Reading helps keep the ol’ thinkamajig in tip-top shape. Novels are my box lunch, but sometimes I like to have steak, or a big mac. In this vein, I present the following: Make Vol 1 is the first issue of O’Reilly’s new quarterly ‘mook’. I had originally not intended to get a copy of Make; at $21.99 CAN a pop, an issue of Make seemed prohibitively expensive. I happened to chance upon a free copy, however; after reading it, I now plan on getting a subscription. »
I’m not one to shop at the dollar store. My parents tell me I have expensive tastes; that I have always had expensive tastes. I assert that I just don’t like cheap crap. It’s not about cost, but quality (the GNOME vs Windows speech goes here). So I was very much not impressed with the job the tailor did on my jacket. The sleeves were crooked, uneven, and generally looked like some junior high student’s first home economics project. »
_ (Apologies to everyone who has heard my PDF rant before.) _ Reading PDFs on Linux sucks. That is, it used to suck, until the desktop group at Red Hat released the result of a weekend hack-fest: Evince. Evince is brilliant. The project has only been alive for ~2 months, but already its the best document viewer available for Linux. PDF, PS, images; it does them all (DVI and multi-page TIFF coming soon!). »
(That’s yours tomorrow, Jon.) Ah, St. Patty’s Day… After an incident at the grawood where one Dan K. put far too much green in the beer, I’ve switched to black velvets for all my Irish-related holiday needs. For the uninitiated, a black velvet is half guinness and half sparkling wine. It tastes far better than it sounds, and goes down smooth and bubbly. »
Not only does the society regularly offer drinks at criminal prices, now they’ve put together what promises to be the best. event. ever. The lovely Ms. Vissers and I will be attending; I would already have my tickets if Pat hadn’t dropped the ball on that one. A note to the organizers: I already own an Xbox and a Game Cube, but I would very much like to play Tekken 5. »
I got a nice email from Carol Cooke today, one of the authors of technogeekery for librarians. She’s a Librarian at the University of Manitoba, and is exploring what other Canadian Universities (and their libraries in particular) are doing with blogs, in the hopes of getting her University to adopt the technology. I wish her the best of luck in this. technogeekery for librarians is a pretty good read, and has been added to my blogroll. »
This is awesome. Not because I’ll use it (I’m all ogg, baby), but because these guys wanted an iTunes Music Store interface in Linux (or at least wanted to make one), so they did it. What’s funny is that they also released a Win32 installer. If MacOS X had a non X11 gtk+ port, I’d totally put out a dmg. »
A lot of Free software developers end up taking a lot of flack from some users. People demand to know why feature X wasn’t implemented yet, or why feature Y was removed. They may keep flaming about it long after any worth-while discussion has ended. As a result, the developers’ time is wasted trying to deal with this person, and so even less work gets done. The process becomes extremely frustrating after you deal with the same complaint for the 50th time. »
In a flurry of productivity, I crafted myself a web- site to complement the blog. Fun facts: It uses neither php nor perl, and there are no repeated presentation elements whatsoever. I decided to go with the Cheetah template system, though I could have just as easily used one of the gajillions of other templating systems for any other language. It’s fun to generate static pages! The style is rather austere, though it does look better now than the original layout of the blog did. »
XML honcho Tim Bray says blogging is good for your career. I feel so validated! Note: this probably won’t help you if your (prospective) employer thinks XML is just an under-powered, over-hyped dilution of SGML (I don’t include myself among that group). _ Link via boingboing and Waxy. _ »