I really like the "Half-Blood Prince"

I finished the latest installment of the Harry Potter series a couple of days ago and decided to let it sink in before writing about the experience.
I really like the book, I have to say. I like it even more than the other books, with the exception of The Order of the Phoenix maybe. The book got better with every page and I found myself reading faster after turning another page. Work kept me from reading it straight after my girlfriend gave it to me. I wanted to read just a couple of pages a few days ago and grabbed the book around 10:30 PM. I finished the book around 4:30 AM.
In short, read it!

Solaris: Where is the SunScreen?

Sun's gift for every Solaris 9™ user is a firewall called SunScreen. The problem is that most users don't know where to look for it. Let me reveal this secret:
You are supposed to install a package hidden in a directory on CD 2 of the distribution, it is in
Solaris_9/ExtraValue/CoBundled/SunScreen_3.2/
Easy to remember, isn't it?
Just change into the directory and issue the following command:
./install -nodisplay
You will thank me for the nodisplay option, if you should forget it on a machine like mine (SS20), the install will take ages, believe me.

BTW: On a machine with a, more or less, standard install, you will need to install the following packages as well.
SUNWapchu
SUNWapchr
SUNWsprot
The SunScreen installer will nag you for them, if they should not be present (they are on the second CD as well, by the way).
I'll leave the configuration for another entry, the product is well documented, though.

Too much Information?

There is an entry at 43 Folders about information overload called On the culture of distraction; one pipe for all interruptions? the section The piece of technology we could really use is very interesting.
The heart of the problem, IMHO, is the fact the everyone sending you some piece of information thinks that this very information is the one you cannot live without (and I'm not talking about spammers here), but your perception might differ. I slow down the reception of e-mail to once an hour or sometimes every other hour while writing; instant messaging is shut off completely at certain times.
Just because you are able to answer an e-mail instantly does not mean you should do it. Sometimes its even better to think about a reply for some time, switch back to pondering mode. Maybe we should learn to ponder again instead of reacting instantly; the name Instant Messaging implies not only instant, but sometimes too instant, in my opinion. Sending a letter (or a Fax for that matter) requires to formulate an inquiry, something to think about first. Hitting the iChat icon and thinking about the subject to be discussed in the process is something completely different.
The article at 43 Folders refers to Driven to distraction by technology.

Scotty has left the Ship

The actor James Doohan, best known as "Scotty" from the StarTrek TV-series died yesterday.
He was one of the heroes of my childhood, I was too young to watch the first airing of the series, though. The BBC website has an article called Star Trek's Scotty dies aged 85.

The Meaning of Names

I already wrote about the subject of the importance to find the right names, but a conversation with my girlfriend about the problems they had in the office regarding their IT-infrastructure, revealed another indication regarding names:
A system running Windows™ is essentially running DOS™, so a network of these machines is a DDOS-network, isn't it?

Writing: Notational Velocity

A programm that can be used to take notes and makes it easy to search inside said notes is Notational Velocity.
The program shines espeially when taking notes for a book or project, means the notes share a common theme. The Notational Velocity Website contains a more thorough description of the program.
As a side-note: the program is Mac only and is a deviation of my mantra to only use software for writing that is available on all platforms I usually use (OS X, Linux, *BSD, Solaris).
BTW: If you are a Mac user, aren't you fed up with the fact that the description of many programs does not contain a hint (in the first two pages of their respective website, that is) that the software is running on something that should be wall-mounted in the first place? Just a thought...

Writing: Explaining what you wrote

The The Blank Page has an article called FATAL MISTAKES: Explaining Your Cleverness. I agree one hundred percent, but:
Why do we see so much of it in books, movies, TV-shows, etc.?
I sometimes get the feeling that the ones having the last word (a.k.a. the decision makers) think their customers simply don't get it, means they seem to convince the writers to explain everything; after a while this behavior becomes a reflex. I stumbled over things like the one described in a lot of newer books and movies, it seems to be a trend, unfortunately.
IMHO: I actually get angry when I get the feeling that a pun or a joke needs to be explained because I (supposedly) don't get it. It tells me that the book or movie in question is not meant for me.

Blog: RSS and Atom Compared

Just in case you need to know, here is a comparison of RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0.

Blog: RSS-Feed added

I added an RSS-Feed (via FeedBurner) to the blog, just in case your News-Aggregator does not know how to handle Atom.
Use the link on the right or this one to subscribe to the RSS-Feed.

Initial Thoughts about 'Half-Blood Prince'

My Girlfriend finished the book and I started to read (I'm half-way through, actually). My impression so far: not really a childrens-book.
It is a very interesting read, darker, faster paced and it uses a more grown-up language.
I'll keep you posted.

Writing: What's in a name...

The wrong name could influence the way a reader sees the characters you create as a writer, this article called On Character Names at Fun Joel is about names in scripts, but the same holds true for characters in a novel: find an interesting name and it will be easier for the reader to relate to the character (or hate the character for that matter, if that is what you want to achieve).

Harry has entered the building

My girlfriend is busy wading through the 600 odd pages of the new Harry Potter book, called Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Judging from the fact that she parts from the book only to cater to things like eating, tells me a lot about the quality of the book.
;-)
[update] She was willing to give a first impression, about 450 pages into the book: Very good!

Writing: Writing under pressure?

Over at the The Artful Writer is an article called Under Pressure.
It is about writing while being under pressure, be it a deadline or the sheer amount of work to be finished. I am not a hundred percent sure that being under pressure yields better results all the time, but it has worked for me on numerous occasions.
;-)
On the other hand, one has to differentiate if the pressure is self-inflicted or comes from the outside. To cite from the article:
...when given months to write, I sometimes lose myself in my own head, and the work suffers.
I think every author experiences that, either consciously or somewhere deep down inside (a.k.a. finding excuses to do a little more research, etc.). Doing research is important, don't get me wrong here! But every author knows when it is time to start writing and to do nothing else until the book is finished.
The latter half of the former sentence requires some explanation, though. The to do nothing else until the book is finished refers to the time a writer dedicates to writing every day. This schedule is heavily dependent on ones own preferences, it does not mean to stop living; it just means to stick to the (self-imposed) schedule.

Pictures of Mammatus Clouds

Take a look at these pictures by Jorn Olsen.
I wonder how many people would suspect that someone manipulated the pictures with PhotoShop™ or a similar program. Incredible.

What is the Job of a Producer?

I always wanted to know that and what a Line Producer does for a living, while we are at it. The answer is here.

About sneak previews

There is a short entry over at Beatrice.com about a sneak preview. To cite from the entry:
Apparently if I hit my camera phone 24 times a second for the length of the movie, then print out the resulting JPGs, I'd have a flipbook of Dark Water that would bring the film industry to its knees were I to post it online.
Click on the link above or here to find out if they actually watched the movie.

Music: I hate the Logic Dongle!

Seriously, I understand the need of the programmers to protect their software, but (this is a big BUT) does the protection has to stand out from my 12" in a way that endangers my PowerBook? I'm still using "Logic Audio 5", but as far as I know, there will be a dongle in my future even after upgrading to the latest release. Said dongle is about three to four inches long, when inserted in my PowerBook, it points outward to the left; waiting to be ripped off by the armrest of an airplane seat or some innocent person strolling through the train I'm sitting in.
The whole setup makes me that nervous, that I sometimes simply refuse to use the program while on the road, sorry emagic.

Podcast: Portland Jazz Jam

To bad that I don't live in Portland,OR. This Blog covers the jam-sessions and provides excellent information about them. Check out Portland Jazz Jams for more information.
Regardless if I'm writing Books or Programs, listening to Jazz seems to influence my writing. I comment a lot more while programming, for example.
;-)

OS X: Dropouts in iTunes

MacFixIt reported about dropouts while playing back songs in iTunes 4.9. I had some of them, but the whole thing does not get that annoying at the moment.
I'll try to rebuild my ID Tags anyway, I think.

I finally watched "Lost in Translation"

Don't laugh, I was busy doing one book, a rewrite of a book, and a translation and couldn't find the time to watch Lost in Translation (ironic isn't it?). I watched it yesterday with my girlfriend and I have to say: excellent in every respect of film-making.
The story is wonderful and shot in a way that makes it easy to relate to the main characters (there were two or three words of Japanese I actually understood, means I have a lot of work to do). Sofia Coppola and her crew did an amazing job here. Every shot was a work of art, the music complemented them and Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson were incredible.
No I do not get paid for this, this movie is an all time great, period. I might be late to the party, but I just needed to write about it.

Writing Part of a File with vi

If you should ever need to write a consecutive part of the text you are working on to another file, then vi allows to do just that. It is not that obvious, though.
Simply move the cursor to the first line you want to write out to a file and use
m a
in command mode, move the cursor to the last of the consecutive lines and use
m b
again, in command mode. To write the text between the two markers a and b to a file, use the following command:
:'a,'b w filename
If you want to keep the current filename and add an extension to it use
:'a,'b w %.backup
vi will expand the % to the name of the current file and appends .backup to it.
Easy, isn't it?

I did not feel like writing yesterday...

... obviously.

*NIX/Linux: spell-checking with vi

Besides taking notes with my notebook, I sometimes use vi to save whatever inspiration struck me. (No, I won't get into the emacs/vi discussion here!)
Writing with vi is fast and efficient, but, due to its heritage, there is no built-in spellchecker. Most well-groomed *NIX/Linux Systems have a spellchecker installed by default. Chances are that there is either aspell or ispell available. I will concentrate on ispell because that is the program I use, but I won't go into the details of its usage here (maybe in another entry, though). To use ispell from inside vi the following chain of commands can be used:
:w
:!ispell %
Saving the file is necessary since ispell cannot operate on the in-memory buffer, to the best of my knowledge. The next command launches ispell on the current filename. After the spellchecking is done, and there were actual modifications to the file, vi will complain about the fact that the file it is working on changed. Answer the resulting question with L (means load the changed file) and you are able to continue working with the spellchecked file.
There will be another file with the same name and a ~ character added to the filename in your current working directory, this is the version of the file before it was spellchecked; a backup if something should go wrong. You can safely delete this file if you don't need its contents any more. Pretty much like the auto-save files created by emacs or other editors.

How to maintain a Website?

This entry is a note to me (as I have said before, write it down, then you don't have to remember it.) and an information for the reader looking for a tool to maintain a website.
The name of the program is sitecopy, it allows you to synchronize the contents of a local folder with your web-server. The program seems to run on most *NIX platforms and on OS/2 and Windows. Mac-users are able to install it via fink. There is a GUI for it running on GNOME — and thus on KDE as well — called Xsitecopy.
If you want to ease the chore of uploading and synchronizing files on your web-space, have a look. I just stumbled over the program, though. Therefore take this entry as information and not as an endorsement.

Writing: FYI Who is Michiko Kakutani?

The literature heavy-weights fear her (at least they pretend to do so):
The Independent gives you some insight in Michiko Kakutani: You know when you've been Kakutanied.
For those who don't know, she is a book critic at the New York Times.

Writing: My Outline-Tools

Maybe I'm a traditionalist, I prefer to do research and outlining everywhere I go using a notebook and a pen. The pen is my writer's pet-peeve, I am convinced that I need exactly this pen to write in my notebook. Maybe it's because it writes with gel instead of ink, maybe it's just a superstition.
The notebook is a Moleskine, but that is just my personal preference (192 thread-bound Pages should get me through my running projects). Forget all the marketing hype about looking like the notebook used by Indiana Jones, etc. What I like about the notebook is the fact that it is sturdy enough to let me write on both sides while holding with one hand. Another important thing (for me), it never complains about drained batteries (yes I carry a spare refill for my pen with me, always).
Using this approach allows me to do a first rewrite while typing my notes on the computer. Finding entries in the notebook takes a little discipline, the last five pages are my index to the contents of the book. I just have to add the page number to the index, and, obviously number the pages as I write.

Writing: To outline or not to outline?

IMHO, there is no question about it. Writing an outline and/or a treatment gives you some sense of where are you going, how you will get there (eventually), and, most important of all, give you some idea if you are on the right track.
I even wrote an outline for the Unix/Linux Survival Guide [en|de]. It is non-fiction, granted, but I still needed to know where I'm going and how to get there, a blueprint if you will. Writing non-fiction does not need an outline or treatment. If so, how do you sell the idea to someone? You have to come up with more than an idea to convince a publisher to publish your works (maybe Dan Brown does not have to do this, but still...).
Why am I writing this? Because an article on The Artful Writer called This Argument Really Does Have A Right Answer showed me, that I am not alone with this mantra. (Not that I needed the reassurance.)
;-)
BTW: Wether you call it outline or treatment is kind of a rhetorical question, use whatever works best for you. I will expand on the subject in a later post.

Have a beautiful Independence Day!

This goes to all the readers celebrating this holiday.
Party hard, but safely!
;-)

File permissions

There is an article about file permissions on Linux Security.com.
All I have to add is: Amen, brother!

Rexx?

There is an article at Linux.com called Why Linux needs Rexx.
I kind of recall using it on a mainframe and my Amiga, of course. The author states that Rexx allows to code either procedural or object-oriented. Well, the same goes for Perl, but the article is an interesting read anyway.

A quiet day on lkml

LKML is strangely quiet today, maybe everyone is watching Live 8.
The record so far: 685 messages in a single day.

Potter anxiety

My girlfriend is getting anxious by now, the bookstore told her that she will get the new Harry Potter book on time. Means I should be able to read it about one and a half day later.
;-)

NetBSD shutdown

To spare you a detour to the man-page of shutdown:
shutdown -p now
Takes the machine down and removes power if possible, the usual -h option everyone knows from Linux won't remove the power, at least not on my SS20.

NetBSD mounting CD-ROMs

Another post to spare me memorizing an entry in a config-file. If you want to mount a CD-ROM on NetBSD, you'll have to either memorize the command to do so or add an entry to /etc/fstab. The entry looks like this (provided your CD-ROM drive is at cd0a:
/dev/cd0a /cdrom cd9660 ro,noauto 0 0
The /cdrom directory has to exist for this to work, obviously. If you want to mount a CD-ROM, simply use mount /cdrom after inserting a CD in the drive.
A mount /dev/cd0a /cdrom won't do, the OS wants to know about the filesystem (and I thought the drive was broken); it complains about missing super-blocks among other things.

NetBSD updating pkgsrc

I wrote about pkgsrc in this entry called NetBSD checking the currently installed packages. Since this blog acts as a notepad for me, too, here are the shocking details about the whole update via CVS thing:
We want to make sure the traffic is encrypted, means if we are using csh, we should do
setenv CVS_RSH ssh
either on the command-line or in one of the initialization files like .cshrc or .login, etc. You get the idea. Then we have to change the current working directory to the location of the pkgsrc
cd /usr/pkgsrc
and issue
cvs -q update -dP
I do not use the -q switch (quiet) by the way, I prefer to see exactly what is going on, this may slow the processing down, though.

WindowMaker does Multi-Byte

Those who know me, know about my ongoing quest to learn to write Chinese and Japanese (there are more similarities than one might think). Trying to figure out how to get these characters displayed on a new computer or operating system is one of the side-effects of this passion.
I installed WindowMaker on my SS20 and found out that the entry MultiByteText = YES has to be present in ~/GNUstep/Defaults/WindowMaker and ~/GNUstep/Defaults/WMGLOBAL to make it work.
Your milage might vary, though.

NetBSD checking the currently installed packages

I love pkgsrc. It might sound arcane, but doing a cvs update from inside /usr/pkgsrc feels good. If one want's to check if all installed packages are up to date,
lintpkgsrc -i
does the trick. If there are newer versions of the installed packages, then
cd /usr/pkgsrc/name_of_package
and
make update
is all that is needed. The latter command rebuilds all dependencies as well, by the way.
Again, there might be a GUI allowing you to initiate the same steps, but to cite from my book again: this chain of commands can be executed via PDA or cell-phone from almost anywhere, not that I'm on a beach right now, but it could happen.
:-)

NetBSD checking for vulnerabilities

There might be more than one way to do this, but this is what I found so far:
One has to download the updated list of vulnerabilities first,
download-vulnerability-list
and then check the current installation:
audit-packages -v
The -v means (surprisingly) be verbose, but it is not as verbose as I had hoped (I'm really nosy and want to know what is happening).
One thing I like about NetBSD so far, is the fact that it does (almost) nothing behind my back, like messing with files in the /etc tree, to the best of my knowledge, that is.
Do I really have to do this by hand, every day? Not really, cron is there to rescue you, of course; simply check the man-page for audit-packages. This might sound strange to readers used to simply click on a button to initiate such a sequence or to configure the system to do so on a recurring basis. The Dark Secret™ is: clicking on the respective buttons does just that; either a script is fired that executes commands similar to the ones shown or an entry in the crontab is created.
Why should you care? Your shiny GUI does everything for you, doesn't it? My point of view is simple: I want to know what is going on. If something does not seem to work as intended, I will know where to look. Besides, it is my computer and I expect this box to do what I want it to do, nothing less. Don't you agree?

BSD?

Why do people ask me this question (in concert with that strange noise in their voices)?
To be blunt: Yes, I usually work with OS X, Solaris, and Linux, so? To quote from my book [en|de]: using another OS might reveal some insights on how things are done somewhere else and it is fun, too.
Regarding the case at hand, I needed to use both CPUs on my SS20. 2.6 will not allow me to do so, NetBSD does. Maybe I'll have a look and try to fix it myself but for the time being, I just need both CPUs for something completely different, that's all.
OTOH, I will blog about the things that I can't remember in this blog, or simply things I deem interesting enough to write about. Chances are, someone might have use for this information and that is what the Internet is all about, information,
isn't it?

From the _interesting to read_ department

aging hipsters is an insightful blog entry at Nickerblog, I found it via WIL WHEATON DOT NET, a great blog in itself by the way.

I need Altivec and so do you...

... if you use your PowerBook to make music, that is. The Altivec unit in a G4/G5 enables me to use a greater number of soft-synths while sitting somewhere nice, e.g. beach, park, take your pick. Intels are nice but know nothing about vector processing — needed to use soft-synths or effects without taxing the CPU of my little 12" too much. Since nobody managed to convince me otherwise, using a 32-bit architecture — totally oblivious of number-crunching — means that I need a separate chip in my laptop to do what I'm used to do.
Big deal, why should I care? Because another chip in your laptop needs additional power, a.k.a. draining your batteries faster. But the Pentium umpteen WGMXBRDG is clocked at a gazillion megahertz, it can handle that! See answer one.
IMHO, two things are making me a little queasy regarding the switch to Intel:

• It seems there will be no 64-bit computing on Apples in the near future.


• According to the docs I saw so far, no vector-processing, not even a compatibility layer for it.

We'll have to wait and see, I guess.

I like XML but...

... I don't want to use XML to configure my *NIX system, Period.
The beauty and simplicity of a *NIX config-file is based on the fact that it is stored as plain-text — to be edited via a text-editor, via a command-line editor, or even via a sufficiently equipped cell-phone. Every person who knows what he/she is doing is able to create scripts to maintain and monitor the files used for configuration; changing the format to XML adds just another layer of complexity to the daily workload.
Don't get me wrong here, I use XML every day; be it to write books or articles or to manage the transition of data to, from, and between databases. It is a lingua franca that enables us to migrate our data or intellectual property from one format to another or — in a perfect world — to store said data in a format that allows us to validate the structure it is stored in.
But (this is a BIG but) I want to be able to make sense of a configuration file _without_ resorting to some kind of specialized editor, because this special editor might not be available on every platform in use to do daily maintenance, it's that simple.