Posts Tagged ‘geek’

  • 23 Mar

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    Flailing around with WordPress themes

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    While I like my website, it’s been occurring to me recently that the information is presented very attractively, but chaotically. Also, I thought it best to bring the Cara d’Bastian books into the fold, so to say, which meant that I had better re-organise my books into some kind of coherent manner so it doesn’t drive the average visitor batty.

    Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Fun even. All I have to do is browse through themes and pick one I like. The problem is, the themes nowadays (she says, gently moving in her rocking chair) are a bit too smart for their own good, and one theme that — I thought — looked absolutely fantastic on Firefox for Windows translated itself into the most cryptic of index pages when displayed on Firefox for Linux. Then too, there’s Opera, which doesn’t play nice with all websites. And, of course, I’m sure there are some people out there who still use (shudder) Internet Explorer, so I need to test that out too. Not to mention Midori and Iceweasel.

    The bottom line from all this experimenting is that I’ve landed with one of the default themes that comes with a WordPress installation. It’s a very nice theme, don’t get me wrong, but I’m still after some more bells and whistles because, as you all know, I’m a geek, and we geeks love our techie bits of bling. And, of course, this has meant taking time away from my writing. I keep saying it, but what I really need is a wife.

    So no big updates for you this week, stalwart reader. I have a to-do list that resembles a short novel, the nagging suspicion that I will eventually have to write my own damn WordPress theme, and a pinned up Sandal Press production schedule for this year that’s tough but do-able. And did I mention, tough?

    Have a good weekend, and I’ll catch up with you next week. Hopefully, by then, I’ll have something I like at my main website.

  • 19 Aug

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    Why I’m hot on EPUB

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    You may have noticed that, in the WAR GAMES giveaway, I specified EPUB as the reading format. Why did I do this?

    Well, first, because EPUB is an international standard put together by the International Digital Publishing Forum and I’ve got the hots for international standards. I love them. Without international standards, you wouldn’t be able to have your luggage tagged from one international destination to another, make phone calls or send a postcard to a friend, for example.

    Let me admit something to you. I’m also an open-source fan. I don’t like proprietary systems. I like to rip things apart to see how they work. EPUB fills those criteria.

    PDF, while widely known and used, is an Adobe product and, while I adore FrameMaker, Adobe has been notoriously antagonistic (or indifferent, take your pick) towards Linux. What really bites in this regard is that Adobe products are available for Apple (a *NIX variant) but they will not go that bit further and port across to Linux.

    Secondly, you have to understand the philosophy behind the two products. PDF was created as a screen alternative to print, at a time when most documents were still being sent from place to place in paper form. In order to win over those print fans, Adobe created the Portable Document Format (PDF), that had all the advantages of a printed document, but without the horrendous shipping and time costs.

    Because Adobe was targetting print fans, PDF gives you a printed page on a monitor. You see the page as the author intended, complete with the typefaces, margins and positioning as the author intended.

    The production of a PDF, then, is a completely different proposition to the production of an EPUB, where the size of screen, margins and even typefaces and their colours vary according to the reader’s choices on her/his screen.

    PDF has another problem. Where the PDF hasn’t been constructed to be reflowable, it will look terrible on your screen. I know this because I’ve tried (and failed) to read dozens of PDFs on various ereaders and they are a pain. Having to depend on the PDF author/publisher to do the right thing is a risk I am no longer willing to take, and one I don’t wish to impose on readers.

    And, lastly, because PDF is a faithful rendition of a printed page, all the considerations that didn’t have to go into an EPUB have to go into a PDF. That is, I have to cater for widows, orphans, gutters, rivers, hyphenation, and so on. This is not a trivial task if I want to do it properly and, believe me, I want to do this properly.

    Having said all that, I haven’t ruled out the possibility of having PDF giveaway versions of my Sandal Press books, but it’s just going to have to wait until I have a bit of spare time. (Although, if you really want a copy, Smashwords has WAR GAMES in PDF to sell you.)

    Hope this explains the reasoning. Have a good weekend and I’ll catch you next week.

    ADDITIONAL: Oops, I forgot to mention. The winner for the WAR GAMES giveaway ended up being two winners and copies have been sent to Cathy Pegau and Barbara Ann Wright. EPUB, natch! ;)

  • 09 Feb

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    Oracle and Java: to fork or not to fork

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    Recently, I wrote a post on LibreOffice and why I thought it was a better alternative to OpenOffice. The main reason was the past recalcitrance of Oracle over open-source as an obstacle to future open source initiatives.

    After I wrote that, J read it and asked, “What about Java?” In buying Sun, Oracle bought Java as well. Would Oracle turn things around and give Java a bit of the lovin’ it had been denying other open-source initiatives?

    [Insert snort of derision here]

    An El Reg post from 8 February cites a Forrester report that declares Java’s future as “alive and well but limited”. El Reg journalist Matt Asay points out that:

    Java [has not been] helped any by the political infighting that has plagued its development over the last few years. Sun had its share of detractors for its (mis)management of Java, but the ire reserved for Oracle’s manhandling of Java and its Java Community Process takes the criticism to a new level.

    Perhaps most notably, the Apache Software Foundation dumped its support for Java’s governance processes, and the open-source crowd also decided to fork the popular Hudson code management project.

    It also leaves Oracle with one more black mark against its reputation with developers.

    And what do the bread-and-butter developers think of Oracle? That would be the wonderfully entertaining commenters at El Reg. At the risk of fielding an accusation of cherry-picking quotes…oh hang it, here are other dudes that also think Oracle are a bunch of tyrannical twats. Andy73:

    If I were a shareholder in Oracle, I’d be most concerned that rather than buying an asset and leveraging it as far as possible, the company appears to be entrenching itself and alienating the wider market. As the author says, it’s probably a position they can hold for some time with little ill effect, but companies don’t grow by defending a corner.

    And from DrXym:

    …Oracle are insane to alienate open source developers whether they are volunteers or employed. The Apache foundation, Spring (VMWare), Hibernate / JBoss (Red Hat), Eclipse (IBM) are all critical contributors to the success of Java. If you develop for Java then the chances are you use a combination of tools and libs from all of the above.

    If you piss off these projects, or deny them input into the platform, they’ll simply begin to think about taking their business elsewhere.

    And while amanfromMars1 is perhaps overstating things by drawing philosophical connections between Quantitative Easing and Oracle’s bullheadedness, his heart seems to be in the right place:

    [Quote from Matt Asay's article:] “Oracle won’t be a comfortable position if it owns the data center but cedes client-side application engineering to someone else. Microsoft showed long ago that owning the end-user drives a lot of infrastructure decisions.”

    Quite so, Matt. Having a store of information [owning the data center] and not having the developers/metadatabase analysts in this case, to turn toxic old phorm information into dynamic new build intelligence, is a carbon copy in a parallel plane [and/or if you are heavily into Virtual Reality Fields and the ARGenre], of the present QE fiascos, with the trillions of fast instant cash being pumped into the money system, which is the owning-the-data-center element, doing absolutely nothing to create a bulwark against catastrophic collapse of the system because there is nobody to use the flash cash/toxic old phorm information to build a SMARTer Intelligence System for SMARTer IntelAIgent Systems.

    But the prize of Geek In-Joke of the Day has to go to Rafael1, who says:

    In a side note, I love when I get people’s CVs which mention HTML as a programming language… I have to resist the urge to ask them to implement a sorting algorithm in HTML.

    Good one, Rafael1! Have to remember that.

  • 27 Jan

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    Go for LibreOffice!

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    While on a recent discussion thread I found, to my surprise, that several authors use Open Office as their word processor of choice. That made my geeky little heart all warm and fuzzy, until I realised that OO was a Sun initiative and that Sun was recently bought by Oracle.

    As an Open Source geek, I don’t like Oracle. They’ve already proven that they will take open source initiatives and shut them down. OpenSolaris is one example. I don’t care whether you’ve used Solaris or not, innovation thrives in competition and Oracle is all about getting rid of it. I was working at Oracle when the Sun acquisition went through and it was not seen as a positive move by many Sun engineers involved in any open source initiatives. It was this, as it turned out, justified fear that led members of Open Office to “fork” the product by forming The Document Foundation and creating the LibreOffice suite.

    According to Wikipedia, and for all the Australians among you, LibreOffice was only supposed to be the interim name, to be changed when Oracle joined the party. In true Oracle fashion, not only did Oracle not buy into the foundation, but they demanded that all OpenOffice.org board members involved in LibreOffice resign. Ah Larry, your management style is truly exceptional!

    I’ll be honest. Even when part of Sun, Open Office was limping along, forever approaching the software guillotine then retreating from it. Now that it is part of Oracle, I really fear that the next trip to the downsizing blade won’t be as merciful.

    My advice to authors who use Open Office? Switch to LibreOffice and do it as quick as you can. Get involved with the development team. Try out some Release Candidates and log bugs. If we want LibreOffice to be a viable alternative to Microsoft Word (and which FOSS advocate doesn’t?), then involvement with the product is the best way to do it. And, because it’s Open Source, that means that your comments and contributions count! You can’t get more democratic than that.

    To find out more about The Document Foundation, go here.

    To download LibreOffice, go here.

    The Linux community has embraced LibreOffice and it is moving to replace Open Office in several distributions. I have removed Open Office from my machine and installed LibreOffice. Hope you do the same.

    UPDATE: LibreOffice 3.3 was officially released yesterday. And, as the article from Developer.com says:

    “I think that there is a very real and sincere offer for [Oracle] to join the community, the only blocker is Oracle,” [Michael Meeks, distinguished engineer at Novell] said. “They could become a leading light in the LibreOffice community. We’d love that. We’d love to have Oracle. This is not attempt to attack them, this an attempt to do something better.”

    What’s the bet Oracle just ignores them?