Yes, I’m on Twitter- alandove: Another reason we need universal healthcare. @DrFriedenCDC "education & income ... keys to better health. Another reason to stay in school!"
- alandove: No, the Lexus with its lights on probably doesn't belong to anyone at this public health meeting.
- alandove: RT @stevesilberman: Taxes, spending and deficits are all lower today than when Obama took office. http://t.co/NGnJlr5l
- alandove: Good: Apple store next door to conference. Bad: they couldn't fix it either. Good: bought Bluetooth keyboard, now phone = laptop.
- alandove: @lhrandall Cool! I've been sitting about five rows back, end of row, house left. Will probably take same seat tomorrow.
- alandove: My new laptop. #oldschool http://t.co/UK1oPLAQ
- alandove: Just arrived in ATL to cover 2 conferences, and my brand new MacBook Air suddenly and completely croaked. No words for how much this sucks.
- alandove: The journey of a thousand miles should begin with an empty bladder.
- alandove: RT @profvrr: This Week in Virology (TWiV) episode 183 is up: Bats out of hell http://t.co/8ukXCDCq
- alandove: Plenty happens if you listen to HF radio frequencies. "We keep hearing about these ... sunspots and nothing happens!" @sciencegoddess
Tag Archives: computers
The Joy of Text
Over the past several months, I did one of the hardest things for a professional writer: I switched to a new word-processing application. This is the third time in my ten-year writing career that I’ve done this. Shortly after leaving the lab, I migrated my work from a “borrowed” copy of Microsoft Word (The Worst Word Processor Ever Created) to the vastly underrated AppleWorks application. When Apple abandoned that product, I moved to the supremely elegant Nisus Writer. I’ve heard that for some writers, this application was their main reason for buying a Mac. While I have other excuses, I can understand that thinking perfectly. From its uncluttered, easily configurable menus and tool drawer to its open, nonproprietary file format, Nisus is truly a writer’s tool.
If I were not such an extreme geek, I would have stuck with that decision, and I still recommend Nisus Writer to aspiring and practicing journalists who aren’t especially technical. Besides its aesthetic advantages, having all of your notes and past stories in text-based files (specifically Rich Text Format, or RTF) ensures that your archive will remain accessible for years to come. You can’t say that about many other formats.
About a year ago, though, I started to re-learn computer programming after a 20-year hiatus, and it changed my perspective on “word processing” completely. You wouldn’t know it to read their emails, but in their regular work, computer programmers are the most diligent copyeditors on the planet. As a result, they’ve developed text-handling systems that make even an elegant word processor like Nisus Writer look like a dull #2 pencil. If you’re a technically-minded writer, especially if you work for “new media” outlets on the Web, keep reading. Continue reading
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Tagged computers, emacs, smultron, text editors, tools, writing
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Just Say "No" to Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word, one of the worst pieces of software ever to enter widespread use, has been a thorn in my side for years. As a writer, it offends my aesthetics. As a techie, it offends my sense of good design. And when it comes to digital security, it just plain offends. There are plenty of other tirades against Word on the Web (such as this, this, and this), and reams of information showing how this application seriously hinders regulatory compliance and technical development for all sorts of organizations. When Microsoft finally lost the ISO standards war on this issue, many people hoped that Word’s corrosive influence on the world would soon come to an end.
No such luck. Continue reading
Thank You, MAMP
Back in the Good Old Days of the World Wide Web (circa 1995), changing the look and feel of a Web site was a pretty simple matter. You just opened up the HTML files in a text editor and changed the appropriate tags, then previewed the pages in Netscape. When everything looked right, you uploaded the new HTML files to your Web server. Because all of the content and layout information were inside the HTML file for each page, there was nothing else to keep track of. Continue reading
A Bash Script to Create Photo Galleries
I’ve started a second blog on the site, under the name “N3IMU.” That’s my nom de nerd, and the new blog will include everything not related to science or journalism. You can subscribe to the RSS feeds separately, so people only interested in the science posts can avoid the other geekery.
Now for some of that other geekery. I maintain a couple of Web sites for a volunteer organization, and one of the recurring problems I have involves posting photos. People routinely send me dozens of digital images from some recent event and ask if I can put them on the group’s site somewhere. Of course, the images haven’t been cropped to Web-appropriate sizes, or processed in any other way. What I need is some magical folder where I can dump the images and have them turn into a nice, W3C-compliant HTML photo gallery. Continue reading
Blog and Wiki are Not "Star Wars" Characters
Hundreds of millions of people use the Internet, but only a tiny minority of them are really into it. For most folks, the Internet is still a nebulous computer-related thingamajig obscured by too much useless information and cryptic jargon. Worse, it’s infested with spam email, viruses, spyware, pop-up advertisements, and other nasties.
How can you filter out the bad and useless and focus only on what’s good and useful? A lot of super-geeks have been asking the same question, and they’ve come up with some excellent solutions. Even better, a lot of those geek-built solutions are now available for free, and they’re not hard to use. You just have to think a little bit differently about how you interact with your computer. Continue reading
Learning New Languages
Recently, I started getting back into an old hobby: computer programming. My use of the term “computer programming” suggests just how old this hobby is for me; these days, it’s known as Information Technology, Application Development, Software Engineering, or some other corporate designation, reflecting the field’s near-total professionalization. Indeed, I’d tried to get back into it a few years ago, but quickly concluded that writing my own software, like repairing my own car, was one of those self-reliant activities of yesteryear that had been removed, gently but firmly, from the hands of mere amateurs. The programming hobbyist had apparently gone the way of the shade-tree mechanic. Continue reading
Lust for Powerbooks
This is the second of two articles about Linux that used to reside on the main part of the site – it’s a somewhat more whimsical look at why someone might install this operating system on an old Apple.
It’s 1999. In a Manhattan apartment, a writer sits in front of a laptop computer, focused intently on producing an article. The computer is a sleek, chic piece of industrial design, the quintessence of hip electronics in the pre-iPod era. Its sexy black case sports a bright white Apple logo. Continue reading
Worth Double the Price
This essay used to be on the Dovdox site, but it was a casualty of the recent technical glitches. Rather than try to reformat it as a Wiki section, I decided to publish it here. It’s the first of two articles about my recent dabblings in desktop Linux.
As you may have gathered from the rest of this site, I’m a big fan of open source software. Firefox is a wonderful browser, and the growing universe of free plug-ins for it constantly add new capabilities. I also use Open Office, an astonishingly good MS Office clone, for some of my work. But what about the final frontier of free software – the desktop operating system itself? What about Linux? Continue reading