[First, let me take a moment to say thanks to a grateful reader.]

Telemachus (nee "frugalRepairs"): No, your story is exactly the reason that Ask Slashdot exists. I don't feel that there's been any "reversion" at all, and I'm glad you got your hard drive installed successfully! I hope your first hard drive replace has built up your confidence enough so that you will continue to tinker with more hardware.

You can never be to old to become a computer geek, no matter what everyone else says. Men aren't dogs, and can learn new tricks whenever they set their minds to it.

Thanks for the question, and thank you again for the gracious "Thank you" note. (Is that enough thanks, yet?) -- It's readers like you that are the reason I get up and do this job.

Take care!

[ ...now back to your regularly scheduled dead journal space... ]

Seriously folks. Ask Slashdot exists to help the entire range of users, and while I try (and many times fail) to prevent the rank and file of FAQs. Soemtimes "Google" only gives you part of the answer (and many times gives you too large of a haystack in which to find your needle). As always, if you don't like the content, or feel that the stories presented are "beneath" you, feel free to move on to other aspects of the site, or better yet, to submit your own questions to "up the ante" of quality to Ask Slashdot. I have no problems with criticism (even harsh criticism), just as long as it's helpful.

Mindless flames, as always, will be routed to /dev/null...

...not again!

It's not just that Corrine Brown was censured (although it can be argued, by most diabolical logic, that there was a valid reason for her censure, but this country is already falling along a slippery slope when it comes to fairness in our elections. Florida has had years to get this straightened out, and yet here we are, not even in the home stretch and already rumblings of wrongdoing are being reported by the press. I should be encouraged, however. It is getting reported, which is a far cry from the deafening silence that was experienced before and after the 2000 election. I can only hope that eyes continue to remain on Florida and other states where such shenanigans may be likely, and that the scrutiny applied to the American Voting Process as a whole remains everpresent.

One wonders what might happen if another Florida-like scandal occurs in "Decision 2004".

Odds are, it won't be pleasant.

Cool! If you are interested in the inner workings, you can get all of the gory details to boot! Thanks to Slashdot reader Saqib Ali for the (inadvertant) pointer.

I have a livecd that fires up Sun's Java Desktop. I got it with a copy of Linux user and Developer, a magazine from the UK.

I'm surprised by how nice it is. I'm using it now. The browser is Mozilla, and it has flash and java working out of the box. I have a nice copy of evolution, and star office, all on the cd.

The whole thing is attractive -- it's slick, and looks like it was "designed". It's a morphix cd, and I like it a little better than the normal gnome morphix livecd that I use.

The only problem is that it doesn't have the best hardware support. For some reason it couldn't find the netcard on the mobo of a dell dimension that my mom owns.

In my previous entry, I talked about how my sister was able to sit down at the morphix gnome livecd and use the email program, despite having never seen linux before. This java desktop livecd is slicker and nicer -- I think it would be easier for someone who didn't know what they were doing.

It's just occured to me that for the first time in my life, linux is starting to make sense for ordinary people. I want to try to explain why in this entry.

Like most slashdot readers, I get called to help people I know with their computers. Almost every machine I see now is riddled with malware of some sort -- viruses, spyware, or whatever. My sample is skewed because people with machines that work well don't call and ask for help, typically. But malware is a real problem for windows users.

The average person doesn't do very many odd things with their machine now. They hit the web, they send email. They do their banking through the bank's web site. They use IM software to talk to their friends. They don't want to fight with the machines, or to learn how to do cool new things, for the most part. Most people I know aren't chomping at the bit to learn video editing, or how to use sound samples with a midi sequencer.

The computer is almost like their car. They need it to do specific things that are absolutely necessary, and they need it to work. They don't want to put time and money into it. They want it to be there, and to work.

This is the amazing thing: this livecd, the one that I'm running now, would do all of that for most people. It's very close, in any event (putting aside the obvious problem that it doesn't have any persistent storage).

This web browser is fine -- it works on most pages, you get the flash (evil though it may be) and you get java. It just works. The email program is great -- I love evolution.

I'm not a groupware person, so I don't use a lot of outlook's features, but as a mail client, I like evolution much better than outlook.

Star Office isn't as good as MS office in my opinion, but it's good enough. I think I could do a big writing project with it just as easily as I could with word. It's a little slow, a little bloated, but it works.

And this is the other amazing thing: Microsoft is dropping the ball. Everyone says that linux is "too hard". But it's becoming harder and harder to keep a windows system healthy in the real world. Time and time again, I see people who have perfectly good computers (hardware wise), who can't do anything because the malware is killing the performance.

Now if you ask yourself: What would those people prefer? A linux system, with the good old gnome desktop, open office, and evolution, which they can use more or less intuitively, or the old familiar windows system, with all of the malware problems? The windows system that *doesn't work* for them in the real world?

For the first time in my 12 years of running linux, I really think that a lot of ordinary users that I know would be better off with linux. I'm not saying that as an ideologue. My main desktop computer is a windows machine, and I love it. I was never sympathetic to the people who used to try to push their friends to run linux -- I've never done that in my life, except with a couple of geeks who really needed to see it.

But I think that you can make a real case for linux in some people's homes now. For the first time. It's a new situation that's derived from two new circumstances.

The first is the quality of modern linux desktops. They're good, and they're intuitive. The gui apps that are available (like evolution) are pretty solid.

The second is the massive security meltdown that we're seeing with windows and malware. It's causing a great deal of pain and suffering out in the real world.

*I* don't have a problem with it. I apply patches, don't run suspicious binaries, have anti-virus software, a firewall, and scan regularly with ad-aware and spybot. I suspect that most geeks don't have a problem with it. The guys writing articles in magazines don't have a problem with it, and the people who buy magazines probably don't have many problems with it.

But low end users are getting creamed by this stuff. It's hard to keep your machine clean. It's hard to keep a windows machine healthy in the real world now.

What I think has happened -- although no one has said it -- is that the difficulty of keeping a windows machine clean has started to exceed the diffculty a windows user has coming to terms with the gnome desktop. I think it exceeds it by a wide margin.

That's a pretty big thing.

Politics. It's like an itch I just can't stop scratching.

OK, so if the White House can release backgrounders for political reasons like attacking Clarke, why can't the Plame Investigators get the same priviledge? Has anything even happened with Plame in recent months? I haven't heard any real news about it in a while.

My mom has a small travel agency business that she runs out of their house.

When my parents go out of town, I go up and check on the mail, make sure the fax machine has paper, and all of that.

This time, they're gone for ten days, so I booted her machine from a morphix gnome livecd. That way I could set up my own bookmarks and cookes, configure the mail program so I could check my mail, etc., without mucking up my mom's stuff. My mom runs windows 2000.

I have the evolution mailer configured to leave mail on the server, and to BCC me anything I send. This way I'll have copies of whatever emails I've sent to friends from my parents' house.

Last night, I got an email from my sister. It was a BCC to a message she sent to my mom. "Wow, your computer sure looks different, but it's been awhile since I've used it." Then she went into a few practical details about travel bookings.

The point is that my sister, who has never seen a linux desktop, and who was expecting to find a windows desktop, sat down at the machine and figured it out. She didn't even know it wasn't windows -- I think she thought it was some sort of funky windows configuration. She sent email, and she probably used the web, too. (I haven't spoken with her yet.

She did this with no help, and no warning.

I think it's a good sign for the future of the linux desktop. It's a little thing, but it shows that things are becoming a lot more intuitive.

OK, Sam -- here we go! A while ago, I was impressed by RDewald and a piece of off-the-cuff fiction and it reminded me of an old excercise that I used to engage in from my BBS days:

Collaborative Fiction

So I was wondering who would be interested in such an experiment, here on Slashdot, in our journals?

The way I was thinking about doing it is this. We'll try a short story, for a test. If we like doing it, we can try and get more ambitious until we get bored with it. I have a few guidelines to start us off, and am welcoming suggestions from those who are interested.

First off, the list of guidelines, I've thought of:

• As stated, let's start off with a short story to see how well this works. Depending on the number of participants, we'll do [n] chapters of [n] parts, where [n] is the number of participants. If we get a large number of folks interested in this, we'll limit the number of chapters to 5-10 -- whatever you guys decide.
• Anything goes in the genre. It will be interesting to see how it starts and how well some of us can weave our characters together into a cohesive plot.
• Anything goes with your own characters. Treat them as you see fit, however no writing out someone else's characters. You can back them into a wall, but leave the owner a way out (and we're all friends here -- I hope -- so in the interest of drama, if you write a cliffhanger, please communicate with the character owner your intent). Characters whom their creators wash their hands of are free game.
• We can lay out the story chapters in several different ways. For consistency, however, each part from each different participant will start off as a comment in the journal that starts each chapter. As each part is fleshed out and adjusted in the comments, the JE entry that holds the chapter will be updated with the new text.
• Chapters can appear here, or we can alternate who starts what chapter among the participants in the comments attached to the previous chapter.
• Let's get the arrangement and clarifications out of the way, first, before we officially start writing anything.
• I would have liked to open this up to everyone, but in the interest of focus, I've marked this journal as "Friends and FoFs" -- this will probably be the recommended setting for each chapter unless the majority of you feel differently.

That's all I can think of right now. Let the discussion begin. I'll update this JE with suggestions, ideas and conclusions that get hashed out in the discussion.

Have at it, everyone! :D

_______________________________
So far so good, 3 people have expressed interest:

• johndiii
• SamTheButcher
• Em Emalb

When .gov sites like these start showing up, can the Independent Counsels be that far behind?

Well...yes! That particular law was encouraged to expire, and eventually did, on June 30th, 1999.

Still, it makes one wonder what the Justice Department is doing with the resonsibility it reassumed, with the death of the Independent Council Act. Why do we have a website made by the House of Representatives pointing out misleading comments by officials, that led to a war, instead of attempts at impeachments or censure for these same officials?

Hopefully the appearance of such sites means that someone is taking steps to make sure the current administration comes clean on the reasons they were made, in the first place. When such statements lead an invasion of a foreign country, in a war sold on false pretences, I would hope that someone would seek to find those responsible and make them answer to the American people as to why the trust we have place in them, to lead this country, has been so betrayed.

It's not that I want the Independent Counsel act to be reinstated, as was called for by Lieberman to investigate the Plame Affair. It has been used as a partisan weapon once too many times, with the taxpayers footing the bill of political prosecution after political prosecution. However it seems that this administration has been able to coast by on many questionable issues during its run, and in an Election Year, it is high time this administration becomes accountable for the things it has done, during its tenure in power.

Will this happen? Only time will tell...

I just got back from Starsky and Hutch.

Surprisingly funny. I bet the DVD will be great.

Best part was how anyone in the theatre under 30 didn't get about 70% of the best jokes.

Now I'm hoping that they'll make a CHiPs movie. I wonder what other late 70s to early 80s TV shows would translate well into movies?

Oh, and if you're not watching TRIO every night, you're really missing out on some fantastic television.

Crude, rude and lewd, but so awfully, accurately true.

Controversial issues, aside, I was pointed to this article, today and just thought I'd share this bit of zen:

...Is this true? Are there actual verses decrying gay marriage? Are they anything like those other Biblical verses, about the rules and regulations surrounding marriage that are making the rounds on the Net right now? Real verses. Actual verses. Verses o' sanctimonious fun. Have you seen them?

Like this: "Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take multiple concubines in addition to his wife or wives." (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21).

Or maybe: "A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be stoned to death." (Deut 22:13-21) Isn't that cute? Isn't quoting Bible verse fun? Ask your local pastor about that one. ...

Thank God (pun, intended), for the New Testament.

As the differences between New and Old Testament show, things change, ust like things are changing now. Hopefully these changes, in whatever form they finally settle into, are for the better.

So maybe I'm just behind, but I've found the CSS Zen Garden to be one of the best examples of what CSS can do. Why more websites haven't embraced CSS (let's not mention Slashdot, please) amazes me. Of course, CSS does look more verbose than HTML, and I'm wondering if there are any editors out there that can generate compliant CSS that validates while providing a visual interface to the user.

What CSS sites have you seen that push the envelope and make good use of the technology?

With CSS having this kind of capabilities, do you think XHTML/CSS will bring anything new or useful to the table?

There's no "Ask Slashdot" topic available for user journals, but I am intrigued by this reader's question, and I thought it was worth a try to tap into the collective wisdom of Slashdot.

Hi Wil,

you mentioned some time ago in your blog that you did a presentation on writing your book(s) using open source tools. Have you posted these slides (or whatever the medium was) anywhere?

I'm asking as I am about to embark on a writing project that will be north of 80,000 words (assuming I get past the 5,000 word 'pain barrier' that killed me last time) and recent experience with M$ Word has, quite frankly, scared the bejaysus out of me.

Anyways, if you get this it would be great to see you share some of your experiences using OSS to write.

thanks
Conrad

[1]http://www.wilwheaton.net/mt/archives/001401.php

I replied:

Hi Conrad,

Sadly, I didn't use any slides . . . that's *way* over my level of preparation for anything I do.

My talk pretty much focused on how I used OpenOffice.org to compose and edit my two current books, and what some of the pitfalls were.

I can summarize briefly for you: OO.o is a fantastic word processing suite, and did everything that I needed it to do. I was particularly impressed by the "stylist" in OO.o, which exists, I think, because they use some sort of XML-ish language behind the scenes. The stylist allowed me to assign something similar to "classes" to diffferent areas of my text, and was extremely useful in the design of "Just A Geek."

The only time I ran into an annoying limitation was moving to and from the .doc format, because OO.o and MSWord don't play nicely in regards to formatting. I worked around this by using .rtf format, when I needed to send my work out to other people (for notes and stuff). There were a few limitations in formatting, but they were purely aesthetic and didn't affect the actual data in any way.

I briefly looked at Abiword and KOffice, and found them both to be well-written and stable, but they were far more limited than OO.o.

In terms of just putting together a manuscript without regard to formatting, you could work very easily with Kwrite, or Kate, the same way that many other writers use BBEdit on the Mac.

When I finally had a finished product that I liked, I used OpenOffice.org to print to a .ps file, then used the ps2pdf13 command line tool to convert it into a .pdf document, which I sent to my printer. I understand that the newest version of OO.o has a very robust built-in pdf converter which makes that extra step unnecessary. I should also point out that converting files to .pdf on *nix always results in smaller filesizes than if you'd done it on a Mac or Windows platform. Hooray for us.

I'll post this e-mail to my Slashdot journal (CleverNickName) and maybe some of the Slashdotters will have good advice of their own to share with us.

Best of luck with your novel. Just go one scene at a time, and you'll be past 5K words before you know it!

Wil

My presentaton was pretty much limited to "I like this, I don't like this, and this thing was cool." I didn't have the time to get into a 1:1 comparison among all the different Open Source word processing suites. Do Slashdotters have any comments or suggestions? I find myself using Kate more and more when I compose weblog entries or shorter columns for magazines and the like. I occasionally use Abiword to compose and format letters and fax covers when time is a factor (Abiword loads much faster than OpenOffice.org.)

I've been grooving for the past few weeks on Internet Radio. Now these streaming stations might not be for those who dislike breakbeats, bass, and intense sound, but I love this stuff. If you find you think that description satisfies your aural interest, may I present the following links for your perusal:

Hop on board the Jungle Train

24 hour Drum 'n Bass, on the net.

And let's not forget, a long-time fav of mine:

Soma FM!

If anyone knows of other streams that play a decent selection of Atmospheric Jungle, Darkstep, Breakbeat, or similar, please let me know.

This has been a Public Slashdot Announcement. If you hear the sound of deep, thruming bass, do not be alarmed. The system is working as intended.

You made the top ten list!

No PointsName Hp [max]
1 20342 Morc-Mon-Hum-Mal-Law died in Sokoban on level 6 [max 9].
Killed by an owlbear. - [79]
2 15917 Morc-Mon-Hum-Mal-Law died in The Dungeons of Doom on level 12.
Killed by a xan. - [68]
3 4171 Morc-Wiz-Orc-Mal-Cha died in The Dungeons of Doom on level 6.
Killed by a water elemental. - [59]

It's cold comfort to be three fucking rocks away from beating Sokoban, only to have a fucking OWLBEAR show up out of nowhere, and whack 70 fucking hit fucking points right off you in one fucking turn.

Gods, I love this fucking game. >:-)