Comment Re:You are only too old if you think you are (Score 1) 772
I forgot to mention; I changed careers at the age of 53 from teaching to programming and system administration.
I'm 55, a programmer, and I've been out of work for two years.
I'm a 58-year old Perl programmer and system administrator enjoying my challenging work.
1. I'm old. One 5 hour energy drink revvs up your basic 20 year old code monkey all day. I need a saline drip with caffeine in it all day to keep going.
I ride my bicycle 160 km each week, and have more energy than many younger programmers.
2. I'm expensive. I have 30 years of experience in the 'biz and a masters degree in CS. I'm not cheap. You could hire two 25 year olds for what I'm asking.
I am productive, have good control in deciding what I do, and enjoy a mentoring role.
3. I've been exposed to every nasty little mindgame management has at it's disposal. And sometimes I have the bad manners to call people on it. This is called "having a bad attitude".
I understand what pressures people are under, and get along well with my work mates and managers.
You are too old if you think you are. Otherwise, you can learn a great deal every day up to the day you die.
I am sorry about the tone of my last post; I don't mean to belittle your excellent efforts. I am glad of your good work. I'm just a daddy with a child who needs my time, and so I must move on, as I don't have a pressing need yet, just a curiosity, and I know I will be able to solve the problem of LaTeX to epub when the time comes, probably using tex4ht and some post processing. I was interested because I have written plenty of LaTeX for many years, and know I'll want to do this conversion in the future.
For future reference, filing bugs in a project with an unrelated entity generally does not achieve anything...
I expect the Fedora maintainer will probably do something sensible with this; why do you declare this authoritatively to be not the case? Upstream also seems to be in a half-baked state.
* LLVM/Clang 2.9 or higher is required to build Etoile
* libobjc2 1.4 (other ObjC runtimes such as the one packaged with GCC won't work)
Okay, I've only 2.8 of LLVM/Clang, and libobjc-4.6.0-10.fc15.x86_64. I'll move on. I'll write my own solution in Perl when I need it.
In the process of compiling this on Fedora 15, I raised bug 728744, and worked around those problems. The compilation of ETClassMirror.m failed with "incomplete implementation of class ‘ETClassMirror’ [-Werror]". I'm tempted to leave this for now, as this doesn't seem sufficient reason to learn Objective C, and I have other things to do.
It is based on plain text and allows cross linking, references, equations. http://orgmode.org/
Let's see:
Org-mode is like a Swiss army knife. People use it for Getting Things Done (GTD), as a Day Planner, as a Notebook, for Web and PDF Authoring, and much more.
Now why isn't dissertation and thesis there in that list? I wonder. Hmmm. Let me think now....
The learning curve is such that for any even moderately long document, it is worth learning latex from scratch rather than using a word processor.
Once you're used to it, it is so much simpler to use.
When teaching in Hong Kong, a fellow lecturer was asked to create a template for exam papers. He did so in Word, but using inconsistent spacing, manually created using the spacebar and other blue-collar methods. I wrote my own style sheet in LaTeX, and my exams conformed to the Departmental Standard better than his model did. One problem is that many users of Word and other word processors have not invested sufficient time in learning how to create actual style sheets that take care of formatting rather than using low-level manual processes that look inconsistent and amateurish. The effort required to understand how to do this well is not much less than that required to understand how to produce good results in LaTeX.
Your code, after suitable modification by a persevering programmer, is the solution to the question posted in this ask.slashdot article.
Since you are the original asker of the question, I see you are after a better answer than that you created yourself. (Silly me!). Okay, I'll see what I can do, even though I will write Perl (but good Perl!)
Btw, that script is here: http://www.johanneswilm.org/download/compile
Thank you very much; you have asked many good questions on the tex4ht list, and the answers have also been illuminating. Your script is very specific to your "SANDINISTA DISSERTATION" (copied and pasted from the script). It assumes a very specific file layout, but does not have defaults that cope with the basic simple case of a LaTeX file that includes some images. But thank you for making it available; I think it (and your discussion on the tex4ht list) will help me write a simple program to cope with the basic case.
It may be impertinent of me, but I offer this gratuitous advice: the additional effort to write a generally more useful tool is not great; you can simply write a script to call it with the options that apply to you. Your code can also create directories if they are not present, and give more specific help for the first time user of your program rather than exception backtraces. I guess this is the difference between code written for a specific purpose by a researcher and that by a programmer who wants to make a generally useful tool. I appreciate that your main effort is your research, and that it is generous of you to provide your useful code, which others such as I can benefit from. Your code, after suitable modification by a persevering programmer, is the solution to the question posted in this ask.slashdot article.
I very strongly suggest you use TeX4ht to convert what you have into an intermediate format of XML, and then postprocess it and clean it up to create a master copy in a well-known and robust XML format like DocBook or TEI, and start from there. There are then plenty of good tools that will let you create multiple outputs, including eBooks, web sites, topic maps, even Braille and voice output...and of course LaTeX, to regenerate your original, if needed.
Among all the noise in this "discussion", this is the first post that actually addresses the problem.
Too expensive, too many mistakes, too much time and
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
