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Yesterday one of my clients called me several times in a very short time to ask a couple of questions. The last time he called, he said: “Sorry for bothering you again, I guess you will kill me”. My reply: “Don’t worry - instead I will bill you!”

Original Debian Install Manual Install Debian Woody the “pure” Debian way on a Dell Inspiron 8200 Anyone notice a pattern?

I’ve had my share of slow down’s on this Dell Inspiron 8200 (read about the adventures with the taskmanager in Windows XP). Yesterday I installed Red Hat 9 on the same machine and it seemed incredibly slow - especiall loading stuff. Talking to my colleagues, hdparm was mentioned… Maybe the harddisk was in PIO mode? Well - it turns out - it isn’t - nevertheless I tweaked the parameters a bit. Here’s my current setting: ...

When I write documentation I use DocBook to write structured text. DocBook is either in SGML or XML and can be - shall we say - interesting - to write in Emacs, my tool of choice for text processing. Enter XXE by french company XML Mind. XXE is written in Java, does WYSIWIG editing of DocBook (or other XML schemata), uses CSS to format things on screen, can convert to HTML, RTF and PDF. It’s extremely fast, very full featured and generally a joy to use. If you need to write DocBook - go and check it out. Oh - the standard version is free too - and has a very liberal license for use. And XMLMind just released version 2.4 ...

uh-oh… Hugh noticed… Also, Guido van Rossum reviews The Humane Interface Meanwhile, I have been busy sketching UI ideas for use in the browser (and that means, that I have to revisit my opinon on browsers not being able to handle all UI needs. I’m piecing together some DHTML / JavaScript technology to handle some of the new ideas I’m going to try out. On another note: don’t seem to be such a bad idea after all… ...