The No Starch Press Blog

I’ve been spending a lot of time reading postings from both sides of the Presidential campaign; both primary news and comments on those postings as well. As a former Political Science major, I find the dialog very enlightening (if a bit disturbing at times).

I’ve just read one brilliant exchange and I have to share it. In many ways, this sums things up very nicely, as “maggots” basically dismisses what have essentially become irrelevant allegations. (You can read the original story here.) Enough with the labels and slander; it’s the economy, stupid.

still, nobody has proved to me that Obama isnt a socialist…somebody give me some feedback

Posted by: nave1379 | October 29, 2008 7:57 PM | Report abuse

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No one has proven to me that Palin isn’t a Martian.

Posted by: maggots | October 29, 2008 9:00 PM | Report abuse

Posted by: maggots | October 29, 2008 8:56 PM | Report abuse

What is with these companies.

I’ve had a Canon MP530 for a couple of years now. For the most part, it’s been a good printer, except when it acts up.

The current problem, and probably the one that will be the death of this printer, is that one of the black ink tanks has stopped printing completely. It seems that this is a known problem with this printer but not one that Canon will fix.

I tried multiple cleaning cycles, replaced it with Canon branded cartridges twice, and not a drop of ink comes out.

After searching forums online I tried soaking the bottom of the print head in a thin film of water. A lot of black ink came out but none came through. I put a few drops of alcohol on the pad; no luck. Tried deep cleaning again and no luck. All of the other cartridges print just fine.

I just called Canon support. What an unpleasant experience. After a brief conversation with one rep whose response was “No, we do not recommend that,” with this nasty tone, I asked to be speak to a Supervisor, Waymon. Waymon was no better and completely unhelpful, as I’ve found most Canon support peole to be.

Great cameras, nice printers, but stinky customer support. Never mind the lousy chips that Canon adds to their ink cartridges to prevent people from using third party cartridges. It’s my printer; why can’t I use any ink cartridge that fits?

Next step: Buy a Brother MFC printer. It looks like they don’t restrict the use of cartridges to only Brother cartridges.

NOTE: This is your classic never talk politics post by Bill Pollock. This is not intended to be a statement by No Starch Press on the November elections. I don’t pretend to speak for our staff; I speak only for myself. And now, here goes.

With apologies to my Republican friends and neighbors, I’ve had enough of McCain and Palin. I can’t recall a dirtier more disrespectful campaign and they both make me sick.

This weekend I attended a protest against Palin at the Burlingame Hyatt. I was astounded by the anger and vehemence directed my way by the McCain supporters, one of whom quite seriously threatened to kill me. He billed himself as Pro-Life, except in my case. That’s not patriotic, that’s un-American, and that’s not the right direction for our country.

America is a great nation. The Presidency is our nation’s highest office and it’s no place for beauty-queen campaigners. Enough with the winky winky, snarky comments, and juvenile behavior. I want my President and Vice President to be smarter than me. We’ve already got a dummy for President; do we really want another one as VP? Never mind that McCain has no clue about anything and is perhaps the greatest flip-flopper in recent history. What happened to the John McCain who used to believe in something? He only believes in getting elected at any cost.

Enough of beating the war drums; giving tax cuts to the absurdly rich; and campaigners who’ll stick the American Flag in your face, spit on you, and call you a terrorist, because you believe in freedom. I’m sorry, has anyone read the Constitution? Last time I checked this country was founded on freedoms and I’ll do what I can to exercise them.

I’m an Independent; I don’t register with any party, though I’ve typically voted Democratic. I would vote for a Republican candidate if I felt that they really put our country first, but I haven’t seen that in my lifetime. I might have voted for McCain years ago, too, that is before he gave Bush that big bear hug after Bush trashed him during the primaries.

If nothing else, let this election be a referendum on the Republicans. If you think that our Republican administration has been doing a great job, vote them back in. If, like me, you think they’ve succeeded in bankrupting our country, blowing hundreds of billions of dollars in a useless war (against whom, I might add?), and turning many of our allies against us, show them the door.

Palin and McCain have got to go. I can’t say that Obama is the strongest Presidential candidate that we’ve ever had but at least he has the potential to unite our country, not divide it as the Republicans have done so well.

We’re one America and, as the saying goes, “united we stand, divided we fall.” We’re not the country of Alaska, this is the United States. Don’t tell me what’s good for Alaska, tell me what’s good for our country.

Enough is enough. Obama in 2008.

It’s DEFCON time and that means Vegas. And as tempting as the $1.99 buffet might be, maybe you’ve had all the cheap steak you want for the day. Check out Bill’s restaurant map for other ideas. There’s a wide range represented, from Himalayan cuisine to good ol’ American food. If you’ve been to any of these restaurants, or have other suggestions, please edit the map.

Restaurant Map

(The Riviera Hotel, home of DEFCON)

The search performed by Monica Goodling while ‘vetting’ candidates for positions within the Department of Justice:

[First name of a candidate]! and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!

[Via USA Today's blog]

Check out Slate’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” an interactive visualization showing how this scandal fits into the larger picture.

Or just grab the inspector general’s entire report on the matter here.

Unfortunately, many of us here still use Windows. (I use Ubuntu almost exclusively now, except when I’m fixing Windows.) And, even more unfortunately, when it’s time for that inevitable Windows problem, I often end up having to fix it.

Tonight I chose to upgrade one of our XP machines to XP Pro. You’d figure that would be easy. Stick in the CD and run the upgrade, right? Wrong.

It’s now six hours since I started the lousy upgrade and I’m still not finished. Let’s see what happened.

Everything seemed fine at first. I put in the CD, Windows recognized it, gave me the Upgrade option, then restarted. The installation was progressing until the screen froze and I couldn’t use the mouse or keyboard to select Yes or No when asked whether to use the Nvidia drivers that were not certified with the Windows logo or some such. (Like I care? I don’t.)

Installation kept failing. I tried restarting several times, which, of course, took quite awhile, but I couldn’t get past that point and I couldn’t go around it. I tried safe mode. That failed. I rebooted into an Ubuntu Live CD to try to delete drivers, but that didn’t work. Then I did that again and deleted some more drivers, that didn’t work. (Ubuntu looked awfully nice, though, and it had NO problems.)

Since Windows wasn’t liking Nvidia, I solved this first problem by pulling out the MSI card and using the machine’s onboard video. Installation proceeded, at last, several hours later. I was out of that first hell.

But now I’m in a new hell. Now, when I boot up, or when I start programs (like IE, for example) I get “Windows Installer Prepaing to Install . . .” This happens over, and over again, with no clue as to what it’s supposed to be installing. And it doesn’t . . .go . . . away. There’s probably a fix for this and it will probably take a few hours to implement. Not tonight.

Then I tried updating to SP3 figuring that might help. That seemed like it was going to work until a Stop Error — Blue Screen. BSOD. Restarted after that and then waited for about 20+ minutes as Windows deleted all of the old stuff and put things back where it had been.

The video card that I pulled is still out of the machine because I don’t dare to put it in just yet. Windows Installer is still blinking and telling me that it’s installing something or other. I still can’t install patches.

The good news is this: Ubuntu 8.04 works beautifully on this machine. It took me, oh, 15 minutes to install and another 10-15 to completely update.

I’m truly in Windows Hell and have been for just about six hours now. I’m ready to drop so I’ll just leave Windows running overnight and hope that it sorts itself out.

I know that it won’t, but a man can dream.

***Update: looks like I solved the Windows Installer problem. I downloaded Windows Installer Cleanup then deleted an entry that had no name. Next, I downloaded some Windows Installer update from somewhere (vague, yes, who knows — Acrobat told me I needed it), restarted, and then I was able to update to 3.1. Seems to have gone away.

I’m intrigued by a July 5 New York Times article titled “On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble.” Apparently, according to Joe Nocera’s report, there’s a bit of controversy and politicking within Google regarding day care. Google is considering raising the cost of its day care by 75 percent, and Googlers with kids don’t appear to be very happy.

I’m sure that there are multiple sides to this story but a few things stand out. For one, at least based on this writer’s report, Google has a bit of a problem with employee expectations. If I take a job at Google, expecting amazing free food all day, subsidized day care, and who knows what else, what happens when the money isn’t rolling in so quickly and benefits need to be cut? What’s Google to do? Start to cut to reduce the bleeding. That’s just business, especially when you’re a public company.

Granted, Google’s benefits are pretty amazing by any standard, but how long can the party last? And when the drinks and hors doeuvres start to run out, how long will the guests linger?

As Joe Nocera comments, Google’s stock dropped 44 percent from a high of $744 to a low of $412, though it has since recovered a bit back to $537 at Thursday’s close. Still, that’s a bit of a tumble as we continue our slide into a bear market. The bad news is coming from all sides and all sorts of companies, and money is already tight. Any business is going to need to pay close attention to their bottom line, and even more attention to that P&L when they’re public. Stockholders are pretty unforgiving and, when you’re a high flyer like Google, one slip can turn into a really bad fall.

Nocera relates a couple of comments from Sergey Brin that certainly make Brin seem arrogant and elitist. Who knows whether Brin actually made these statements, but here’s what Nocera has to say:

At a T.G.I.F. in June, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.)

Nocera also drew my attention to a very interesting blog by Sergey Solyanik, who writes of his return to Microsoft from Google. Granted, this is one voice (be sure to read not only his post but also the comments on his post), but it’s certainly food for thought.

Over at the Penguin blog, Nick Hornby neatly captures the uncertainty of the ebook’s future:

There is currently much consternation in the book industry about the future of the conventional book, but my suspicion is that it will prove to be more tenacious than the CD, for the following reasons:

1) Book readers like books, whereas music fans never had much affection for CDs. Vinyl yes, CDs no. They are too small for interesting cover art and legible lyrics, the cases break easily, and despite all promises to the contrary, they are extremely easy to break and scratch. Books have remained consistently lovable for several hundred years now. For readers, a wall lined with books is as attractive as any art we could afford to put up there.

UPDATE: 8.8 million ain’t too shabby.

Get your copy of the latest, greatest, browser around, and help Firefox break a world record for most software downloads in 24 hours.

Catch the fever, right here.

And for newcomers to the browser, here’s a printable shortcut cheatsheet:

Baron Schwartz just posted an exhaustive summary of his experience writing High Performance MySQL for O’Reilly. He has great insight into writing well, research, and the interpersonal side of publishing. Highly recommended reading for aspiring authors and those who work in tech publishing.

On time management…

There’s a non-linear relationship between pages and work, and pages that are going into print are going to take a lot more work than your senior thesis or dissertation, believe me. Anyway, however it works for you, try to get a sense of the hours it’ll need. Now mentally visualize where you’re going to get those hours from. Really, how much time do you think you can spend in evenings and weekends? You still have to do all the ordinary things like paying bills and washing dishes, too.

On tech reviewers…

We also didn’t make it clear to the reviewers that they were supposed to be reviewing, not editing. I’d try not to make this mistake again. Some of the reviewers spent a lot of time editing grammar and style. Unfortunately, this was wasted effort — the material was nowhere near good enough quality to be editing for style and grammar (and the style is up to the author and editor, not tech reviewers).

On production editors…

The production editor was going to just check for spelling and grammar, right? I think someone told me that. Instead, she went through the book in such incredible detail I couldn’t believe it. And she proposed major changes to just about every paragraph in the whole book. She made so many changes that it took me at least a day, sometimes two or three, to review each chapter. That’s weeks of work I never saw coming — every weekend, every night, all the time — just like when I was writing. And these were necessary changes. She found every little ambiguous phrase, every contradiction between parts of the book, missing curly braces in code samples, paragraphs that belonged in other chapters, sentences that needed to be moved, commas in the wrong place, and much more. She was an absolute editing machine.

And as a bonus, he includes a killer set of regexes to catch troublesome constructions.