The best find du jour is the following set of Linux commands and their real responses in the shell. Below is a snippet.

Actual UNIX commands and responses…

% make love
Make: Don’t know how to make love. Stop.

% got a light?
No match.

% sleep with me
bad character

[....]

have always said that I would never write blog content while drunk or even tipsy. I think I made the exception only once. Today I have a compelling reason to make an exception, too.

I have just returned from the night club and, on my way back, I witnessed a violent scene (although I did not see it frontally or directly). An innocent Northern Irish man was assaulted by three bullies and then left lying unconscious on the ground, having had his mobile phone stolen. His head was visibly injured. I saw him lying there without moving while other witnesses fled the scene. Soon afterwards I had the ambulance and the police come to assist. I spent about an hour with them, providing evidence.and rough description of the criminals. I am yet to be contacted for further information by the police (or at least that’s I was told by the officer).

But here comes the scary part: as I was leaving the police vehicle I was yelled at by a bunch of guys whose appearance resembled the criminals. I walked back home through an alternative route watching my back like a paranoid. I don’t expect to sleep well tonight. It’s 3 AM and I need to wake up early for work. Quite unnerving. The policemen said that they had captured those three who assaulted, but I begin to doubt it. They could have lied to find reassurance. In fact, now that I think about it, I will go downstairs immediately and phone the police, again. They could not have found the criminals as quickly as they arrived at the scene of the incident.

UPDATE (after phonecall): it seems possible that they only captured one or two of the criminals (probably one).

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

nice old writeup from Tristan Miller (someone whom I first met on UseNet) explains why it is a poor idea to send Word files. I explored his site at deeper levels in the past as his opinions broadly intersected with mine. I also happened to find this funny ‘scientific paper’ with an hilarious followup.

Returning to the subject at hand, the true nuisance is mail that contains Word attachments. It is a plague that appears to be reaching its end. Funnier (or coversely — more annoying) experiences include the embedment of nothing but plain text (or even a single image) in a Word files which is attached to a blank-body message. Some people just never learn. Here are some effective E-mail signatures that I have come across in the L_yX mailing list.

I do not have a copy of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.
I have no plans to buy one.
Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint use proprietary data formats,
encouraging consumerism by forcing us to purchase new licenses
every time they “upgrade” their secret formats.
Send plain text, rich text format, html, or pdf instead.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

Or a shorter version thereof (one which honours the 4-line signature limit)

Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are unreliable, unmaintainable, and unsafe.
Send plain text, rtf, pdf, or W3C html instead.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

There is now the ODF argument as well. ODF has recently become an ISO-approved standard.

NE thing that keeps striking me as surprising is that people’s habits supersede all logic. I will provide an example from technology.

How can anybody argue that drive A for floppy disk and C for primary hard-drive is more rational than the rhetorical and self-explanatory /dev/floppy/ (for floppy device) and /dev/hd0/? This comes the prove that it is all just a matter of habits. People refuse to accept new things that they are not already used to, irrespective of their reasoning. In fact, the hierarchy of a computer (abstraction) in the *nix world is far more robust. It may also be easier for a new user to ‘digest’ and everything stems from the root of a single tree.

The following is a mind-stimulating fragment from a post that I recently read in the Linux advocacy newsgroups. Judge it for yourselves.

(In a derogatory reference to Linux) “Anything free is worth what you pay for it” - Robert Heinlein

What? You think it could be worth less?

He also said:

“Certainly the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you; if you don’t bet, you can’t win.” - Robert Heinlein

Which should be the unwritten motto of the OSS community.

And finally one for you to ponder:

“Your enemy is never a villian in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate–and quickly.” - Robert Heinlein

Upgrade to Thunderbird. It’s Open Source and it honours standards/netiquette.

ICROSOFT Outlook is a terrible mail application, despite some common beliefs (and expectations due to cost, or bloat). I cannot comment on its abilities as a calendaring software as I have only seen others using these peripherals features. However, at least one Outlook user whom I exchange E-mails with is breaking every rule in the book regularly (if not always). Outlook does not prevent him from doing this. As a matter of fact, it encourages this and a dissatisfied recipient is of course less likely to reply.

Here is a short description of the problems inherent in these messages that I receive from Outlook (and sometimes Outlook Express too):

• HTML-formatted
• Non-standard ‘HTML’ (Microsoft Office inclination, MSIE-centric)
• Roughly 38 kilobyte even for a one-liner (an enormous non-standards compliant ‘style sheet’ is prepended)
• 10-line signature (Outlook does not warn or deter)
• No signature delimiter (breaking all RFC standards)
• Always top-posted, not trimmed and lacking context (Outlook is definitely not helping by creating new lines and putting the cursor at the top)
• In quotes, re-wrapping is broken and irregular symbols get inserted sporadically

There is no gentle way to approach the issue, but one such person learned to at least stick to plain-text (owing to a kind request). The top posting habits remain though. Outlook Express requires QuoteFix, which is addon software/hack, just to stop this default behaviour and make bottom posting practical. So there is no subtle way to suggesting others to improve their posting habits, unfortunately. To them, the Windows/Microsoft way is the right way. Acceptable standards lose their value when a desktop monopoly simply ignores them.

Some time ago I wrote some notes on how to begin loving E-mail again , which reminds me of an old favourite that is titled the UseNet improvement project.

Baghira Mac OS X lookalike for KDE

INUX can be assimilated to merely any desktop environment, including the appearance of its rivals’ desktops. It can endlessly adapt, particularly layout-wise, although look-and-feel is getting there too. Different interfaces (achievable through desktop environment), as well as various addons, make this truer than ever before. There are several design sets lying about, which enable Linux to look and behave merely like any other operating system. Here are a few examples that I collected recently:

• KDE posing as Mac OS X
• GNOME posing as Mac OS X
• Another approach/route to GNOME OS X
• KDE as Windows XP (not quite so ‘brushed up’ though)

Another nice style that I found is Noia for KDE (version 1).

Here are some sets of instructions of interest. These are step-by-step recipes to achieving some of what’s shown above:

• Transforming GNOME to become a OSX lookalike
• A recent blog item pointing to Arnaud’s OSX cloning tutorial