basement. Making it impossible (or at least nonobvious) to share things outside of the.Mac environment is annoying, as is continually bumping up against buttons labelled.Mac that take you to configuration options that only work with.Mac.
Set up Ssh to allow you in to your usual haunts without a password.
By which, of course, lheal meant that you should use a strong passphrase for your SSH key, and set up ssh-agent so you only have to type it once a day or so.
The Gentoo folks wrote a tool called Keychain, which works in terminals (and, presumably, consoles). For Mac OS X, SSHKeychain hooks into Apple's Keychain password manager, screen saver, and so forth. I use it on my laptop -- when it sleeps, the machine drops my SSH keys. When it wakes up, I run an ssh command, it asks for my Keychain password, and the agent takes over again.
For X in Linux, I just use the standard ssh-agent. The agent is started when I log in (check your X session scripts), so I have two buttons on my top panel. One runs ssh-add to add my SSH keys to the agent's keyring. The other runs ssh-add -d to drop the keys. (I could have them time out, too, but haven't bothered thus far.) By setting SSH_ASKPASS to/usr/libexec/openssh/gnome-ssh-askpass, I even get a nice graphical passphrase dialog.
Also, as a quick comment on Keep your current work files backed up where you can get to them without relying on someone [to change a tape], I have two suggestions.
First, version control (CVS, Subversion, arch, or whatever else you like) is your friend. If it's important, it's probably important enough to be kept in version control, preferably with the repository on a different machine (e.g., work, for home, or another machine at work).
Second, it's pretty easy to set up a hard-drive-based backup system that uses cp -al to duplicate the archives, and rsync over SSH with the -W flag (among others) to overwrite an entire file if it changes. That way you get multiple backups with only the changed files taking up additional space. Run it with cron and you're good to go. Oh, and make sure it's a different machine, just in case.
Again, though, if it's important, having tapes that you can take offsite is a very, very good idea. They're also nice for preserving large amounts of data you aren't using right now, but that someone will ask for as soon as you delete the last copy from disk.
Different manifestations pop up depending on the milieu: today it's radio signals from government controlled satellites, but in the late 1940's Shaver's tales of "Dero rays" being emitted by a race of evil subterranean dwellers proved a popular framework for the delusion.
In addition to insights into one of the earliest documented manifestations of paranoid delusion, the book has lots of juicy details about mental health facilities in the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth centuries, the French Revolution, Mesmerism, and lots more. A really interesting book.
I'm surprised at how few serious *NIX Administrators I know are using GNU Screen.
I used to use screen, back in the days when I had a 2400 baud modem, running a terminal emulator on an Apple//e. These days I have DSL or gigabit Ethernet, a 20" LCD, and X (or Mac OS X). I can open as many terminal windows as I like, rearrange them on the screen, and even have several of them viewable at once so I can, for example, watch log files on multiple machines whilst typing commands that interact with those machines in other terminals.
Screen was cool in its time, but these days the only time I'm stuck with a text terminal is when X gets screwed up and I have to fix its configuration file. I can imagine using screen again, but it would have to involve working from a smartphone or a PDA.
They also have multivolume collections of work by William Hope Hodgson and Manly Wade Wellman, both of which I would highly recommend for Lovecraft fans. The Carnacki stories are probably the most relevant Hodgson works, but there are quite a number of other supernatural stories, as well. Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself really enjoying most of the sea stories for which he's better known, too. The House on the Borderland is also excellent. I had never read anything by Wellman before this collection, but everything I've read so far (four of the five volumes) has been good. Many of Wellman's stories take place during the Civil War, but still feature various disturbing elements.
NSB does nice editions of material that's hard to find. The editing/proofreading isn't quite as wonderful as it could be, but the books are nice, and it's hard to complain too much about having access to things that have been out of print for decades.
Oh! And ObLovecraft, NSB has a collection with all of Lovecraft's poetry. And Necronomicon Press has come out with a second edition of S.T. Joshi's definitive Lovecraft biography.
There's pretty good support for linguistics (phonetic fonts and packages, for example) in LaTeX, so that shouldn't be a major barrier.
... you end up in the situation in which you've invested a lot of time and energy getting the paper revised and accepted, the journal has also invested time and energy, and you really don't want to pull out at that point.
In an ideal world, neither would they, and if they can't support TeX or LaTeX directly, they might be willing to reset the thing in their godawful word processor.
Actually, chances are that they aren't really using Word to create publishable material, but are using Word as an importable format for whatever desktop-publishing application they're using.
If they're using something recent (inDesign or the latest Quark), it might even be possible for them to work with PDF typeset from your original.
From the sounds of it, though, even with Word they're going to have to do a bunch of reformatting, so the quality of what you give them might not be as important as it would with a journal that took LaTeX or DocBook source.
(Whatever you do, be sure they have a PDF of your version of the article -- that will both help them know what you meant when they're wrestling with Word, Quark, PageMaker, inDesign, or whatever, and give them a beautifully typeset example that might make them wonder whether they should change their publishing model.)
The WinXP user in me takes graphics and gui for granted. You turn on your PC and it just works, no matter what.
But when I run Linux, that isn't necessarily true.
It doesn't always work out of the box on Windows, either. I've set up several machines recently where the WinXPSP2 CD didn't have the drivers it needed to get video, sound cards, and even network cards working properly. I had to download the drivers from the manufacturer's site before I could get the things to display better than 640x480, 16 colors. (Oh, and extra fun on the machines with no network connectivity.)
We're not talking about brand-new, exotic hardware here, either. These were two-year-old Dell Dimension 4500s, four-year old Dell OptiPlexes, and a Dell laptop that's more than a year old.
Leatherman's ChargeXTi includes many of the OP's wants. There's also a bit kit available that adds a bunch of additional screwdriver bits, including more Torx drivers.
I spent a long time looking at all the options that were available (looking especially hard at the Gerber and Swisstool), and ended up with the ChargeXTi. It does what I need it to do, and is great for quick fixes where I don't want to bother getting my real tools.
That said, real tools are a must -- removing or installing more than a half-dozen screws with the Leatherman gets annoying pretty quickly, not to mention its bulk being a issue with any screws that are accessed via a tunnel or with bits of bracing in the way.
When I started my latest academic sysadmin job, we were talking about hiring a couple of students, as that's what they'd always done in the past. I kept putting it off because the systems were so screwed up that I had to spend a huge amount of time trying to figure out what kind of crack people had been smoking when they set them up and didn't have the time or energy to train anyone.
In the end, we bought a brand-new server (we needed the disk space, anyway) that I set up from scratch. I migrated the data and built a bunch of tools to keep everything up to date, then moved on to automate handling the workstations. I never did get around to hiring anyone else, and the only time I remotely regret that is when I'm taking vacation.
Hiring students to do things is a cool idea in theory. You get some extra help and some backup, and they get some experience that they can take to their jobs. Unfortunately, their lack of experience, professionalism, and often just general understanding of how things work mean that important things get broken or never get finished because they lack the knowledge or the time to do the work.
It gets really fun when you have a couple of people who think they know what they're doing making changes without telling anyone else.
These days anyone can set up a Linux box themselves if they want to learn about the OS and how all the pieces work, and I'm happy to help out where I can. But having students work on ``mission-critical infrastructure'', such as the departmental web server or faculty workstations, just isn't worth it.
...why centos and not rhel? I believe you can download red hat for free still.
You can download RHEL SRPMs. But that doesn't mean that you can trivially build a distribution out of those SRPMs. CentOS builds the whole system and gives it away for free. For education, it's exactly the same deal you can get for RHEL -- binaries with no Red Hat support -- but for less money.
Long answer: I don't think most tcsh users use it for its programming ability. Instead, it tends to be useful as a solid interactive shell.
I agree -- back when I started using the tcsh, my options were the (real) Bourne shell, the basic csh, and I think that was about it (Gould Unix). When I was young and dumb, I'd write scripts in tcsh syntax, but only for really basic things. But the real merits of the tcsh come in interactive mode -- the completion was a revelation, and the ability to do quick loops from the command line was amazing, too.
Now, of course, bash and other shells have caught up, and, arguably, surpassed the tcsh. Which is why I'm currently reading From Bash to Z Shell myself, and seriously contemplating moving to the zsh in the not-so-distant future.
I bought one of these, too (actually I got the XTi). It's nice -- it fits in my hand, has all the tools I need and a bunch I don't (a saw?), and also has a rescue blade for cutting seat belts and similar things (works great for opening plastic bags).
I looked at the Gerbers and the SwissTool, and handled a whole bunch of different Leatherman tools first. In the end, this one had the most things that seemed useful.
A Good Read?
on
Blink, Take 2
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Whether or not Gladwell has any stunning insights, one reason for the book being popular is that he writes well and the book is entertaining.
I watched him talk about the book on C-SPAN, and enjoyed the talk. I also read and enjoyed his previous book (The Tipping Point), which was similarly enjoyable without being incredibly insightful or a great learning experience.
It's okay to have nonfiction that isn't dull or stodgey. It's even possible for such popular books to encourage people to read more about particular topics.
Granted, that doesn't mean that there aren't other possible issues, and while most paper today is acid-free, it's not generally buffered, so contact with acidic materials can still ``infect'' it. But most laser-printer and copy paper isn't going to fall apart due to acidification.
How do you get hired to proofread? I love to read and am pretty sure that I can catch a lot of errors.
Ooh, careful.... I offered to proofread a book and actually got hired to edit it (and another book by the same author). I am now hypersensitive to errors in books and magazines, not to mention all the other printer matter you run into on a day to day basis.
ObTopic: I actually volunteered after the author asked on a TeX-related mailing list I was on. I have no idea how else you'd get hired -- maybe try your local college or university, where there's lots of writing going on.
Once it's on, it might be hard to shut off, and it's amazing how many mistakes there are out there... seeing them all can really suck.
'objects in space' I mean whats with that idiot bounty hunter??? Does he have a hearing problem or something? (When Reynolds asks him 'are you alliance?' he seems to think that he said 'are you a lion').
``Objects in Space'' is awesome. Early has, well, some issues, which come out by the end of the episode. There's also amazing narrative tension -- is River dead or alive? Could she have really merged with the ship? What powers does she have?
The conversation you mention was actually with Simon; Mal was already locked in his cabin, unconscious. Early's reply is classic: ``I don't think of myself as a lion. You might as well, though... I have a mighty roar.''
And the last line of the episode -- ``Well... Here I am.'' -- is right up there with ``No matter where you go, there you are.'' as a summary of existential philosophy.
The first two episodes where shown out of order. No wonder they didn't make any sense.
But they still didn't suck. I admit, I wasn't completely taken with the show until the wondeful scene in which Mal gives the head henchman a chance to let bygones be bygones. He does the usual blustering ``I'll hunt you down across the galaxy'', and Mal's response is so amazingly uncliched I was an instant convert.
And it only got better....
As for making sense, well, I guess I'm used to reading books where you're tossed into the middle of a situation you're unfamiliar with -- characters with motivations that aren't obvious, a world that doesn't work quite the way you're used to, unfamiliar technologies, and so on. You just have to open up and absorb until it all starts to come together.
However I can say that one product that stands out, and I have seen used successfully, is Bricolage (http://www.bricolage.cc/) which is on the flexible side of the above spectrum.
Bricolage is built on top of HTML::Mason, which is also the basis for some huge sites (e.g., Amazon).
Mason isn't a CMS itself, but you can do pretty much anything you can imagine with it. There are some other CMSs built on Mason that might be worth a look, however, including Mason-CM and Bricks.
Mason can also be used with CVS/Subversion/Arch/your-favorite-VCS-here to build a home-grown, terminal-based CMS of sorts.
Slashdot Mirror
I have two of the Pagewide printers at work, and one at home (after watching the first one at work for a year, and needing to replace our ~16-year-old LaserJet 4000). They are very fast (although not as fast as some color copier/printers), fairly cheap, and seem to hold up reasonably well (so far; they came out about four years ago). Print quality is also quite good on decent paperâ"I spent quite a while evaluating that before deciding to keep it. And the color was better (truer to onscreen) than our color LaserJet. The only thing I find disappointing about them is that they only do letter/legal size paper. I'd really like one that could do tabloid with the same technology (but the only option there seems to be color lasers that are no faster than the 15+-year-old one we have, or the aforementioned copier/printers).
In transportation terms, he's looking for a vehicle that can:
In other words, he wants an airship. :)
There are some airship-quality tools available, including OmniGraffle Pro and the venerable but amazing TeX, especially CONTEXT, and even Apple's Pages.
But if you're dealing with print shops, they're going to expect that your documents have been put together with certain applications, and that's all they'll do. So professional work is going to require professional tools, and that may mean ponying up for Adobe applications until another company decides to challenge them and create a competitive product.
I was going to suggest Hiveminder. I've recently started using it for tracking issues at work as well as home. It has lots of features that can be used to support GTD methodologies. It's also usable via e-mail, although I haven't really taken the time to see how useful the e-mail interface is.
Hiveminder also supports tagging, multiple groups (with different sets of people), and the creation of unassigned tasks for a group (which can be claimed by a member) or assigning tasks at creation. Tasks can have priorities, due dates, and don't-show-until dates.
You can also add notes to tasks, which are e-mailed to the owner (creator) of the task.
Tasks can be shared/tracked through Google Calendar, as iCal shared calendars, or as RSS feeds.
One of my favorite features is the ability to link tasks so that some tasks have and thens or but firsts, which allows you to specify a series of steps that have to be completed in order. The linkage also affects the order that tasks appear, so that later tasks won't show up until after you've completed the prerequisite(s).
There's also a review tasks function, which shows you each task in order and gives you a limited number of choices for dealing with them (check them as done, get rid of them, or stop showing them for a period of time (a week, a month, next Monday, I think), which seems very GTD oriented. I haven't started using that feature myself, though I really should.
Hell BeFS featured a database File System of the likes MSFT still can't create. and they did it on hardware that even Linux would require recompile and lightweight window manager to run on.
Maybe today you'd need a lightweight window manager, but at the time (1997-2000), my 132 MHz PPC 604e PowerComputing machine was smoking fast with Linux, especially when compared with its performance under Mac OS 7 and 8. (I ran WindowMaker back then.)
But BeOS was pretty cool. Unfortunately, it never really picked up enough interest to make it more than a niche OS.
How do you turn on automatic word wrapping in a tabular block?
You define the column as a p, followed by the width in braces; for example, p{1.25in}.
Lamport's LaTeX: A Document Preparation Manual still has one of the best summaries of basic LaTeX commands. For math, Gratzer's Math into LaTeX is an excellent book. Kopka and Daly's Guide to LaTeX is also well spoken of.
Gratzer also has a new book, The LaTeX Book , in preparation.
And, of course, there's lots of free documentation, as well.
Dr Buckaroo Banzai and his arch nemesis Dr Emilio Lizardo
Buckaroo's real arch-nemeis is Hanoi Xan, head of the World Crime League, who killed his wife Peggy (whose separated-at-birth identical twin, Penny, showed up in the adventure featured in the movie).
Lizardo just represented some unfinished business.
As others have pointed out, .Mac costs Apple money for bandwidth, disks, servers, and so on, so not giving it away for free seems reasonable.
On the other hand, most of the functionality that you get from .Mac could just as easily be provided by free software solutions that might be provided by your employer, your (non-Apple) ISP, or even by you on a machine in your basement. Making it impossible (or at least nonobvious) to share things outside of the .Mac environment is annoying, as is continually bumping up against buttons labelled .Mac that take you to configuration options that only work with .Mac.
Set up Ssh to allow you in to your usual haunts without a password.
By which, of course, lheal meant that you should use a strong passphrase for your SSH key, and set up ssh-agent so you only have to type it once a day or so.
The Gentoo folks wrote a tool called Keychain, which works in terminals (and, presumably, consoles). For Mac OS X, SSHKeychain hooks into Apple's Keychain password manager, screen saver, and so forth. I use it on my laptop -- when it sleeps, the machine drops my SSH keys. When it wakes up, I run an ssh command, it asks for my Keychain password, and the agent takes over again.
For X in Linux, I just use the standard ssh-agent. The agent is started when I log in (check your X session scripts), so I have two buttons on my top panel. One runs ssh-add to add my SSH keys to the agent's keyring. The other runs ssh-add -d to drop the keys. (I could have them time out, too, but haven't bothered thus far.) By setting SSH_ASKPASS to /usr/libexec/openssh/gnome-ssh-askpass, I even get a nice graphical passphrase dialog.
Also, as a quick comment on Keep your current work files backed up where you can get to them without relying on someone [to change a tape], I have two suggestions.
First, version control (CVS, Subversion, arch, or whatever else you like) is your friend. If it's important, it's probably important enough to be kept in version control, preferably with the repository on a different machine (e.g., work, for home, or another machine at work).
Second, it's pretty easy to set up a hard-drive-based backup system that uses cp -al to duplicate the archives, and rsync over SSH with the -W flag (among others) to overwrite an entire file if it changes. That way you get multiple backups with only the changed files taking up additional space. Run it with cron and you're good to go. Oh, and make sure it's a different machine, just in case.
Again, though, if it's important, having tapes that you can take offsite is a very, very good idea. They're also nice for preserving large amounts of data you aren't using right now, but that someone will ask for as soon as you delete the last copy from disk.
Different manifestations pop up depending on the milieu: today it's radio signals from government controlled satellites, but in the late 1940's Shaver's tales of "Dero rays" being emitted by a race of evil subterranean dwellers proved a popular framework for the delusion.
And before that (in 1796), there was James Tilly Matthews's Air Loom, a "pneumatic machine" that could manipulate the ether to influence its victims. See The Air Loom Gang: The Strange and True Story of James Tilly Matthews and His Visionary Madness by Mike Jay for more details.
In addition to insights into one of the earliest documented manifestations of paranoid delusion, the book has lots of juicy details about mental health facilities in the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth centuries, the French Revolution, Mesmerism, and lots more. A really interesting book.
I'm surprised at how few serious *NIX Administrators I know are using GNU Screen.
I used to use screen, back in the days when I had a 2400 baud modem, running a terminal emulator on an Apple //e. These days I have DSL or gigabit Ethernet, a 20" LCD, and X (or Mac OS X). I can open as many terminal windows as I like, rearrange them on the screen, and even have several of them viewable at once so I can, for example, watch log files on multiple machines whilst typing commands that interact with those machines in other terminals.
Screen was cool in its time, but these days the only time I'm stuck with a text terminal is when X gets screwed up and I have to fix its configuration file. I can imagine using screen again, but it would have to involve working from a smartphone or a PDA.
Night Shade Books is producing a five-volume collection of Clark Ashton-Smith's work, The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith .
They also have multivolume collections of work by William Hope Hodgson and Manly Wade Wellman, both of which I would highly recommend for Lovecraft fans. The Carnacki stories are probably the most relevant Hodgson works, but there are quite a number of other supernatural stories, as well. Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself really enjoying most of the sea stories for which he's better known, too. The House on the Borderland is also excellent. I had never read anything by Wellman before this collection, but everything I've read so far (four of the five volumes) has been good. Many of Wellman's stories take place during the Civil War, but still feature various disturbing elements.
NSB does nice editions of material that's hard to find. The editing/proofreading isn't quite as wonderful as it could be, but the books are nice, and it's hard to complain too much about having access to things that have been out of print for decades.
Oh! And ObLovecraft, NSB has a collection with all of Lovecraft's poetry. And Necronomicon Press has come out with a second edition of S.T. Joshi's definitive Lovecraft biography.
There's pretty good support for linguistics (phonetic fonts and packages, for example) in LaTeX, so that shouldn't be a major barrier.
In an ideal world, neither would they, and if they can't support TeX or LaTeX directly, they might be willing to reset the thing in their godawful word processor.
Actually, chances are that they aren't really using Word to create publishable material, but are using Word as an importable format for whatever desktop-publishing application they're using.
If they're using something recent (inDesign or the latest Quark), it might even be possible for them to work with PDF typeset from your original.
From the sounds of it, though, even with Word they're going to have to do a bunch of reformatting, so the quality of what you give them might not be as important as it would with a journal that took LaTeX or DocBook source.
(Whatever you do, be sure they have a PDF of your version of the article -- that will both help them know what you meant when they're wrestling with Word, Quark, PageMaker, inDesign, or whatever, and give them a beautifully typeset example that might make them wonder whether they should change their publishing model.)
The WinXP user in me takes graphics and gui for granted. You turn on your PC and it just works, no matter what.
But when I run Linux, that isn't necessarily true.
It doesn't always work out of the box on Windows, either. I've set up several machines recently where the WinXPSP2 CD didn't have the drivers it needed to get video, sound cards, and even network cards working properly. I had to download the drivers from the manufacturer's site before I could get the things to display better than 640x480, 16 colors. (Oh, and extra fun on the machines with no network connectivity.)
We're not talking about brand-new, exotic hardware here, either. These were two-year-old Dell Dimension 4500s, four-year old Dell OptiPlexes, and a Dell laptop that's more than a year old.
Every time I unpack boxes, I wish that I had a stiletto switchblade.
Isn't that a bit overkill? (Not to mention very likely to be illegal in many localities.)
Personally, I can generally draw and get the blade of my Charge XTi out quickly enough to cause some real consternation.
Leatherman's ChargeXTi includes many of the OP's wants. There's also a bit kit available that adds a bunch of additional screwdriver bits, including more Torx drivers.
I spent a long time looking at all the options that were available (looking especially hard at the Gerber and Swisstool), and ended up with the ChargeXTi. It does what I need it to do, and is great for quick fixes where I don't want to bother getting my real tools.
That said, real tools are a must -- removing or installing more than a half-dozen screws with the Leatherman gets annoying pretty quickly, not to mention its bulk being a issue with any screws that are accessed via a tunnel or with bits of bracing in the way.
When I started my latest academic sysadmin job, we were talking about hiring a couple of students, as that's what they'd always done in the past. I kept putting it off because the systems were so screwed up that I had to spend a huge amount of time trying to figure out what kind of crack people had been smoking when they set them up and didn't have the time or energy to train anyone.
In the end, we bought a brand-new server (we needed the disk space, anyway) that I set up from scratch. I migrated the data and built a bunch of tools to keep everything up to date, then moved on to automate handling the workstations. I never did get around to hiring anyone else, and the only time I remotely regret that is when I'm taking vacation.
Hiring students to do things is a cool idea in theory. You get some extra help and some backup, and they get some experience that they can take to their jobs. Unfortunately, their lack of experience, professionalism, and often just general understanding of how things work mean that important things get broken or never get finished because they lack the knowledge or the time to do the work.
It gets really fun when you have a couple of people who think they know what they're doing making changes without telling anyone else.
These days anyone can set up a Linux box themselves if they want to learn about the OS and how all the pieces work, and I'm happy to help out where I can. But having students work on ``mission-critical infrastructure'', such as the departmental web server or faculty workstations, just isn't worth it.
You can download RHEL SRPMs. But that doesn't mean that you can trivially build a distribution out of those SRPMs. CentOS builds the whole system and gives it away for free. For education, it's exactly the same deal you can get for RHEL -- binaries with no Red Hat support -- but for less money.
Long answer: I don't think most tcsh users use it for its programming ability. Instead, it tends to be useful as a solid interactive shell.
I agree -- back when I started using the tcsh, my options were the (real) Bourne shell, the basic csh, and I think that was about it (Gould Unix). When I was young and dumb, I'd write scripts in tcsh syntax, but only for really basic things. But the real merits of the tcsh come in interactive mode -- the completion was a revelation, and the ability to do quick loops from the command line was amazing, too.
Now, of course, bash and other shells have caught up, and, arguably, surpassed the tcsh. Which is why I'm currently reading From Bash to Z Shell myself, and seriously contemplating moving to the zsh in the not-so-distant future.
I bought one of these, too (actually I got the XTi). It's nice -- it fits in my hand, has all the tools I need and a bunch I don't (a saw?), and also has a rescue blade for cutting seat belts and similar things (works great for opening plastic bags).
I looked at the Gerbers and the SwissTool, and handled a whole bunch of different Leatherman tools first. In the end, this one had the most things that seemed useful.
Whether or not Gladwell has any stunning insights, one reason for the book being popular is that he writes well and the book is entertaining.
I watched him talk about the book on C-SPAN, and enjoyed the talk. I also read and enjoyed his previous book (The Tipping Point), which was similarly enjoyable without being incredibly insightful or a great learning experience.
It's okay to have nonfiction that isn't dull or stodgey. It's even possible for such popular books to encourage people to read more about particular topics.
Fun is good!
Normal acid paper will be destroyed in a few years.
Unless you're using something like newsprint, they don't make acidic paper anymore.
Granted, that doesn't mean that there aren't other possible issues, and while most paper today is acid-free, it's not generally buffered, so contact with acidic materials can still ``infect'' it. But most laser-printer and copy paper isn't going to fall apart due to acidification.
How do you get hired to proofread? I love to read and am pretty sure that I can catch a lot of errors.
Ooh, careful.... I offered to proofread a book and actually got hired to edit it (and another book by the same author). I am now hypersensitive to errors in books and magazines, not to mention all the other printer matter you run into on a day to day basis.
ObTopic: I actually volunteered after the author asked on a TeX-related mailing list I was on. I have no idea how else you'd get hired -- maybe try your local college or university, where there's lots of writing going on.
Once it's on, it might be hard to shut off, and it's amazing how many mistakes there are out there... seeing them all can really suck.
Hmm. I'm not sure whether you're kidding or not.
'objects in space' I mean whats with that idiot bounty hunter??? Does he have a hearing problem or something? (When Reynolds asks him 'are you alliance?' he seems to think that he said 'are you a lion').
``Objects in Space'' is awesome. Early has, well, some issues, which come out by the end of the episode. There's also amazing narrative tension -- is River dead or alive? Could she have really merged with the ship? What powers does she have?
The conversation you mention was actually with Simon; Mal was already locked in his cabin, unconscious. Early's reply is classic: ``I don't think of myself as a lion. You might as well, though... I have a mighty roar.''
And the last line of the episode -- ``Well... Here I am.'' -- is right up there with ``No matter where you go, there you are.'' as a summary of existential philosophy.
The first two episodes sucked
The first two episodes where shown out of order. No wonder they didn't make any sense.
But they still didn't suck. I admit, I wasn't completely taken with the show until the wondeful scene in which Mal gives the head henchman a chance to let bygones be bygones. He does the usual blustering ``I'll hunt you down across the galaxy'', and Mal's response is so amazingly uncliched I was an instant convert.
And it only got better....
As for making sense, well, I guess I'm used to reading books where you're tossed into the middle of a situation you're unfamiliar with -- characters with motivations that aren't obvious, a world that doesn't work quite the way you're used to, unfamiliar technologies, and so on. You just have to open up and absorb until it all starts to come together.
Yup. Banks, Powers, Dickens... Good stuff.
However I can say that one product that stands out, and I have seen used successfully, is Bricolage (http://www.bricolage.cc/) which is on the flexible side of the above spectrum.
Bricolage is built on top of HTML::Mason, which is also the basis for some huge sites (e.g., Amazon).
Mason isn't a CMS itself, but you can do pretty much anything you can imagine with it. There are some other CMSs built on Mason that might be worth a look, however, including Mason-CM and Bricks.
Mason can also be used with CVS/Subversion/Arch/your-favorite-VCS-here to build a home-grown, terminal-based CMS of sorts.