Help encourage use of the best web browser out there. Firefox: in your heart, you know it’s right.
06 February 2018: updated URL
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R is a language for manipulating statistical data, and is very useful for folks in fields where this matters. It’s free software, which is important: it means that one has the freedoms to run it; to study it; to copy it; and to improve it. For those familiar with statistics, R is similar to S (which was developed at Bell Labs).
IBM developerWorks have a good Introduction to Statistical Programming with R available.
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GNU Octave is a cool numerical package which is more-or-less compatible with MATLAB. It’s very cool if one has need of that kind of thing.
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Anyone who follows energy prices knows that they’re not going down; in fact, natural gas prices have doubled over the last two years (and due to political opposition to nuclear and practical opposition to coal, almost every new power plant is powered by, you guessed it, natural gas).
Years ago environmentalists were trumpeting the advantages of fluorescent light bulbs which were bulky, didn’t fit every lamp, didn’t produce enough light and which were economically unsound (spending $20 to save $5 is stupid).
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There’s a new search engine out there: Vivisimo. It seems to have a bit more intelligence about figuring out what one is looking for, and has a nice feature whereby it displays a selection of possible sub-categories. It is somewhat slower than Google.
07 February 2018: updated URL to point to information about the defunct company
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Coral is a distribution network meant to help distribute the load of a commonly-accessed site. Anyone who reads Slashdot is familiar with the effect of a slashdotting, when tens or hundreds of thousands of users hit a website all at once, pounding its servers and destroying its internet connexion. Well, Coral fixes that: instead of linking to http://foo.net/, link to http://foo.net.nyud.net:8090/.
So if anyone likes this blog enough to forward one of my pieces to Slashdot or elsewhere, do be kind enough to use the link provided☺
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We’ve a few Exchange admins at work this week for a special project (for those of you outside the technorati, Microsoft Exchange is a mail server). One of them dropped by my cube because he was interested in the software I use to relay mail (it, too, is a mail server — I’ve just configured it to pass on mail rather than holding onto it). So I gave him a quick overview of the commands I use to see how many messages are sitting in the queue, to count the number of probably spams, and to track the progress of a message through the system, from arrival, through processing and to departure to its final destination.
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TeX by Topic is now available as a PDF on the web, directly from the author. Very cool.
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Most folks don’s know this nowadays, but one of the first production uses of Unix was as a writer’s tool. The typesetter used back then was called troff — a rather arcane and often odd little language which did its job nonetheless. roff is still used as the format for the ‘man’ (short for ‘manual’) pages which remain the bedrock of Unix documentation.
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Last night I discovered Peter Flynn’s excellent Formatting information, A beginner’s introduction to typesetting with LaTeX. It looks like a valuable introduction to the only way to format text.
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Neal Stephenson’s masterpiece, In the Beginning was the Command Line, is available online these days.
31 January 2018: updated URL
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Conrad Taylor wonders what WYSIWYG typesetting has done to the typesetter’s art — and the answer’s not pretty. From 1996, but as true today as it was then.
07 February 2018: updated URL
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