After some trial and error I discovered my first generation optical Intellimouse Explorer didn't like the USB hub on the Dell monitor (I plugged it into the 2001FP's USB ports to add some slack on the mouse cable).
Not at all the same problem, but I have noticed problems with using Dell monitor USB ports under Linux. When the monitor goes to sleep, so does its USB hub, and when you wake up the machine, you get no mouse (unless you unplug it and plug it back in).
I solved the problem by plugging the mouse into the USB ports on the back of the machine. Less slack, fewer user calls about ``broken'' mice.
Also, you better hope that your college degree is recognizably in the field you're trying to work. Ten years of experience as a sysadmin don't mean squat to an Immigration Canada official looking at your application for a work permit for a sysadmin job once they see your degree is in anthropology.
But, damn, Canada (Vancouver, anyway) is a nice place to live.
Once you get into more advanced usages, The LaTeX Companion is a good second book to pick up.
Be sure to get the new, second edition, due out at the end of the month and not the older edition, which is now about ten years old and definitely showing its age. (Parent links to the new edition.)
Now that The LaTeX Companion is being updated, can BibTeX 1.0 be far behind?!:)
I'm honor bound to put in a plug for George Gratzer's Math into LaTeX, which is the only book I'm aware of that covers most of the intricacies of AMS LaTeX. If you have a lot of math to write, George's book will probably tell you what you need to type (and will also probably have an example that's pretty close to what you need).
MiL also has a nice introduction to LaTeX, walking you through creating your very first LaTeX article; covers BibTeX reasonably thoroughly; and introduces you to some of the additional minutiae you should be aware of when writing a book with LaTeX.
ObAdditionalHonorableMention: I edited Math into LaTeX, but I don't see a cent from sales. I do use the book all the time when I'm trying to figure out something new or remember how to do something I haven't done for a while.
Zodiac (subtitled The Ecothriller) is still my favorite Stephenson, suitable for numerous rereadings. It's fun, downright silly, at times, and has a loveably obnoxious main character.
ObTopic: I liked Quicksilver a lot, too, and I should have The Confusion on Thursday. Very Pynchonesque (in the Mason & Dixon sense).
CGI finally seems to be at the point where it could do justice to some of the scenes in Banksie's books. I'm looking forward to seeing the Clear Air Turbulence streaking through the GSV....
I also used to have google, but with the google search bar in firefox that's pretty useless.
If you set your search engine to Google in Mozilla, you can also get a ``search Google'' option from your regular location bar, which is even nicer, as you can do
C-l some phrase Down-Arrow Down-Arrow Return
and get a page of Google results.
I still have Google as my home page, though. If nothing else, it lets me know the network is still alive....
Also, is it free of dead pixels? (both kinds?)
I got my Apple Cinema Display shipped by mail,
and it arrived with 100% perfect pixels. There
wasn't a single stuck-on or stuck-off pixel,
and not even a bad sub-pixel.
I have two Dell 2000FPs, one at work, one at home. Both are perfect, with no dead or stuck pixels.
I also have a 20" Apple Cinema Display at home. It's the second one, because the first one (shipped to us from Apple) had a bright green stuck pixel in the middle of the lower-left quadrant. One stuck pixel, no matter how obvious or annoying, is well within Apple's ``acceptable'' limit. We were able to exchange it for another monitor that didn't have any problems, but it required hours of argument with the folks at a nearby Apple store, as well as calls to Apple, and, in the end, an additional payment of a couple hundred dollars and a gamble that the new monitor wouldn't have problems. (They would not just open the box and test it for us without the additional charge.)
I love Apple's machines and Mac OS X, but Apple is still a company, with company policies that lean toward maximizing profits over customer happiness.
I found Rosemary Sassoon's Teach yourself better handwriting very useful. It is specifically targeted at ppl who are trying to fix up their handwriting and not at child first time learners.
Sweedack. I found the book to be pretty useful in giving me some insights into some of the things I was doing that were problematic. Doing lots of writing, writing larger, and writing more slowly also help a lot.
Tinderbox looks cool from the website, but when I downloaded the trial version I was completely turned off by the Carbon dialogs. Maybe I'm a snob, but I can't really imagine paying a lot of money for software that looks bad, especially on Mac OS X.
Maybe things have changed, but the last time I played with Fink, I got the impression that the developers didn't quite ``get'' Debian, and didn't quite get the BSD ports system, either. The result was kind of clunky and frustrating for people familiar with either inspirational ancestor.
DarwinPorts, on the other hand, does pretty much what I want it to do without contaminating my OS install. I'd still probably prefer a signed binary package system (if you're just trying something, having to wait for it to both download and build is annoying), but it works well enough for what I've used it for.
Were not NYT writers and editors the imbeciles responsible for irreparably damaging the English language by convincing millions of people that a comma was not needed before the and in a series?
No, that was the British, who invented the language and who tend to use a lot less punctuation than Americans do.
Tom Bihn makes and sells backpacks and shoulder bags for all kinds of laptops. They're made in the USA of nice materials.
Many of the bags that don't have built-in laptop support have snaps that can be used to hold a ``Brain Bag'' (available in various sizes) for a laptop. The Brain Bags suspend the laptop in a cradle inside a box with hardish sides.
Can anyone name an acquisition story that's been a huge success?
NeXT Computer's acquisition of Apple has been pretty successful. New, faster, shiner hardware; a slick new version of OPENSTEP; increasing popularity with consumers through the iPod and the iTunes Music Store; and even great geek cred now that the OS is based on BSD Unix.
Is it my imagination or did that Microsoft keyboard take the function keys and make four groups of three across the top (deviating from the normal four groups of three)?
Dell did the same thing with their ``Performance USB Keyboard''. I couldn't believe it, and, sure enough, the first user to get one of these keyboards asked for an old one. Since then, we order their cheapo PS/2 keyboards.
The school I work for uses these 'phones for coordinating emergency response stuff. They actually switched to Verizon a few months back because Nextel's coverage on campus was problematic.
My partner and I lucked into the Nike missile base being manned. It's really cool. We even got to go up on the missile lift.:)
There are also a variety of gun emplacements and bunkers that you can wander around on. You can also get inside them, but they're mostly barricaded and I have no idea how safe or unsafe they are.
Over in the East Bay, there's the Lawrence Hall of Science, which is an okay hands-on science museum, but is immediately recognizable as the home of Colossus from Colossus: The Forbin Project. It also has a spectacular view of most of the bay.
Another famously cool science museum in SF is the Exploratorium.
They are definitely really nice monitors. I got one at work, and then ended up buying one for my home machine.
They don't make great TVs, though, although they are workable if you're desperate. I had the monitor a couple of weeks before I got the new computer, so we put it next to our real TV for comparison, using its S-video input. We weren't that impressed, because it showed significant ghosting.
Then our real TV died and we used the 2000FP again while we were trying to find a replacement. It's fine with slow-moving scenes, but it's definitely blurry if there's a lot of motion. Like all the LCDs I've seen, it also doesn't do true black very well -- the screen still glows a bit, which is noticable if you have the lights low.
We spent a lot of time looking at TVs to replace our dead one. We ended up with a 27" tube Philips HDTV monitor. It's not perfect, but we found that the plasma TVs have a very visible grid pattern, and while the LCDs look the nicest, they still seem to be too slow for most programming. I think that the LCD TVs may also be a bit worse than the 2000FP.
(We also tried one of the new Sony non-HDTV (WEGA) TVs and ended up returning it after a week. The screen was very stroby, and it drove my partner to distraction. She speculates that the phosphor fades too quickly for regular TV, so that half the lines are starting to go black before they're redrawn. Her best guess is that the tubes might be optimized for noninterlaced progressive-scan HDTV signals and just don't work that well with regular television.)
I've tried, but I can't find anybody who makes "fat enter key, no windows keys, full sized with numeric keypad" USB keyboards. That animal just doesn't seem to exist. I see a PS/2 to USB converter in my future...
Look at some of the ``Mac'' keyboards (not just from Apple). Of course you end up with Apple/Command keys, but they make swell Metas....
Philip Taubman was on C-SPAN's
Booknotes last Sunday. They have information about the book, a transcript of the interview, and even video (not sure what format).
One of the few places I've seen that carries a wide range of ergonomic furniture, including sit-to-stand desks, is OfficeOrganix. I have my eye on them for outfitting my office at work.
In addition to more or less traditional desks and chairs, they have some crazy stuff, such as the Stance chair, which adjusts from a kneeler chair to a regular chair to a lean-back-while-standing chair; and a couple of reclining desks or desk/chair combinations.
Even if you want to build your own, their site may be worth looking at for ideas. Their prices also approach reasonable, which is a rarity in the ergonomic furniture arena (where, I suppose, the assumption is that insurance or lawsuit money is paying for everything).
How many sysadmins know that the door to their server closet can be opened by an employee with a regular key?
How many sysadmins keep trying to convince their bosses that security is important, only to discover that the custodial staff routinely pops in the server room to empty the trash?
Sadly, not everyone understands that security is an issue.
I found Tranquility to be immensely frustrating, as I overshot pads and spun off the board or crashed to the floor. The more I missed, the more frustrated I became, and -- big surprise -- the more I missed.
I think I prefer games that are a bit less laid back.
Slashdot Mirror
After some trial and error I discovered my first generation optical Intellimouse Explorer didn't like the USB hub on the Dell monitor (I plugged it into the 2001FP's USB ports to add some slack on the mouse cable).
Not at all the same problem, but I have noticed problems with using Dell monitor USB ports under Linux. When the monitor goes to sleep, so does its USB hub, and when you wake up the machine, you get no mouse (unless you unplug it and plug it back in).
I solved the problem by plugging the mouse into the USB ports on the back of the machine. Less slack, fewer user calls about ``broken'' mice.
If I recall correctly, the children's father was a bit of an intellect. The boy hero certainly was.
Mom was a ``brilliant scientist'', too. And Meg (the main character) was no slouch herself. Even the twins were pretty bright.
Jeez, Buckaroo Banzai is a documentary, not science fiction.
Also, you better hope that your college degree is recognizably in the field you're trying to work. Ten years of experience as a sysadmin don't mean squat to an Immigration Canada official looking at your application for a work permit for a sysadmin job once they see your degree is in anthropology.
But, damn, Canada (Vancouver, anyway) is a nice place to live.
Once you get into more advanced usages, The LaTeX Companion is a good second book to pick up.
Be sure to get the new, second edition, due out at the end of the month and not the older edition, which is now about ten years old and definitely showing its age. (Parent links to the new edition.)
Now that The LaTeX Companion is being updated, can BibTeX 1.0 be far behind?! :)
I'm honor bound to put in a plug for George Gratzer's Math into LaTeX , which is the only book I'm aware of that covers most of the intricacies of AMS LaTeX. If you have a lot of math to write, George's book will probably tell you what you need to type (and will also probably have an example that's pretty close to what you need).
MiL also has a nice introduction to LaTeX, walking you through creating your very first LaTeX article; covers BibTeX reasonably thoroughly; and introduces you to some of the additional minutiae you should be aware of when writing a book with LaTeX.
ObAdditionalHonorableMention: I edited Math into LaTeX, but I don't see a cent from sales. I do use the book all the time when I'm trying to figure out something new or remember how to do something I haven't done for a while.
I recommend Zodiac.
Zodiac (subtitled The Ecothriller) is still my favorite Stephenson, suitable for numerous rereadings. It's fun, downright silly, at times, and has a loveably obnoxious main character.
ObTopic: I liked Quicksilver a lot, too, and I should have The Confusion on Thursday. Very Pynchonesque (in the Mason & Dixon sense).
CGI finally seems to be at the point where it could do justice to some of the scenes in Banksie's books. I'm looking forward to seeing the Clear Air Turbulence streaking through the GSV....
I also used to have google, but with the google search bar in firefox that's pretty useless.
If you set your search engine to Google in Mozilla, you can also get a ``search Google'' option from your regular location bar, which is even nicer, as you can do
and get a page of Google results.I still have Google as my home page, though. If nothing else, it lets me know the network is still alive....
Also, is it free of dead pixels? (both kinds?) I got my Apple Cinema Display shipped by mail, and it arrived with 100% perfect pixels. There wasn't a single stuck-on or stuck-off pixel, and not even a bad sub-pixel.
I have two Dell 2000FPs, one at work, one at home. Both are perfect, with no dead or stuck pixels.
I also have a 20" Apple Cinema Display at home. It's the second one, because the first one (shipped to us from Apple) had a bright green stuck pixel in the middle of the lower-left quadrant. One stuck pixel, no matter how obvious or annoying, is well within Apple's ``acceptable'' limit. We were able to exchange it for another monitor that didn't have any problems, but it required hours of argument with the folks at a nearby Apple store, as well as calls to Apple, and, in the end, an additional payment of a couple hundred dollars and a gamble that the new monitor wouldn't have problems. (They would not just open the box and test it for us without the additional charge.)
I love Apple's machines and Mac OS X, but Apple is still a company, with company policies that lean toward maximizing profits over customer happiness.
I found Rosemary Sassoon's Teach yourself better handwriting very useful. It is specifically targeted at ppl who are trying to fix up their handwriting and not at child first time learners.
Sweedack. I found the book to be pretty useful in giving me some insights into some of the things I was doing that were problematic. Doing lots of writing, writing larger, and writing more slowly also help a lot.
Mod parent up!
Tinderbox looks cool from the website, but when I downloaded the trial version I was completely turned off by the Carbon dialogs. Maybe I'm a snob, but I can't really imagine paying a lot of money for software that looks bad, especially on Mac OS X.
Maybe things have changed, but the last time I played with Fink, I got the impression that the developers didn't quite ``get'' Debian, and didn't quite get the BSD ports system, either. The result was kind of clunky and frustrating for people familiar with either inspirational ancestor.
DarwinPorts, on the other hand, does pretty much what I want it to do without contaminating my OS install. I'd still probably prefer a signed binary package system (if you're just trying something, having to wait for it to both download and build is annoying), but it works well enough for what I've used it for.
Were not NYT writers and editors the imbeciles responsible for irreparably damaging the English language by convincing millions of people that a comma was not needed before the and in a series?
No, that was the British, who invented the language and who tend to use a lot less punctuation than Americans do.
Tom Bihn makes and sells backpacks and shoulder bags for all kinds of laptops. They're made in the USA of nice materials.
Many of the bags that don't have built-in laptop support have snaps that can be used to hold a ``Brain Bag'' (available in various sizes) for a laptop. The Brain Bags suspend the laptop in a cradle inside a box with hardish sides.
Nice bags. Nice people.
Can anyone name an acquisition story that's been a huge success?
NeXT Computer's acquisition of Apple has been pretty successful. New, faster, shiner hardware; a slick new version of OPENSTEP; increasing popularity with consumers through the iPod and the iTunes Music Store; and even great geek cred now that the OS is based on BSD Unix.
Is it my imagination or did that Microsoft keyboard take the function keys and make four groups of three across the top (deviating from the normal four groups of three)?
Dell did the same thing with their ``Performance USB Keyboard''. I couldn't believe it, and, sure enough, the first user to get one of these keyboards asked for an old one. Since then, we order their cheapo PS/2 keyboards.
The school I work for uses these 'phones for coordinating emergency response stuff. They actually switched to Verizon a few months back because Nextel's coverage on campus was problematic.
My partner and I lucked into the Nike missile base being manned. It's really cool. We even got to go up on the missile lift. :)
There are also a variety of gun emplacements and bunkers that you can wander around on. You can also get inside them, but they're mostly barricaded and I have no idea how safe or unsafe they are.
Over in the East Bay, there's the Lawrence Hall of Science, which is an okay hands-on science museum, but is immediately recognizable as the home of Colossus from Colossus: The Forbin Project . It also has a spectacular view of most of the bay.
Another famously cool science museum in SF is the Exploratorium.
They are definitely really nice monitors. I got one at work, and then ended up buying one for my home machine.
They don't make great TVs, though, although they are workable if you're desperate. I had the monitor a couple of weeks before I got the new computer, so we put it next to our real TV for comparison, using its S-video input. We weren't that impressed, because it showed significant ghosting.
Then our real TV died and we used the 2000FP again while we were trying to find a replacement. It's fine with slow-moving scenes, but it's definitely blurry if there's a lot of motion. Like all the LCDs I've seen, it also doesn't do true black very well -- the screen still glows a bit, which is noticable if you have the lights low.
We spent a lot of time looking at TVs to replace our dead one. We ended up with a 27" tube Philips HDTV monitor. It's not perfect, but we found that the plasma TVs have a very visible grid pattern, and while the LCDs look the nicest, they still seem to be too slow for most programming. I think that the LCD TVs may also be a bit worse than the 2000FP.
(We also tried one of the new Sony non-HDTV (WEGA) TVs and ended up returning it after a week. The screen was very stroby, and it drove my partner to distraction. She speculates that the phosphor fades too quickly for regular TV, so that half the lines are starting to go black before they're redrawn. Her best guess is that the tubes might be optimized for noninterlaced progressive-scan HDTV signals and just don't work that well with regular television.)
I've tried, but I can't find anybody who makes "fat enter key, no windows keys, full sized with numeric keypad" USB keyboards. That animal just doesn't seem to exist. I see a PS/2 to USB converter in my future...
Look at some of the ``Mac'' keyboards (not just from Apple). Of course you end up with Apple/Command keys, but they make swell Metas....
Philip Taubman was on C-SPAN's Booknotes last Sunday. They have information about the book, a transcript of the interview, and even video (not sure what format).
One of the few places I've seen that carries a wide range of ergonomic furniture, including sit-to-stand desks, is OfficeOrganix. I have my eye on them for outfitting my office at work.
In addition to more or less traditional desks and chairs, they have some crazy stuff, such as the Stance chair, which adjusts from a kneeler chair to a regular chair to a lean-back-while-standing chair; and a couple of reclining desks or desk/chair combinations.
Even if you want to build your own, their site may be worth looking at for ideas. Their prices also approach reasonable, which is a rarity in the ergonomic furniture arena (where, I suppose, the assumption is that insurance or lawsuit money is paying for everything).
How many sysadmins know that the door to their server closet can be opened by an employee with a regular key?
How many sysadmins keep trying to convince their bosses that security is important, only to discover that the custodial staff routinely pops in the server room to empty the trash?
Sadly, not everyone understands that security is an issue.
I found Tranquility to be immensely frustrating, as I overshot pads and spun off the board or crashed to the floor. The more I missed, the more frustrated I became, and -- big surprise -- the more I missed.
I think I prefer games that are a bit less laid back.