Jan-Piet Mens

Windows Vista is like a papaya: sleek on the outside, but a big mess on the inside.

I am going to do all I can to make sure that no family or friends buy a machine with Vista

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Everyone has to start some place in IT, and we all went through some sort of learning curve, right? But this takes the bloody cake:

Guy sees documentation (note: I write sees; he certainly didn't read it), where it says he should run

./configure ...

He then comes back to the mailing list and writes:

We are supposed to put three dots after ./configure script to make it work.[] It doesn't work for me too.

Holy shit. How dense can you get?

Königin Elizabeth II. ist bei einem Krankenhausbesuch mit zwei Bananen überrascht worden.

Allerdings habe die 81-jährige Monarchin nicht so ausgesehen, als würde sie die Bananen tatsächlich essen wollen.

via.

The first thing I recommend you do when you want to write a (technical) book is to find a publisher who doesn't force you to use MS-whatsit (or any other what you see is perhaps what you get system) to write your manuscript. Tell those that do to go take a hike, and continue looking for one that will allow, perhaps even encourage, you to use a text formatting system like LaTeX.

The next step, macroize everything. In case that isn't a word, what I mean is that you convert any reoccurring terms to macros. It is a bit of a pain at first, but it pays off. So, instead of using, say

LDAP

in your text, you use a macro and write

\LDAP

(note the backslash). After you've written the main content, you get to the irky bit: creating an index. Here is where the macroization pays off. If you did it well to start with, creating half the index is fully automated with the LaTeX tools. For example, in the PowerDNS chapter I use

\pdnsky{launch}

whenever I discuss the launch command. By altering that macro definition, I automatically create index entries that look like:

launch, PowerDNS, 123
...
PowerDNS directives
  launch, 123

Of course, there is still plenty to do, because you don't (well, at least I don't) just want a keyword index, but rather a concept index.

Not that I've finished my book yet, not by far, but let me tell you that using good tools means getting there in half the time!

News from Apple. (click):

[Thanks, Nic!]

[Thanks, Dominik.]

Just before last weekend, I lost about 50 pages of my writing. Not that I really lost them, as in "oops: I deleted them accidentally", thank goodness. No, the LaTeX style sheet I was using had the wrong page size.

I was seeing 540 pages, but my publisher said the page size was wrong. They got to the bottom of it, and sent me a patched style sheet, which "stole" fifty of my pages! The width of the page increased, therewith reducing the volume I had by that amount.

But since the purpose of my writing is not simply to create lots of pages, it doesn't matter what so ever.

Apart from that, I literally spent the whole weekend working on my book, and you know what? I'm almost back to the original page count.

Photo: Vladimir Aarkhipov.