mprovost

That's the classic solution but blows up when using multibyte characters since rev just reads the bytes in each line in reverse.

I always thought cow-orkers was a Dilbert thing but apparently it's older, from Usenet.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/cow-orker.html

At some point soon the computers will be able to send email back and forth to each other and leave me out of it.

Pick one... during the Unix Wars [0] there was X/Open [1] vs Unix International (aka AT&T) [2] and the Open Software Foundation [3] (which eventually merged with X/Open to form the Open Software Group). And then the IEEE got involved with POSIX which ultimately "won" as the lowest of the LCDs. [4]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X/Open [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_International [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX

Nothing like logging into a freshly installed Solaris system and having to configure it using Bourne shell, which didn't have job control or history. At least it had vi. Usually the first thing you would do is get enough networking going to download bash and the GNU tools. But there were always some old timers around who wanted to haze the youngsters by forcing you to do everything with "native" tools.

There was a consortium, and it did standardise Unix, and that's when everything stopped moving in the 90s. Standards are compromises and so all the commercial Unixes had to implement the lowest common denominator. Thankfully GNU didn't care, and the BSD tools were already better.

It feels like we're in a third wave of innovation in Unix CLI tools. The first was from BSD in the late 70s/early 80s which considerably improved the original Unix utilities, then the GNU tools rewrite in the late 80s, then there were the dark ages of System V. I give ack (and Andy) credit for starting this latest wave around 2005 but it's really taken off lately with tools being rewritten in Rust and challenging the old status quo.

Totally agree about not obsessing over tools. That's an easy rabbit hole to go down and distract yourself from producing the actual content of the book. I deliberately chose to use Google Docs because the formatting options are so limited. But I also found it motivating to have a WYSIWYG interface so it felt like I was looking at something resembling the finished product.

In the end gdocs turned out to be a great choice because it's so easy to collaborate. All of the articles talking about markdown seem to assume that you're the only person that's going to work on it, or that everyone else is going to figure out this diagram and your git workflow. It's so easy to email someone a link and let them comment on it, or suggest edits.

For producing the final PDF I found a plugin that embeds the doc directly from Google into InDesign so I can typeset it into something that looks pretty great. Then I just upload the PDF to Leanpub.

The tool that had the biggest impact though was Beeminder, which has a hook into Docs and measures your progress by counting the number of words in the book every day. If you don't make progress you have to pay! It's a great way to make yourself accountable. I kept a 100+ day streak for the final push.

Sure but that doesn't mean it's under active development. Before that it was an ancient version of bash that hadn't been updated in years.

I always assumed zsh was abandonware because it's still hosted on Sourceforge, so it's good to see it's still getting new releases!

This was the subtle joke in "Anchorman" with Brick Tamland (Steve Carell) the weatherman with an IQ of 48. You don't have to be smart to predict "78 and sunny" every day.

That's true of any place in the Southern hemisphere though.

Someone once asked the Duke of Westminster for career advice: “Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror.” At least he was honest.

I write in Google Docs mostly for the collaboration features. It's super easy to invite someone to leave comments. I use the Code Blocks add-on to format code. When it's time to publish I use the DocsFlow plug-in to import the doc into InDesign for typesetting.

Maybe it's like giving birth and you forget how painful it is after a few years...

I deliberately haven't been tracking my time spent writing my book because it would be super depressing to see an hourly rate less than minimum wage. But without knowing that number it's still super exciting to get an email saying I sold a copy, and to see a payment arrive every month. It's like free money!

This is really impressive! I recently hit $1000 in sales on mine and celebrated with a glass of something nice. You're right about how much time marketing takes - I don't spend nearly enough time on it but I'm trying to get myself into a pace where I alternate iterating on the book itself and then doing some marketing (reddit, twitter, website).

Have you looked into Ingram Spark? They do on-demand global distribution. I'm considering it for my book once I finish the ebook and get around to printing paper copies.

They’re just opening a new exhibit in Block A next week!

Regardless of the method, boiling water puts a lot of moisture into the air.

When I worked as a sysadmin at Warner Bros back around 2001 our corporate mail was name@warnerbros.com which went to an AOL inbox (they made everyone eat the AOL dogfood). We realised that we owned a ton of domains including wb.com that didn't use email, so we set up some MX records and pointed them at a Solaris box running qmail and had our own wb.com addresses. I think I checked my official account maybe a handful of times the entire time I worked there.

I did a warranty replacement on a Dell monitor entirely on Whatsapp. I have to say it was a super slick process. Even down to taking a picture of the problem and the serial number and not having to attach it to an email or upload it into some ticketing system. So it's not just small businesses.

(Spoiler) Disappointed that they didn't end up with naked pilots. But it reminded me how Polynesian navigators in the Pacific would use their testicles to detect subtle ocean swells. We're used to relying on our eyes but our other senses can be just as useful.

Maybe they meant the effort on the other side of the war? The side that has been cut off from the international finance system...

> I noticed in another thread that a few people seem to think you can't implement an entire operating system in a GCd language like Java or C#, but that isn't true.

Both Smalltalk and LISP were used to write operating systems decades ago.

Unless you're a sociopath, as a manager it's never easy to think of firing a person (where the alternative is improving them - sometimes people do things that make it easy). It's usually sleepless nights, stress, alcohol, sometimes counselling or therapy.

We noticed a lot of "meeting fatigue" with teams early in the pandemic and after a lot of feedback realised that it was because the limited number of conference rooms was constraining the overall number of meetings. Once that constraint was lifted and everyone could meet online, the number of meetings shot way up. It's come down a bit since then but is probably still much higher than it was when everyone was in the office. It will take some adjusting to go back to that, and honestly I doubt we ever will.

But you don't need VPNs with IPv6, it has encryption built it and you don't need NAT because every node is directly accessible!

It seems strange to me that the author's names aren't on the website anywhere except in a BibTeX citation and the open source license.

Ironically, if you google "is speak good english grammatically correct" there are a lot of articles debating whether it's ok, or if "speak English well" is better. This is the kind of subtlety that's hard to understand for non-native speakers.