I posted the following to the LPLUG mailing list, but perhaps someone else out there might have some insight. I’ve tried latex2rtf, which didn’t undersatnd my very simple documents. (Choked on makeindex and setpapersize, and it went downhill from there.) And I’ve tried to go LaTeX -> HTML -> Word, which is an abomination.

Of course, the real problem here is people who insist on MSWord documents, when I already have a far superior document format. I have no doubts that if/when I ever do get a conversion, that I’ll get back a modified document, and have no clue what exactly was changed. So I’m going to a great deal of trouble to create additional trouble for myself. *sigh*

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I write stuff in LaTeX. I do this because it is easy, looks professional, makes TOCs and indexes easy to maintain, and converts easily to formats I care about.

Unfortunately, invariably, when I write a document, someone demands that I then provide that document in Word, so that they can make small tweaks to it. This is aggravating for all the obvious reasons. Versioning goes out the window, diffs are impossible, applying changes to the
authoritative copy of the document is icky, at best, the resulting file is at least 10x larger than it needs to be, and I have to use bloatware to do further edits to the document.

And, the more annoying thing, the reason for this note, is that there’s no nice way to convert. Can anyone recommend a reasonable and simple conversion vector from LaTeX –> Word? Most/All of the LaTeX -> plain text conversions are terrible. And, even when they work, you lose all
semblance of formatting. I usually end up having to do a great deal of editing to get back to anything like what I started with, and the resulting document is never quite as professional-looking as what I did initially. I lose all cross references (see section ~ref{section_label}) and I don’t know any way around that.

I find this whole discussion really irritating, but I don’t see much way around the requirement. So any kind of crude conversion would be good, I guess, since I’m never going to get a resulting document that is as good as what I have to start with.

I suffer from “early adopter syndrome”. When new technology comes out, I’m one of the first in line to buy. So I get shoddy stuff at 3 times the price that anyone else pays. I have a CD/CDR/MP3 player which I bought in 1999. I paid, I seem to recall, $150 for it. It has no concept of directories (albums) on the CD. It doesn’t always correctly handle CD-Rs. And it doesn’t read any ID3 tags, so you can’t easily navigate through a disk, particularly if it has hundreds of files on it.

This weekend I got a CD/CDR/MP3 player. It indexes the disk at startup, and you can navigate by album and by song. It reads directory names and song names, either from the file name, or from the ID3 tags. And it buffers the song. So if you’re listening to MP3s, rather than a “real” CD, the disk hardly ever even spins. It spins up long enough to read in the file, and then it stops spinning. This means that it has almost infinite shock resistence, and so you don’t get skips when you hit bumps. It appears to buffer about 2 minutes of audio, so you have to be on a pretty rough road to outlast that. This device cost $29.

I had similar experiences with wireless networking and digital cameras and scanners. My only consolation is that I got to enjoy all of these things for at least 2 or 3 years more than “normal” people.

The thing that annoys me, more than anything else, about cell phones, is the way that certain people seem to think that I should be always available. If they call, and I don’t answer, the message left is always petulant and irritated, as though by not answering the phone I have committed some kind of insult against them. Particularly if they call my home phone and my cell phone, and I answer neither, then the message is even more irritated.

I remember, not so many years ago, when you could safely take 12 hours to return a phone message, and nobody thought that you had been run over by a garbage truck. These days, if you wait more than 10 minutes to return a message, you get a lecture about how hard they’ve been trying to get in touch with you. Heaven forbid you should leave your phone home, or … *horrors* … turn it off.

I envy my friends who have decided not to have a cell phone, and I wish for a simpler time when I could make a similar decision. Instead of being a convenience, my cell phone is, primarily, something that I pay for so that people I don’t want to talk to can get in touch with me no matter where I am. I guess this is the price I pay for being a slave to technology.

Due to my less-than-ideal housing situation at the moment, my servers are in my bedroom. At the moment, I have 3 servers running. Three others are turned off. The iMac is *still* out in the dining room.

Anyways, back to the point. This morning, I just couldn’t take the noise any more. I needed a break. I turned off all the servers for about a half hour. After a while, you can almost get used to the noise to where you don’t really hear it. But it’s always there, and it drowns out other things, like the birds and the hum of cars passing on the highway.

Ironically, while enjoying the silence, I had a desire to blog about it. Which would, of course, require that I turn the servers back on. Isn’t that absolutely pathetic? But, I resisted the urge to turn them back on until now. I kinda need to turn them on before I leave for work, since they run semi-critical services, like DNS for a dozen domains, IRC bots, and, of course, this web site.

*sigh*. I really really really want to get back into my house.

I just watched Hackers, again. I’ve probably seen it a dozen times now. I think I’ve come to a realization. The reason that I don’t watch many movies is that they suck me in too much. I identify with the characters entirely too much, and it messes with my mind. Hackers, for example, is about who I probably would have been had I lived in the USA during the 80s. Kinda scary.

I often wonder about how much trouble I would have gotten into if Asbury had had Internet when I was in college. I managed to get into quite enough trouble without it. Plus all the things that we never got caught for. 😉 (Ahem. Is the bell tower *supposed* to be that color?)

The sequence in Hackers, when they are altering the records for Mr. Richard Gill, just seems a little bit too much like me.

In college, about all that we had was a dialup number to the college computer. Of course, nobody knew the phone number, right? And we would dial up to it from the dorm, and log on and poke around. Later in college I managed to obtain a SLIP connection and a login on the computers at UK. We would log in and poke around there, looking around FTP- and Gopher-space. But, alas, we were right on the cusp of the WWW days, since I graduated in 1992.

Anyways, all that to say, “Hackers” always makes me sad, and glad, that I wasn’t a part of that subculture at just the right time in history, because I tend to think that I would have been a little more Joey than ZeroCool.

While I’m sure I’ve seen worse … much worse! … I could not resist the temptation to snap a a few pictures.

John Gruber has a depressingly good article about Linux usability in which he highlights some of he fundamentally wrong assumptions about usability, and, in particular, why Linux is (can be) terrible in that department. The underlying assumption is that first you make software work, and then you “spray on” the ease of use.

In the article he refers to the “rock star” UI designers who are both good at user interface design, and, at the same time, are programmers and can make it happen. He says that these folks are very very thin on the ground. Of course, I immediately thought of Tim.

As my laptop booted up and the words Red Hat scrolled past, Sarah said, “Daddy, can you make that say Blue Hat next time?”

I found this in rc.sysinit:

[ "$BOOTUP" = "color" ] && echo -en $"33[0;31m"
 echo -en "Red Hat"
 [ "$BOOTUP" = "color" ] && echo -en $"33[0;39m"
 PRODUCT=`sed "s/Red Hat (.*) release.*/1/" /etc/redhat-release`
 echo " $PRODUCT"

Now I’m just trying to figure out what the color codes are.

🙂

I rediscovered ReBug this week. It’s a *very* shiny little app that shows you how Perl’s regular expression engine works on a partular pattern and string. Wonderful for explaining how regexes work, and even better for assisting in crafting just the right regex for the right occasion.

Even better than Luddite.com, now there’s SWEDX, purveyor of wooden computers.