| Sunday, 14 April 2002, 9:02 pm Tags: Announcements |
Alas, book sales are dropping off and it looks like we’re pretty much out of steam for the first edition of Poor Leo’s Computer Almanac. Que will have sold 35,000 books in five months which I’m told is very respectable. Thanks so much to those of you who bought copies!
On the strength of this year’s sales, the publisher is planning a first printing of 50,000 for next year’s edition. I hope to sell even more. I can tell you that it’s going to be much better with a lot more content. Laura and I are working our buns off on it already. She’s doing the “this date in history” stuff and I’m collating existing web content and writing a bunch of new material.
I’m using Movable Type, this blog software, to create an online database that she and I can use to collaborate on the book. (She’s in the South Bay and I’m in the North Bay so we can’t work face-to-face.) In fact, I’ve just imported nearly 3,000 web articles from Call for Help and The Screen Savers into the Poor Leo blog. I’ll use Movable Type to edit, categorize, and assign articles to each day of the year. MT’s calendar interface will make it easy to access one day at a time. Laura will add her daily bits to each day. And then I can export it to a big text file and use Perl to process it for the publishers.
We’re scheduled to finish the book by the end of July to get it into bookstores by September. The new title is tentatively, “Leo Laporte’s 2003 TechTV Almanac.”
Meanwhile, if you’d like me to autograph the 2002 edition, send your copy to me with a postage paid self-addressed mailer to:
Leo Laporte
TechTV
650 Townsend St
San Francisco, CA 94103
I’ll sign your copy and pop it right back in the mail. I’ve done this for several dozen folks so far and it seems to work pretty well. I can’t be responsible for copies lost in the mail, but as long as you’re willing to take that chance and pay the return postage, I’m glad to put my John Hancock on it.
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| Wednesday, 3 April 2002, 12:32 am Tags: |
Some people collect butterflies. Others collect programming languages. I collect Linux distros. I’ve installed several dozen over the past few years. In fact, I think I was the first person to install Linux on national television. (Come to think of it, Megan and I are probably still the only people ever to install Linux on national television. I may be the only person who thinks installing Linux on national television is even remotely interesting.)
I’ve found a new distro for people like me. A roll your own package that let’s you put exactly what you want into your Linux. It’s called Gentoo Linux and it’s swift. (I was told that I can’t use the word “cool” any more. I’m looking for replacements if you want to help.)
Gentoo is based on the BSD UNIX ports system, only the developers call it “portage” and it means you can easily install, upgrade, and uninstall software. To install a new package you type “emerge” and the package name. Gentoo goes out onto the net, downloads the source code, builds it, and installs it.
You start by downloading a small ISO (18 to 100 MB depending on how much of a Linux system you want to pre-load. I used the larger file). Burn the ISO to disk, boot the CD, then bootstrap your own Linux with just the pieces you want. This is not a process for the Linux newbie, but I found it insanely satisfying. I learned a lot about the guts of Linux, and found I could modify parts of it I never had control over before.
Read the documentation before you try Gentoo – if it’s not crystal clear then don’t install it on your main machine. Consider it a learning project and be ready to mess around with it for a while. But if you want to learn about Linux, or are already an expert who is looking for a very configurable version of Linux, Gentoo is faboo.
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