Search Results: "ag"

6 February 2010

John Goerzen: The Big-Publisher Ebook Scam

There s been a lot written about the Amazon vs. Macmillan dust-up. I ve seen a lot of posts by people that work for publishers saying that there are costs to making a book, and that $9.99 just won t cut it for an ebook. They say that publishers invest in typesetting, editing, selection, art, and various stages of quality control. All of that is true. Too bad they aren t doing it with ebooks. I ve had some books published, and while the process varies from publisher to publisher, the editing process usually involves technical editors (people that check my facts), copy editors (people that help the writing and grammar), cover designers, and QC staff. Often I will see PDFs or printed pages at the final stage, and at that point can catch things like bad table formatting or lines split at inopportune places. My point here is that there s a lot of editing going on, and there are many pairs of eyeballs looking at the printed page before it goes to the presses. In the year or so since I ve owned my Kindle, I can absolutely guarantee you that this process is not happening with ebooks. Most of the time, it is quite obvious that nobody has even looked at the finished product. Some intern has whipped up a quick conversion from whatever typesetting software they use, give it a quick glance, and call it good. One of my own books, Real World Haskell, is available in Kindle form. O Reilly took better than average care of that process, but even so, I certainly didn t approve screenshots before it went out like I did for paper (not that I d have had time after the paper project was done anyway.) From memory, some of the flaws I m aware of: In some of these cases, it is quite obvious that a human didn t even bother to look at the result. Harper Collins got a huge black eye after their LOTR fiasco, and still took quite a long time to fix it. Now, if the publishers were actually going to put as much care into the quality of their ebooks as they do into the quality of their paper books, then sure, I d pay almost the cost of a paperback. But very few of them are doing that. It is quite obvious to me usually by the end of the first chapter of a book whether anybody even looked at the result of their conversion. Bottom line: If they re going to sell me an inferior product, don t expect me to pay near full price. If they can get their act together on quality, only then would they have room to start arguing for higher prices. If all you re going to do with the ebook is run the paper version through some buggy filter, you haven t incurred much additional cost, and it is plainly visible to all. Note: I would like to say that Lonely Planet and O Reilly have done good jobs with the tools available, and while their results aren t perfect, they have done a good job working with rendering their sometimes very complex print layouts for a Kindle.

C.J. Adams-Collier: PPA installation on karmic

I don t know how long add-apt-repository has been around, but I ve found it very useful for installing some of the bleeding edge stuff I want to test: 
$ for ppa in do-core team-xbmc nvidia-vdpau chromium-daily directhex/monoxide
do
  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:$ppa
done
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install chromium-browser nvidia-glx-195 gnome-do xbmc monodevelop
Is there anything like this for debian proper, I wonder?
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Robert Collins: Adding new languages to Ubuntu


Scott recently noted that we don t have Klingon available in Ubuntu. Klingon is available in ISO 639, so adding it should be straight forward. Last time I blogged about this three packages needed changing, as well as Launchpad needing a translation team for the language. The situation is a little better now: only two packages need changing as gdm now dynamically looks for languages based on installed locales. libx11 still needs changing a minimal diff would be: 
=== modified file 'nls/compose.dir.pre'
--- libx11-1.2.1/nls/compose.dir.pre
+++ libx11-1.2.1/nls/compose.dir.pre
@@ -406,0 +406,1 @@
+en_US.UTF-8/Compose:     tlh_GB.UTF-8
=== modified file 'nls/locale.alias.pre'
--- libx11-1.2.1/nls/locale.alias.pre
+++ libx11-1.2.1/nls/locale.alias.pre
@@ -1083,0 +1083,1 @@
+tlh_GB.utf8:           tlh_GB.UTF-8
 === modified file 'nls/locale.dir.pre'
--- libx11-1.2.1/nls/locale.dir.pre
+++ libx11-1.2.1/nls/locale.dir.pre
@@ -429,0 +429,1 @@
+en_US.UTF-8/XLC_LOCALE:       tlh_GB.UTF-8
Secondly, langpack-locales has to change for two reasons. Firstly a locale definition has to be added (and locales define a place a language and locale information like days of the week, phone number formatting etc. Secondly the language needs to be added to the SUPPORTED list in that package, so that language packs are generated from Launchpad translations. Now, gdm autodetects, but it turns out that only complete locales were being shown. And that on Ubuntu, this was not looking at language pack directories, rather at 
/usr/share/locale
which langpack-built packages do not install translations into. So it could be a bit random about whether a language shows up in gdm. Martin Pitt has kindly turned on the with-incomplete-locales configure flag to gdm, and this will permit less completely translated locales to show up (when their langpack is installed without the langpack nothing will show up).

5 February 2010

Carl Chenet: python-memcache 1.45 in unstable


The new upstream version of python-memcache was uploaded yesterday in unstable (thanks Piotr!). Python-memcache is a 100% Python library to interact with your memcached server, typically to store and retrieve data. But you can think of a wide range of uses, e.g writing a plugin to monitor your memcached server. Hmm tomorrow I ll need a 3-hour road trip to reach the Fosdem and it s late already. See you there!

Dirk Eddelbuettel: R / Finance 2010 Open for Registration

The annoucement below went out to R-SIG-Finance earlier today. For information is as usual the the R / Finance 2010 page:
Now open for registrations: R / Finance 2010: Applied Finance with R
April 16 and 17, 2010
Chicago, IL, USA
The second annual R / Finance conference for applied finance using R, the premier free software system for statistical computation and graphics, will be held this spring in Chicago, IL, USA on Friday April 16 and Saturday April 17. Building on the success of the inaugural R / Finance 2009 event, this two-day conference will cover topics as diverse as portfolio theory, time-series analysis, as well as advanced risk tools, high-performance computing, and econometrics. All will be discussed within the context of using R as a primary tool for financial risk management and trading. Invited keynote presentations by Bernhard Pfaff, Ralph Vince, Mark Wildi and Achim Zeileis are complemented by over twenty talks (both full-length and 'lightning') selected from the submissions. Four optional tutorials are also offered on Friday April 16. R / Finance 2010 is organized by a local group of R package authors and community contributors, and hosted by the International Center for Futures and Derivatives (ICFD) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Conference registration is now open. Special advanced registration pricing is available, as well as discounted pricing for academic and student registrations. More details and registration information can be found at the website at
http://www.RinFinance.com
For the program committee:
Gib Bassett, Peter Carl, Dirk Eddelbuettel, John Miller,
Brian Peterson, Dale Rosenthal, Jeffrey Ryan
See you in Chicago in April!

Matthew Garrett: Shaping young minds

I'm off to CMU at the weekend, in order to do a couple of talks on Monday (the 8th). I'll be giving an introduction to ACPI to the operating systems class in the morning, and an open presentation on Fedora, some of the challenges we face and how to get involved in Linux in the afternoon. This is as a result of our cooperation with CMU, which has led to things like the request on the right. How could we refuse?

Mike Hommey: broken_arch -= 2

The xulrunner test suite now passes on sparc, involving a fix for an existing bug, and a new bug report. Next target is powerpc, where, interestingly, the test suite only failed 3 tests on the porterbox, where the buildd failed 58 And contrary to sparc, the failures don t involve crashes. Update: powerpc is now fixed, too, with a little help from luck and good timing: the 3 failing tests had all the same origin, and it was fixed a few months ago in upstream trunk.

Marco T&uacute;lio Gontijo e Silva: More on sup


Going on with this post. I noticed, again with the help of hyperbolist@#sup@irc.freenode.net, that the startup.rb file can be more simple. I also noticed that the comment I ve made in the original code was making the thread not going away from the thread list in inbox. So, this one works: 
class Redwood::ThreadViewMode
  @@keymaps[self].add :kill_and_next,
  "Kill this thread, kill buffer, and view next", '&'
  def kill_and_next; kill_and_then :next end
  def kill_and_then op
    dispatch op do
      @index_mode.multi_kill [@thread]
    end
  end
end
Also, I used the suggestion of the New User Guide to Sup, and installed rss2email to read also blogs from sup. The r2e manpage has the indications to setup it.

Cyril Brulebois: G-I, part 3

Last night was the third one spent on playing around with X in a d-i environment. Making sure X actually works So far, running X was nice already, but is it really possible to run some applications inside? Bad news is that many trivial applications (xeyes, xclock, ) pull more dependencies than previously packaged. Finally, xev was chosen, and it indeed works fine (provided one makes sure it gets the focus). X was crashing when the (only last) client was exiting, and that wasn t normal. Thankfully the bug was reproducible outside d-i and Julien sent a patch a few minutes later. In the meanwhile, using -noreset did the trick to keep X running. Another way to run X applications there, is to point the host environment to the guest environment using DISPLAY=$GUEST:0 xterm. With VirtualBox, I followed those steps: Moving forward: cairo, pango, gtk The next step was to rework some udebs. Legend: Current situation, keeping only the relationships between udebs of interest: I took care of gtk+2.0 while Julien hacked pango1.0 and cairo. Some more libraries were needed, but being X libraries, tweaking the packaging was as trivial as for the first X libraries, and it only took a couple of minutes: libxcomposite, libxdamage, and libxinerama. Once those added to localudebs/ and to pkg-lists/local, and once the image rebuilt, I prepared a tiny Hello world -style application: Pango wasn t quite happy at first (message wrapped): 
(hello:1991): Pango-WARNING **: failed to choose a font, expect
              ugly output. engine-type='PangoRenderFc', script='latin'
Indeed, since no fonts were included, there was a tiny issue. No big deal, adding ttf-dejavu-udeb did the trick. I wanted to play around with a non-Latin language, so I asked for an example (thanks, Theppitak!), and once ttf-thai-tlwg-udeb added as well, one gets: Of course, there are many more features to test, but that sounds like we re going in the right direction (and this is not a joke about RTL). Next step Have a look at the green boxes, which may require to have a closer look at g-i s integration within d-i (it might be needed to see how it s supposed to be started, that might help testing the tweaked packages).

Marco T&uacute;lio Gontijo e Silva: Using sup-mail


Some time ago I wanted some features that evolution wouldn t give to me, such as a good user experience without using the mouse, and the possibility to use an external editor for writing e-mails. I always liked gmail web interface, but I don t like using software that I can t change or see the code, so I wanted threaded view, but I was not with a very high expectative of finding it, since I ve never seen it anywhere else. I tried icedove, sylpheed, claws and mutt, but none of them was good enough for me. I couldn t use very well icedove, sylpheed and claws only with the keyboard, and mutt wouldn t show me a list of folders with how many unread messages there was in each of them. mutt-patched tries to do this, but the number of messages aren t updated automatically. So I kept with evolution. At that time, I even tried evolution from experimental, which contained a plugin to use an external editor. The result was that I got even more crashes, and the external editor was not very nice. I gave up about it when I had to remove totem because of broken dependencies with the evolution from experimental. Some days ago Rafael (Pre ) Cunha de Almeida told me that he heard of this sup, and tried using it, but didn t like very much, because it was not good for accessing the mail from two different machines. As I use only my notebook most of the time, I decided to try it out. And i m liking it: it s mostly like gmail, but with a very good feature I don t remember seeing in gmail: you can kill a thread, and even if more mail arrives from that thread, it ll not be shown in your inbox. Other thing I liked about it is that it s highly customizable in Ruby, which made me feel a little bit like in XMonad. The first problem I found on it was the handling of UTF-8. I found this bug about it, and installed the recommended package, so it worked. I hope this correction, or the better one suggested here, get to Debian. I took a look at the Hooks page on the sup wiki, and used the fetchmail suggestion. I noticed that the code that was there in the time didn t worked here (maybe a bashism?):
fetchmail >& /dev/null
 So I replaced it in the wiki with:
fetchmail 2>&1 > /dev/null
 which worked here. I wanted to create a new binding, to kill the thread, kill the buffer, and move to the next message in thread-view-mode, so I tried some possibilities without success, until I got to this, with the help of hyperbolis@#sup@irc.freenode.net:
class Redwood::ThreadViewMode
@@keymaps[self].add :kill_and_next,
"Kill this thread, kill buffer, and view next", '&'
def kill_and_next; kill_and_then :next end
def kill_and_then op
dispatch op do
multi_kill [@thread]
end
end # From lib/modes/thread-index-mode.rb
## m-m-m-m-MULTI-KILL
def multi_kill threads
UndoManager.register killing # threads.size.pluralize thread do
threads.each do t
t.remove_label :killed
add_or_unhide t.first
Index.save_thread t
end
regen_text
end threads.each do t
t.apply_label :killed
# hide_thread t
end regen_text
BufferManager.flash # threads.size.pluralize thread killed.
threads.each t Index.save_thread t
end
end This is the content of the file ~/.sup/hooks/startup.rb. I copied a function from the source code of sup, commenting one line that was relative to that context.

Thorsten Glaser: FOSDEM 2010, day #0

Yesterday, I arrived in Bruxelles, coming from the Issy/Paris FusionForge meeting which will be described more later by Roland on Pl net Forge. Please tell Ohlol if you use it, for more visibility. My employer will also provide hosting for FOSS projects, but we'll need to formalise the hosting conditions first, plus Evolvis currently runs FusionForge 4.5 (aka "Debian GForge") but we're in the process of upgrading to a 4.8-plus-backports-and-patches, then 5.0 soon. There is a new inter-forge mailing list as well, see the info page. People from Coclico and the various *forges may want to subscribe there (forge developers, not so much users (hosters) or end-users (hosted project developers/users) though). At FOSDEM, Benny and I (and maybe gecko2) will be running the MirBSD booth, so no Debian staffing for me, sorry. But I will be there. Also please do ask me about mksh the MirBSD Korn Shell etc. There are flyers in German (not updated), English and French too! (One of the *forge guys did install mksh(1) after reading it, in fact.) Don't you people dare miss the two talks: from Benny about how to package with autotools and libtool correctly and from XTaran explaining Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Benny's also famous for his talk about Painless Perl Ports with cpan2port; XTaran's famous for a whole bunch of other things. I still have some catching up (wlog entries, keysigning, webpages, etc.) to do, please bear with me. I don't really have a proper work environment with me. There's a chance I will not be attending the Beer Event in the Delirium Tremens caf (last year's still remembered). Benny will certainly be there, though. Could someone please order nice weather? I still need to eat some lunch and find a supermarket to shop for the weekend!

Brandon Holtsclaw: My Friend Audio Business Converter Product

Audio information can be stored in a wide variety of formats, which vary in sound quality, file size, compatibility, etc. There are lots of extensions that cannot be read by some players. For this reason, many audiophiles are often confronted with compatibility issues. There are lots of audio conversion tools available on the web, but there are much more formats out there than they support. Most converters support only a few extensions and therefore they fail to satisfy users requirements.

Finding a high quality mp3 converter
has long been a challenge. Happily, software developers have designed Factory Audio Converter. It converts audio files to MP3, WAV, WMA, OGG, APE, MP4, FLAC, MPC, AAC. The array of input formats is even broader: MP3, RA, RMM, RAM, RPM, RM, RMVB, WAV, OGG, CDA, APE, APL, MPC, MP+, WMA, FLAC, AAC, M4A, MP4, TTA, OFR, SPX, WV, XM, IT, S3M, MOD, MTM, UMX, AMR, MP3/OGG compressed MODs, MIDI, VQF, AU / SND, PAF, IFF, SVX, WAV, SF, VOC, W64, MAT4, MAT5, PVF, XI, HTK, CAF. If you are looking for a flexible audio conversion utility, this one is the best!

Good audio converters feature batch mode. If you have a lot of wma files and would like to save them as mp3, you need a fast-working and powerful wma to mp3 converter. Factory Audio Converter can convert hundreds of files within seconds. If you have gigs of music on your PC, you can set the utility to convert all of them and turn in. You will get up in the morning to see all your files saved in your preferred format!

By aid of Factory Audio Converter, you can convert wma to mp3 right from the desktop. Once installed on a PC, the program integrates into Windows seamlessly, and Convert to option appears in the right-button menu. All you need to do is right-click on a wma file and select Convert to. You can also run Factory Audio Converter from within other programs via command line.

Advanced users do not only want toconvert wma to mp3
. They want to do it easily! User-friendliness all but heads the top-importance list of characteristics. Factory Audio Converter has a robust and intuitive user interface. It does not take any background to understand how to use it. The program wizard will guide you through the whole procedure. It will help you select your settings. You may either skip it and leave the default settings or specify your own settings. Sound quality will depend on your choice of bitrate, samplerate and channel.

The more new features a program has, the more likely it is to enjoy demand. Factory Audio Converter incorporates a built-in audio player and CD ripper. You can listen to your tracks prior to conversion and compare output and input files. The CD ripper will rip your CD files and help you save them on any type of hard drive. Factory Audio Converter permits you to change wav to mp3
and save a lot of drive space. Now you can use any portable player and listen to your favorite musicians any time, wherever you are!

You can buy Factory Audio converter at a price comparable to that of any other converter. However, few converters are comparable to Factory Audio Converter in terms of user friendliness and productiveness. <script class="owbutton" src="http://onlywire.com/button" title="My Friend Audio Business Converter Product" type="text/javascript" url="http://www.imbrandon.com/2010/02/05/my-friend-audio-business-product/"></script>

Julien Blache: Ten years

Ten years ago, pretty much to the day, I was installing my first Debian system, a frozen Potato, using a release-candidate version of the boot-floppies. A few days later, I was reading the Policy, New Maintainer s Guide and Developer s Reference while building my first package. It s been a fun ten years, with ups and downs, and I m looking forward to what s coming next.

Andrew Pollock: [life] Dean's Award for Sarah

Sarah got a piece of mail today from USQ, with a very ominous "Do Not Bend" on it. It turns out because she averaged a 6.5 GPA in semester 2, she'd qualified for a special Dean's Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement, and will get a mention on the University's website and in a bunch of newspapers. I'm really proud of her. Unfortunately, she had to withdraw from semester 3 (the Summer semester) study because all of the baby's brain stuff came up right towards the end of semester, and that on top of moving and trying to renovate was just too much for her. She's intending to take Semester 1 off, because the baby's due right around exam time, and then resuming study in Semester 2.

Carl Chenet: python-jabberbot 0.9 in Debian


The new upstream version of python-jabberbot was uploaded yesterday in unstable (thanks Piotr!). Python-jabber is a Python library which makes easy to write your own Jabber bot. /usr/share/doc/python-jabberbot/examples/broadcast.py is a good example of a *really simple* Jabber bot and could be a good start if you need one.

4 February 2010

Joachim Breitner: FontForge-Article in the German Linux-Magazin

Yesterday, I found the 3/10-issue of the German Linux-Magazin in my mailbox. (I don t dare to call it the March issue they are a bit off schedule...) On page 62, you can find my 3 page article about creating a symbol font with FontForge. I briefly covered the topic on my blog and later thought that it would made a nice article, even though I m not an expert on this area. The article will be freely available in about three years.This is already my third publication, after my article on the Cross-Site-Authentication attack that was published in the same magazine (circulation ~63.000) and in its international counterpart in 2005 and my recent article in the freeX magazine (circulation ~15.000). Looks like I ll have to add a Publications section to my website soon...

Brandon Holtsclaw: More Women in Management, the More Profitable the Company

According to an article in theWashington Post, Weekly Edition, 9 by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, companies that employ more women in upper level management are more profitable than those that rely heavily on male talent to run their businesses.

This exciting (but not surprising) news is not limited to the United States, but is true throughout the world.

And it s not only one study, but at least half a dozen, from a broad spectrum of organizations such as Columbia University, McKinsey & Co., Goldman Sachs and Pepperdine University, that document a clear relationship between women in senior management and corporate financial success. By all measures, more women in your company means better performance.

One of the points made in the Washington Post article was that men may naturally be more prone to risk taking and competition (thanks to the hormone testosterone), but women are better collaborators and better at achieving long-term results.

So men, if you want your businesses to flourish, hire and promote more qualified women. The results are in, the statistics speak for themselves. Men are the hares and women are the tortoises, who will win the race steady and slow. <script class="owbutton" src="http://onlywire.com/button" title="More Women in Management, the More Profitable the Company" type="text/javascript" url="http://www.imbrandon.com/2010/02/04/more-women-in-management-the-more-profitable-the-company/"></script>

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Travel agenda before FOSDEM

In last few days I spent some time with travel agenda. Tomorrow morning I am leaving for FOSDEM, so I'm arranging last minutes things like online checking. Whoever wants to meet me just drop me an email or just check things I want to visit and find me there. Meanwhile got open registration for Debconf 10, so when I was in travelling mood, I also filled in that one. Right now it looks like it will be quite tough for me to pay this trip, but there is still some time to sort it out :-).

Mike Hommey: xulrunner 1.9.1.6-2 diff stats

As part of preparing xulrunner 1.9.2 (which would lead to Iceweasel 3.6), I have gone through all the patches currently applied to the latest xulrunner release, to keep track of what should be upstreamed, what needed feedback, what patches I needed to update in upstream bugzilla, etc. As I have talked about our differences with upstream on a few occasions already, and as I was doing this grunt work anyway, I thought it would be nice to make the results public. First, a few reference numbers (excluding changes to generated configure files): A few observations on the above data: The latter used to be true, but is not anymore: xulrunner 1.9.1.6-2 added a lot of changes and is now up to: 98 files changed, 1107 insertions(+), 517 deletions(-). What happened ? will you ask me. A lot happened: the test suite, attempts at correctly installing C++ headers and IDL files, bug fixes. Work has also been done such that make clean/distclean doesn t leave stuff around and that xulrunner can be properly built twice in a row. Differences between 1.9.1.6-1 and 1.9.1.6-2 look like this: 31 files changed, 341 insertions(+), 167 deletions(-). Some were stolen from bugzilla (13 files changed, 162 insertions(+), 70 deletions(-)): Many others were sent: A few others were filed without a patch, as I felt a proper upstreamable patch needed discussion (3 files changed, 16 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)): A few changes are related to the way we build and how we run the test suite (5 files changed, 35 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-)): Finally, a few were related to the Debian changes history (2 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 26 deletions(-)): Going through the rest of the changes between upstream and the latest Debian release, we can split in 5 categories of changes:
Those that were picked from upstream, or sent and eventually applied in 1.9.2 or trunk (12 files changed, 68 insertions(+), 41 deletions(-)): Those that were picked from bugzilla or sent there, but are not applied upstream for various reasons (29 files changed, 138 insertions(+), 209 deletions(-)): Those that were reported but for which I wanted feedback for a proper fix, yet a patch was applied in Debian because this was necessary (6 files changed, 22 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)): Those that are yet to be sent to bugzilla (15 files changed, 111 insertions(+), 54 deletions(-)): And finally, the changes that are either Debian specific or not deemed upstreamable (30 files changed, 460 insertions(+), 77 deletions(-) ; this can sound huge, but see the details below): Note, the numbers in the various diff stats obviously don t add up, since some changes overlap. All that information doesn t account the few additional components added in debian/filemonitor and debian/extra-stuff, that account for nearly 600 lines (excluding licensing boilerplate), but I ll talk about these in another post. This analysis also helped spotting another harmless merge error (the first one was spotted a few weeks ago and just left the enable-system-lcms around, without any effect): a variable replacement in a Makefile that doesn t have any effect, since the 2 variables have the same value. Only a pointless 1 line change.

Andrew Pollock: [life] Farewell Central Park Apartments

In buying a place and moving, we've left the home we've been in for just over 4 years. Central Park Apartments was a wonderful community for us, and we made many wonderful friends there. At the peak of awesome, we knew really well the occupants of 4 out of the 7 other apartments in our building, as well as numerous others throughout the complex. The company running the place ran it really well. Everything was well maintained. I wouldn't recommend one of the single-level apartments, as the inter-floor sound insulation was pretty terrible, but the townhomes were great (albeit the kitchens were a bit small). We were in a Greenwich floorplan. The other big plus for me was that it had data cabling. We'll miss all of our friends there, but thankfully they're not very far away.

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