Intuitive Stories

We’re just about completely done with the Solaris 9 for Dummies book; all that’s left is reviewing the cover art and text and one or two final “are you sure you meant to say this” questions. That’s the good news. The bad news is that for some braindead reason, the graphic designers at Wiley have […]

There was a very interesting article in a back issue of BusinessWeek that caught my eye today whilst sipping at Starbucks. Apparently our strategic petroleum reserve in the USA is now reaching its capacity of 700 million barrels. So I thought “let’s do some math…”

We’ve begun the war in Iraq, the peaceniks and those of us who espoused further diplomatic means have been pushed aside. So now what? I live in “alternative” Boulder, Colorado, so it was no surprise to me that this afternoon there was a big peace rally with “impeach the president”, “what’s the real story, George?”, […]

This is something that just boggles the mind. Can people really be inventing this sort of thing, given the complete nightmare that minefields from previous conflicts have proven to third world nations? Clearly they are, as detailed in this article about SAIC’s efforts in this regard. “The SAIC team is developing a robust intelligent mobile […]

In a complete change of pace, a funny article in the British Independent details how if men “streak” (run naked through a public place) they’ll now be likely to get two years in prison (can anyone say “punishment fit crime”?), while if women do the same thing, well, they’ll presumably not be doing anything illegal. […]

I have to admit that I am just aghast at how President Bush and his team are so astonishingly mismanaging the entire Iraq situation. Today’s headline: U.S. Ends Effort for U.N. War Approval And Declares Diplomatic Window Closed. But what about those of us that think the United Nations is a good idea, not some […]

The argument between booksellers and Scholastic, the publisher of the next Harry Potter book that has decided to try direct sales in addition to channel sales, continues, as detailed in today’s episode of Publishers Weekly. “The ABA lashed out harshly today against Scholastic for its decision to sell Harry Potter V through its book fairs, […]

There’s something interesting brewing behind the scenes at Scholastic, the company that has the US publishing rights to the astonishingly successful Harry Potter series: Scholastic is planning on selling the newest title, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix directly. This is causing great pain and frustration in the book world, as the following […]

Alright, so I just finished my Solaris book and now I’m working on the other book in the queue, Unix Shell Hacks. We’re in the revision phase now and an interesting question has arisen regarding the variation in shells on different Unix platforms. Specifically, I’ve been asked by some tech reviewers to tweak my scripts […]

A wonderful day! I finished the final author revision and edit of Solaris 9 for Dummies, coming soon to a bookstore near you! For those of you that aren’t familiar with the process of writing and publishing a technical book, here’s how it worked for this title…

An aspect of the Internet that isn’t discussed much in the general media, but is an increasing point of concern for adult educators is that it’s incredibly easy for lazy or intellectually dishonest students to dig up essays and papers on just about any imaginable topic online. For example, you’ve been assigned to write a […]

I just finished grading a batch of assignments from my University of Phoenix Online course (web programming I) and am rather amazed at the number of students who didn’t answer the questions in their answers. I asked questions like “why….” and got answers more akin to “what…”. This seems to apply across the board to […]

Anyone else watch Thunderbirds on TechTV? It’s a great TV series show from the 60’s filmed in supermarionation (yes, they’re marionettes). The show is a future-looking science fiction program and it’s quite entertaining! What makes the TechTV version so fun is that they have little blurbs underneath the program talking about characters, gaffes in the […]

As a writer, I get lots of email from readers, most of which is interesting and enjoyable to receive, but some of which is, well, daft might be the best word for it. My favorite message of the last few weeks was from the young man who wrote “I bought your book Creating Cool HTML […]

to realize that selling the latest issue of the UK comic The Dandy with a free gun included (no kidding) isn’t going to be a good newsstand addition at the airport, but some people are surprised. This story, by way of BBC News, is quite logical, albeit a bit daft: Airport bans toy gun comic. […]