I recently bought a new hard drive and decided to start with a clean install of my favorite OS--OpenSUSE 11.0 with KDE 4.2. I've used both OpenSUSE and Ubuntu for years. OpenSUSE was my favorite up until this fresh install. There were so many dependencies errors that neither KDE nor Gnome nor XFCE were completely functional.
So I downloaded OpenSUSE 11.1, thinking that it might not have the same problems. Not only did OpenSUSE 11.1 have serious out of the box dependency issues, it was also slow as molasses. After spending six hours disabling everything from the IPv6, which it uses by default for repositories that don't support IPv6, and downloading the graphics support for my IBM NetVista Pentium 4 (which was included in the 11.0 original install) and making numerous other tweaks, I quit and installed Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, which just works.
The only problem with Ubuntu 8.04 is it doesn't have the latest KDE 4.2 in the repositories because it is a long term version. While I respect that decision, KDE 4.03, which reminds me of Vista in that it's an alpha that some marketing idiot labeled final release, shouldn't be used by anyone interested in a stable production environment. I am currently compiling the source for KDE 4.2 and crossing my fingers that my lovely KDE desktop will resurface. (Yes, I could use the latest Kubuntu. I tried it. It was missing crucial screen resolution settings...)
I hate writing about this experience and sincerely hope the lovely people in the OpenSUSE community get their act together. Linux distributions are highly competitive and breaking what was one of the best linux distributions is a sure way to kill your project.
P.S. I did post bug reports with the OpenSUSE community and discussed the very strange problems I was experiencing in the forums. The machine I did the fresh install on was an OpenSUSE 11.0 machine prior to the install and did not experience any of these problems.
Before reading this post, there are few things you should know...
ITunes is a wonderful concept for purchasing content. Unfortunately, it locks the users into Apple's approved file formats and to Apple devices. Both of these are problematic. By forcing users to use a particular file format, Apple is supporting one technology over another. Because of their market share, this is an anti-competitive business practice. It means that file formats, such as ogg and flac, are less supported and less competitive with other formats such as mp3. Please note, some computer companies may have financial stakes in file formats. Supporting a particular format through their online retailer is one way of obtaining market dominance for their file format. (And yes, Apple appears to be one of the companies that uses this business model. They do have a vested financial interest in .aac, .mp4, and .m4a.) As a consumer, you should be concerned by this. This company is selling you music in formats that may or may not have a higher quality than other formats. You should control the quality of your music files. Not Apple!
I do have an IPod, and I have made purchases from ITunes. (Most of those were made before Amazon.com began selling MP3s.) My IPod is a first generation nano. It runs Rockbox. Rockbox adds support for other file formats including .ogg and .flac. Unfortunately, Apple changed their firmware. The newer IPods, IPhones, and IPod Touches all use encrypted firmware. There are ways around it, but they aren't for the faint hearted and rockbox doesn't work on most newer models. Here's the trick. ITunes writes all its music into a hidden file directories with meaningless file names. Rockbox turns my IPod into a generic mp3 player. The file directories are now human readable. Adding files is a simple drag and drop. Alternatively, I can sync my music using either Amarok or Banshee. To date, I've tried ten different music managers, including RhythmBox, gtkpod, and SongBird. Amarok and Banshee are the only two I've liked. All the others were either too difficult to use, didn't recognize my IPod as a generic MP3 player, or were too immature.
When I purchase music online, the first thing I do is burn it to a playable music CD. Then, I backup the files for good measure. I simply took my ITunes music CD collection and put them in my Ubuntu box's cd player. Then, I used Audio CD Extractor to convert my CD collection into .ogg files. Unfortunately, my pretty little .ogg files are tagless, but not for long. Using Jaikoz, I tagged most of my files. I also created a master record of my ITunes song tags. Then, I listened to the songs without tags, found them on my master list, and typed the tags in. Note: Jaikoz had no problems finding tags for popular songs. My obscure classical collection was a different matter. Overall, I'm very happy with the transition away from ITunes dependency. So far, it hasn't been as painful as I thought it would be. There are programs available that strip DRM from ITunes purchases. I've tested these. In my opinion, using real CDs instead of a virtual CD burner or recording music from the sound card produces a better quality file. Plus, using real CDs is more legit. If you like any of the open source software mentioned in this post, please consider contributing to the project. There are many ways to contribute including coding, testing, documenting, and sending money.
Tools Used for the Below Example:For the past eight years, I've used Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. Due to recent experiences with Apple (specifically Apple Care), I no longer recommend their products and am swapping to Linux as my primary OS. I replaced my Window's machine a few years ago with Linux. I am very happy with my stable little Linux box and have reached a decision.
I have a list of programs and files, including nearly 1000 ITunes music downloads. When I am finished, all functionality and files from my Powerbook G4 12" (sadly discontinued) will run on the Linux box. The programs will all be open source programs. The files types will be independent of the operating system. I seek simplicity and interoperability. I will find it. A header is an organization unit similar to an outline level, not a method of enlarging your text.
You use it to apply titles, subtitles, sections, and subsections to your work.
This is a bit difficult to answer. Headers are unique and should give additional meaning to your writing. If truncating your header reduces its meaning, you should leave it alone. However, many search engines and other web crawlers display header levels, and most cut them off somewhere between 65 and 100 characters. Keep this in mind when writing for the web and make sure the first portion of your headers is meaningful.
Start with your outline; use your outline to layout your header levels. Each level of your outline is a different header level. Convert your outline text into meaningful titles and subtitles as you go. You should not use your outline text as the text for the header because your outline should be more detailed than your title or subtitle. Layout your document using your headers prior to writing your text. This makes it easier to navigate within your document while you are writing and helps you retain some structure. Remember, it is easier to delete something you dislike than it is to remember something you forgot.
Most word processing programs, including OpenOffice, Word, and Word Perfect, offer an outline view. This view is actually a header view and is quite useful for laying your documents. It is not a true outline. You should not outline using this view. Using header levels consistently throughout your document gives you several advantages.
The first advantage is styling. You should never style any document by highlighting the text and selecting a font, font size, and weight. You should use your styles. For example, my document title is Header 1, and all my chapters are Header 2. My chapters should be centered Times New Roman, size 16, and bold. Instead of highlighting each chapter title and applying this style individually, which on a large document would be very time consuming, open the style bar and edit the Header 2 style once. Now, every Header 2 in my document has the required style. This principle applies to every element of your composition, including footnotes, endnotes, subscripts, tables, and paragraphs. The only time you should highlight the text and change its font is when you want to apply particular emphasis to a phrase or passage. Even then, you are better off if you create a custom style called “emphasize” or “quotation box”. This will help maintain consistent styles throughout your document.
The second advantage is generating tables of contents, indexes, tables of figures, and tables of authorities. Style levels actually mark many of these in advance. By using captions under your figures, you allow the word processing program to identify all the figures in your document and generate a list with the figure name and location. The same applies to the others.
The final major advantage is managing citation layouts. There many tools, including EndNote, ProCite, and Zotero, that manage citations and automatically insert them as footnotes, endnotes, and/or internal citations. All of these tools use defined styles to style your citations, and you can edit these styles. This includes things like indenting all lines after the first line of the citation in the bibliography and adding a tab before the number in footnotes. Just a note, if you need to underline all book titles and your book title citations are currently in italics, you should edit the style template output (ex. APA) defined in the program. For consistency reasons, you should not edit these in the word processor.
In print publications, headers are used to organize content into easily digestible chunks and in some cases, help readers skim the content. Most textbooks contain excellent examples of proper header usage. Multiple header levels are not typically used in fiction writing. This is probably because people are less likely to skim fiction. They are much more important in non-fiction, and many reference works would be difficult, if not impossible, to use without them.
In web writing, it is particularly important to use headers properly. People read web pages differently than print publications and are more likely to skim your page for relevant information. Headers help them skim.
Search engines display header levels in their search results. This means yours headers should be relevant to your content and the first 65 to 100 characters should be the most meaningful. Preferably, your headers should be short and to the point.
Many visually-impaired people use screen readers to navigate the web. For them, headers are extremely important because they offer an additional level of navigation embedded within your content. Without proper header usage, your main content will be difficult to navigate for these people and you cannot tell from web statics how many people accessing your site use this technology.
This post is an example of proper header usage.
Regardless of your subject matter, grammar is important. Unless your name is William Faulkner, deviating from standard English grammar is not a good idea. Now, I realize many schools stop teaching grammar once students can identify verbs and nouns. This is an unfortunate decision that our society will regret. Contrary to popular belief, learning grammar does not stifle creativity. Think of writing as building. Words are the concrete and grammar is the rebar. Just as with construction, grammar reinforces the words by making them stronger and giving them structure. This helps you connect with your readers.
Over the past several years, many sites have cropped up for aspiring authors to share their work with the world. While some of the authors are excellent writers, others begin their stories with long disclaimers stating why they do not write with proper grammar and commonly accepted spelling. Generally, their disclaimers are better written than their stories. After skimming through the first two hundred words, I leave and read someone else’s story. Although they may have an excellent story idea, their grammar usage made the story difficult to understand, and I could not easily read it. Compare the examples below and see which one you would prefer reading.
john stealthily klimbed the tree. hoping to sneak back in the house without being caught. he is slowly pushing his bedroom window open when an earsplitting alarm goes off. shocked that his parents rememmbered to turn on the alarm he jerked back, lost his footing, and plummeted to the ground. ten minutes later his father found him moaning in pain clutching his broken arm.
John stealthily klimbed the tree, hoping to sneak back in the house without being caught. He is slowly pushing his bedroom window open when an earsplitting alarm goes off. Shocked that his parents had actually rememmbered to turn on the alarm, he jerked back, lost his footing, and plummeted to the ground. Ten minutes later, his father found him moaning in pain, clutching his broken arm.
John stealthily climbed the tree, hoping to sneak back in the house without being caught. He was slowly pushing his bedroom window open when an earsplitting alarm went off. Shocked that his parents had actually remembered to turn on the alarm, he jerked back, lost his footing, and plummeted to the ground. Ten minutes later, his father found him moaning in pain, clutching his broken arm.
Although I made up these examples, the first is based on several pieces friends have sent me over the years. When I receive documents similar to the first example, despite my personal feelings towards spell check and grammar check programs, I tend to return them with the words “spell check and grammar check” in bold print. As you can see in the second example, even with the tense issues and the spelling errors, proper capitalization and commas, it is easier to read than the first example. The third example is even easier to read.
No one has perfect grammar, but perfection is something every writer should aspire to. The next time you suffer from writer’s block or just have a few minutes to devote to your craft, take a look at the following books and grammar exercises:
As you’ve probably noticed, many of the references listed above are old. They are still relevant.
Now, I shall leave you and spend the next thirty minutes working my way through my self-made grammar refresher course.
Recently, my grandmother and I were talking while I installed some drivers on her computer following an operating system failure. She was worried that her Word had changed and she wouldn't be able to use it anymore. Although her situation was different, her fears were an eerie reminder of the utter panic many of my friends and colleagues expressed during several other software transitions, including the dreaded WordPerfect to Word. Since I was always one of the ones behind the transitions, I tried to keep an open mind, listen to their troubles, and find solutions for them. As an expert user and macro programmer of Word, WordPerfect, and OpenOffice, I was constantly conducting one-on-one and group training sessions and sending out tips and cheat sheets. It was not unusual to receive weekend phone calls from panicked secretaries, and I'm still slightly shocked that some of my colleagues didn't push me in front of the commuter train. Then again, it was their attempt at formatting that caused the panicked phone calls. Every experience highlights one key principle: technology changes rapidly, but people don't. Throughout every panicked reaction, I always fought the urge to ask why they were using a word processor.
For most things, word processors are massive overkill. For starters, they are large programs packed to the gills with features most of us will never use. They consume memory when running and slow down older computers. Do you really need something that can generate labels from a database to type an email? Plus, some of us, even as adults, have a distressing Dennis, the Menace mentality and are easily distracted by all the pretty buttons just begging us to push them. All the bells and whistles distract us from our primary purpose--writing.
Thus, I wish to introduce you to my little known friend, the text editor. Most programmers are already well acquainted with text editors. We love them. They're quick, easy, and highly versatile. As a writer who frequently programs, I also write in my text editor. Many text editors, including my personal favorites (KEdit (part of KDE) and Bean (Mac)), allow you to show a few rich text styling options. In Windows, the long-forgotten WordPad is a good basic rich text editor, but NotePad also works quite well for basic writing. Yes, the text is frequently quite ugly and unformatted, but in many cases, that is a good thing. Once I have completed my rough draft, I can either print it out for proofreading and edit it in the text editor or I can close my document and open it using the word processor of my choice. When I open the document, the word processor will apply its default paragraph and header settings without any action on my part. If I need to set additional headers, all I have to do is highlight the text and select the header level from my pull down style menu. Then, I'm done.
If I work in an office where a secretary will be taking my document and merging it together with multiple other documents, I probably just made her day because my document is clean. She doesn't have to spend a day reading the document codes in Word Perfect or clear all the formatting in Word and then reformatting. Everything that I provided was clean, free of the many extraneous document codes that wreak havoc on master documents.
Now, let's take the text editor a step further and pretend that you are maintaining a blog or a website. Writing your text in the text editor will save you a lot of heartache. As a general rule, word processors do not produce clean html. This means that if you write your text in a word processor and paste it directly into your blog post or your page, you run the risk of importing many other things that although you probably do not see them, can and will alter your page layout. In my experience, saving the document as a web page produces worse results. Even if you are only using a simple cut and paste text operation, you run the risk of pasting some rather ugly stuff when you paste from a word processor to the web.
Recently, a client was showing me a page on his site. He'd written the content in Word, copied it, and pasted it into WordPress. On the page, there was a strange box floating on top of the main content with some illegible text. Looking in the code, I realized the box was an image. When asked, he confessed that when he didn't like images in Word, he simply moved them behind the text instead of deleting them. In another case, strange coding in an OpenOffice document actually pushed the sidebar so far over you had to scroll to see it. These are only a few examples of what can and eventually, will go wrong and writing the content in a rich text editor would have prevented these problems. Do yourself a favor and use your rich text editor for writing blog and web content.
You may wonder how I run spell check and grammar check as these two features are not always available in text editors. I don’t. Several studies and personal experience have forced me to conclude these features are more likely to introduce errors into my writing than improve it.
Author’s Favorite Text EditorsThe below instructions were written after I received a panicked phone call from a friend who was installing Multiple Movable Type Blogs on Add-On Domains. After reading the available instructions, I understood her pain. At some point, I intend to submit me these to SixApart's Movable Type documentation, but I'd like to polish these a bit first, so here's the first draft.
This installation was done on BlueHost without direct access to the server, but the instructions should work for other hosting companies as well. In the past, I've used a custom .htaccess file to do many of the things discussed below. That was easiest for me, but unless you really know what you're doing, you could, and probably will, really screw up your site. My advice, if you are wondering what .htaccess means or have only a vague notion what it means courtesy of Wikipedia, leave the .htaccess file alone. The steps below should work without customizing your .htaccess file. Hopefully, this will make the installation a bit more accessible to semi-geeks and do-it-yourselfers. If you're still a bit daunted by the task, go to Rent-A-Coder or a similar site and post a job. Make sure they set-up and test each of your domains prior to final payment!
#======== REQUIRED SETTINGS ==========
CGIPath http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/mt/
StaticWebPath http://www.example.com/mt-static/
StaticFilePath /home/example/public_html/mt-static
#======== DATABASE SETTINGS ==========
ObjectDriver DBI::mysql
Database examp1_mt
DBUser examp1_admin
DBPassword admin
DBHost localhost In the past, I've used Scripts and Fantastico to automatically install software. I've never had good luck with these methods because the installation didn't meet my needs, so I prefer manual installation. In theory, you could cut out steps 7, 8, 14, 15, 16, and 17 using one of these or a similar product where the Movable Type files are provided by your web host. I haven't tried it and my host does not provide Movable Type on either of these platforms, so I don't know.
Suggestions and comments to improve the above are welcome. Enjoy!
A while back, a friend of mine showed me her daughter's English paper. Her child's paper was riddled with grammar and spelling errors. Accompanying it was a note from the teacher requesting a parent-teacher conference to discuss her daughter's English skills. My friend was clearly affronted by the suggestion that there was anything wrong with her daughter's work and firmly stated that she had personally run the grammar check and spell check before her daughter turned it in. I didn't think much of this incident until a few days ago when I received a error riddled email from a well-educated friend who, while not a native English speaker, is well known for his precise sentence structure. He also happens to be the harshest and most precise editor I have ever had the pleasure of encountering. I called him later on and learned that his IT department recently turned on MS Outlook’s grammar check and spell check on all the computers. Although he was puzzled by some of the errors reported, he assumed the program was correct and accepted each and every change. Horrified, I suggested he return to the old-fashioned method and walked him through turning off the spell check and grammar check. Then, I did a little research and discovered some startling facts.
Considering my personal experience with these programs, these facts are not surprising. Even in graduate school, our professors routinely advised us to use grammar check and spell check. In the same breath, most of them gave us a list of problems they’d experienced with these tools. Personally, I have not run grammar check in several years and rarely require the spell check feature, although I do leave it turned on. I regularly post to blogs, forums, and message boards and frequently write articles and short stories without using these features. The reason I don't use them is simple- the word "maybe".
English grammar contains many instances of maybe. It relies on an evolved, loose syntax that frequently borrows from other languages that use different grammatical structures and everything is contextual. The result is a set of rules with phrases such as "if you have this, you may want to do this or this, but you can also use this". Grammar check and spell check programs are all written in computer programming languages. These languages are built using strict logic chains, specific syntax, and grammar. In many ways, they are more mathematical equations than languages and as I have tried to explain many times in the past, you simply cannot program "maybe". Even the more sophisticated algorithm-based programs suffer from this affliction. Computer programs are not a substitute for knowledge!
Grammar check is not a substitute for a good understanding of the English language and a grammar handbook. I keep a well-worn copy of Stunk & White's The Elements of Style by my desk and use it frequently. I check my spelling using several dictionaries. One is a large unabridged dictionary, which no office should be without. The others are discipline specific. Since research suggests people are more likely to skim computer screens than paper, I print out my writing. Then, I manually proofread it and enter the revisions. I normally repeat this process several times, checking the revisions each time. In my experience, this is the most accurate method of producing clean, consistent copy and I apply it to everything I write. Yes, it takes longer, but clean copy is worth an extra ten to fifteen minutes.
Bishop, Todd. “A Word to the unwise -- program's grammar check isn't so smart.” seattlepi.com. Available at: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/217802_grammar28.asp [Accessed July 9, 2008].
Jorgensen, Laurel. 2008. “Pitt study fails MS Word grammar, spell checker.” The Daily Northwestern. Available at: http://media.www.dailynorthwestern.com/media/storage/paper853/news/2003/04/08/Campus/Pitt-Study.Fails.Ms.Word.Grammar.Spell.Checker-1910823.shtml [Accessed July 9, 2008].
Kies, Daniel. “Evaluating Grammar Checkers: A Comparative Ten-Year Study.” Available at: http://papyr.com/hypertextbooks/grammar/gramchek.htm [Accessed July 9, 2008].
Krishnamurthy, Sandeep. “A Demonstration of the Futility of using Microsoft Word's Spelling and Grammar Check.” Available at: http://faculty.washington.edu/sandeep/check/ [Accessed July 9, 2008].
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