Categories
Rant Tech

Word processors are for wieners

In my editing work, far too often I come across papers that have headings numbered like {1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 6} or {1, 2, 3, 5, 6}, etc. Likewise, tables and figures are misnumbered and references are not in alphabetical order. Now I claim that no one is writing their papers on typewriters anymore, nor are they writing them out longhand. Nearly 100% of authors today are using computers.

Now think about that word “computer” for a moment. What does it mean? In its simplified meaning, “to compute” means to count. So why do people manually assign numbers to the headings in their documents, only to get it wrong in the end. The computer’s purpose is to count and enumerate these things for you. And the computer won’t get it wrong, even when you move entire sections or chapters around in your document.

The basic problem is that if you are using a word processor to write letters, memos, papers, reports, or even books—namely structured documents—you are using the wrong tool for the job. The proper tool to use is a text processor. Personally, I recommend LaTeX, but there are many other choices out there.

The main point is that writing using a text processor, as opposed to a word processor, allows you to separate content from style. You, as an author, should focus on deciding how to structure your document (the major and minor headings) and what text to put in your document, and not on deciding how the document should look. You should decide the latter after the document is written, and let the computer handle the work of enumerating and managing headings. The longer and more complex a document is, the more important this becomes. Word processors do an absolutely horrid job of maintaining consistency across a document. Text processors, on the other hand, do this trivially.

Free yourself from the madness of the word processor today! Just follow the two links above to get started, and have your computer work for you, not against you.

Categories
General

Michelle vs. the big scary Lab

In her latest post, Michelle gives us a fascinating tour of “the lab” in Winnipeg. “The lab” is the National Microbiology Laboratory, a complex containment facility for researching and replicating the world’s most deadly pathogens. She describes the building’s construction, the containment procedures and facilities, and muses about what life would be like working in such an environment. (They use “spacesuits” in the level 4 lab to protect themselves and the outside world from the pathogens.) It’s a good read, where Michelle truly “geeks out” about her expertise. 🙂 Go check it out!

Categories
FreeBSD

DenyHosts on FreeBSD

On a tip from the news site RootPrompt, I discovered a small security utility called DenyHosts which is for Linux systems to help thwart ssh server attacks. It examines the sshd logs and looks for multiple failed login attempts. It then collects the IP addresses of the offending hosts and writes them out to /etc/hosts.deny so that these hosts will be blocked from further access to the machine.

Since the server in question is running FreeBSD, which uses a combined allow/deny syntax in hosts.allow and doesn’t use hosts.deny, I had to modify the DenyHosts script script slightly to get it to work in the FreeBSD context. Basically, I configured DenyHosts to write to a dummy hosts.deny file and then wrapped it in a cron(8) script to concatenate this dummy file with a hosts.allow.template file. Thus hosts.allow is dynamically generated with the dynamic deny rules first and the static allow rules last.

It seems to be working so far. 🙂

Update from the comments: FreeBSD is now supported in the latest version of DenyHosts.

Categories
WordPress

WordPress hacking

I’ve been using a default WordPress installation to run this blog for a few months now. But there have been a few things that I didn’t like about how it works, and so I jumped into the php code to see if I could make some changes. My biggest gripe was that on the monthly archive pages, each entry is truncated to the first 100 characters, whereas I would prefer to see the entire entry displayed. So I replaced the code < ?php the_excerpt() ?> in archive.php with the code < ?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;'); ?> that I found in index.php. I was just guessing at what these two functions actually do, but I guessed right and got rid of the annoying truncation.

I installed a spelling-checker plugin so that I can check my spelling before I post an entry. (Before this, I actually performed a forensic spell check via lynx -dump -nolist https://madphilosopher.ca/ | ispell and found some old spelling errors, but I haven’t gone back and fixed all of the back entries yet.)

I changed the permanent link scheme so that links to old entries look like this: https://madphilosopher.ca/2005/03/the-wedding/. This makes it obvious what the link is about before the user clicks on it. And when examining my web server logs, I’ll be able to tell what posts are what by examining the URL. Before the change, I used this scheme: https://madphilosopher.ca/archives/107/, which is not nearly as user-friendly.

I also learned that the default linking scheme index.php?p=107 can be used within a blog post to refer to another blog post, so that these references won’t break even when I change the permanent link scheme.

So, the mechanics and structure of this blog are slowly becoming my creation. I made some major changes today, and I learned a lot about WordPress. It feels great!

Categories
Philosophy

What is my world view?


[Cultural Creative]

I took this online World View quiz and scored as a Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. I am a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. I am very spiritual, even if I am not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.

Cultural Creative
100%
Idealist
100%
Postmodernist
88%
Romanticist
50%
Fundamentalist
44%
Modernist
38%
Existentialist
31%
Materialist
25%

What is Your World View?

Categories
WordPress

Technorati and me

This is cool. I just learned that the categories of my blog posts are picked up by the Technorati search engine and used as tags. So, my Antiwar blog posts show up in a Technorati “search” for Antiwar, for example, according to this URI: http://www.technorati.com/tag/antiwar. Awesome. Check these out:

To see how this works, read the original article by Tom Raftery, entitled “WordPress Categories, Technorati Tags and Search Engine Optimisation”.

Categories
Audio Copyright Tech

An iPod plugin for Winamp

The iPod is pretty cool because it is so well designed, but it has some disadvantages. The prominent disadvantage is that it is completely tied to Apple’s iTunes software, and iTunes doesn’t work with older versions of Windows, such as Win98. According to this Wired article entitled “IPod Plug-In Sets Music Free”, iTunes is a 40-MB download, but Winamp is only 4 MB and the plugin only takes up 130 kB of space. So you can manage the iPod with an older version of Windows using Winamp. That’s cool. And furthermore, the plugin allows you to copy music from the iPod back onto a computer, a functionality that is missing (on purpose) from the iTunes software. The ml_iPod plugin has the following motto: “Your iPod just became useful.” Great!

Categories
Antiwar Philosophy Rant

The religious right: An anti-American terrorist movement

The title says it all: The religious right: An anti-American terrorist movement. It’s a very good essay that elucidates the extremism of the Religious Right movement in America. Most Christians that I know, including my family, do not hold such views consciously, but elements of their belief system overlap with such extreme ideas and can, in the extreme, be pushed in that direction. It was for this reason, I believe, that the framers of the U.S. constitution established a system that explicitly rejects a theocracy. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be holding up very well in today’s America.

Categories
Philosophy

Healing by post

I would like to share with you the PostSecret Blog, which is a gallery of peoples’ secrets displayed on 4×6 postcards that have been submitted to the site anonymously by mail. Here is an example:

[PostSecret: I didn't cry at my grandmother's funeral]

The gallery is amazingly human. People find healing in sharing their secrets. Others find healing in discovering a commonality with strangers. Spend some time there. What secret do you need to let go of…?

Categories
Antiwar

War Resisters Support Campaign

I just learned about the War Resisters Support Campaign and I signed their petition:

The War Resisters Support Campaign, a broad-based coalition of community organizations, has launched a petition aimed at Canada’s federal government to allow US war resisters who refuse to fight in Iraq to have refuge in Canada.

Initial signatories include June Callwood, David Suzuki, Maude Barlow, Shirley Douglas, Naomi Klein, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Amir Khadir, Paul Cliche and M.G. Vassanji.

The Americans talk so much about Freedom, but they have so little of it left. So we, as Canadians, should remain true to our tradition and continue to share our Freedom with others. May the Canadian government have the wisdom and courage to stand up to the American government and welcome her refugees.