Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Wednesday, April 7, 2004

Which WLAN base station to use at home? -- Comment()
I'm thinking of using a WLAN broadband router at home. But which system to use: Apple, Linksys, or Buffalo? For me the top priorities are ease of use and maintainance, and security.

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Genocide victims remembered: "Rwanda holds commemorative events to mark the 1994 genocide in which about 800,000 people were killed." [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

This raises a question: How much publicity did the genocide in Rwanda get compared to the September 11th attack in New York?

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More on SpyMac, and its self-love: "Due to Google announcing Gmail, SpyMac figured it would be cool to give out 1GB of email storage to its members. [...] Google is cashflow positive and has a track record of knowing how to scale to infinity. SpyMac can't buy an advertiser and is only famous for lying. Who would you trust with your data?" [JG]

Buy-buy Classic, I'm now Mac OS X all the way -- Comment()
I installed last week Adobe Creative Suite on my PowerBook. The main reason for getting CS was to have a newer version of Acrobat Distiller. The older 5.0 version of Distiller still needed the Classic environment on Mac OS X, which was a big nuisance. Now I don't have a single application needing Classic any more. Good riddance!

Further questions about pdfLaTeX -- Comment()
SP asked about PdfLaTeX: "However, I mainly use it for straight text, maths and a few commutative diagrams at most. And I didn't run into any troubles yet. In which areas would pdfTeX be a problematic choice? What can it not be recommended for?"

I have been using some PostScript-specific macro packages in the books I have written. Also, when I tried to use pdfLaTeX to typeset a book with several hundred pages, pdfLaTeX ran out of space for the PDF bookmarks etc.

I later corrected this problem by modifying the local TeX installation. I configured the TeX system with more space for bookkeeping (I don't remember all the details any more). So, you may have to have a non-standard version of TeX to use pdfLaTeX with longer books.

Update: A message from SP clarifies the situation with pdfLaTeX: "[The problems are] probably mostly memory related. Like back in the early 1990s, when we had a separate 'BigTeX' binary and formats. I thought they had increased the default memory settings to reasonable values when creating more recent versions. But probably they didn't quite foresee all the nice PDF stuff people were going to want to use. Let's hope these memory considerations in TeX will be history in whatever TeX is being developed to (NTS, say)."

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Bush Sloganator reborn: "Dave has created a replica of the Bush Sloganator, which was taken down by its authors a couple weeks ago because Some People were making funny signs..." [Boing Boing]

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Why I Wouldn't Consider Google's E-Mail: "The "privacy policy" for the not-yet-available Google "GMail" e-mail service is nothing short of chilling. It is made to order for the most intrusive kind of spying on its users. Anyone who signs up for this service is just begging for trouble. But if you insist on doing so, at least go to this Google Watch page and follow the instructions on how to delete the cookie associated with your Google data searches." [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Adding a print button to Safari -- Comment()
This hint at Mac OS X Hints tells how to add a print button to the Safar web browser. I also added an e-mail button for sending the title and URL of a web page.