Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, November 22, 2002

-- Comment()
A Kinder, Gentler Web: "Microsoft announced a really nasty bug in their Data Access Components (MDAC) yesterday. Microsoft Security Bulletin MS02-065 has the details. I'm a sysadmin, I'm going to have to do something about this and I'm going to have to do it tonight. I work for a small company, not only do a lot of our applications use MDAC, I don't have enough budget room to build a testing environment for our application servers. I figure I'll do the patch and test starting at 1:00 AM, should be done by 4:00 AM. Our Ontario warehouse starts at about 6:00 AM my time so I'll be able to bring a pillow and grab a couple hours snooze under the rack or something. I can't help asking myself, why are you doing this?" [kuro5hin.org]

Digital Typography Using LaTeX -- Comment()
Yesterday I received a review copy of Digital Typography Using LaTeX from Springer (written by Syropoulos, Tsolomitis and Sofroniou, 510 pages, publishing year 2003). This is a nice new book on LaTeX. It will not replace the classic manuals by Lamport or for example Math into LaTeX (by Grätzer). However, Digital Typography Using LaTeX has a really good description of multi-lingual typesetting. And the book also describes the future directions of TeX and LaTeX. It shows examples of using pdfTeX and pdfLaTeX, and other new tools, plus the upcoming XML-transformation tools developed in the Omega and Lambda projects. The future of TeX and LaTeX looks bright indeed.

A new channel for thoughts -- Comment()
I have been posting here at Universal Rule a lot of pointers to topics elsewhere, so I decided to make a new channel (or category) for more personal postings. I came up with the title Universally Personal, not terribly original perhaps.