Categories
Writing

OpenOffice for Aqua

Last week I made the switch from NeoOffice to OpenOffice for Aqua on the Mac. I’m impressed with the overall appearance of the application, and the functionality. Most importantly, I was able to process Word documents with templates without problems and without loss of functionality. The application is very fast and responsive on my PowerPC laptops, and […]

Categories
Writing

Curly brackets or braces

This one came up during the tech edit and now during the copy edit on my last book: the use of “curly bracket” as compared to “curly braces” or “brace”. I have used the term “curly bracket” for decades, and have seen the term used in other programming contexts. Wikipedia, though not the definitive source of […]

Categories
JavaScript Political Writing

Finis

The draft for Learning JavaScript, second edition, has entered production, and that’s more or less it for my tech book writing career. I don’t want to say I’ll never write another tech book, because never is a long time. However, I have no intentions of writing another tech book in the foreseeable future. I hope […]

Categories
Weather Writing

Storm surges

Luckily Gustav calmed down before landfall, because I don’t think the New Orleans levees would have held if the surge was 18 feet as originally predicted. It’s important, now, for Nagin et al to let people back into the city as soon as possible. If the city management continues to keep the citizens out, but […]

Categories
JavaScript Writing

Future proofing books

The downside of the recent flurry of activity regarding JavaScript/ECMAScript is that I’m in the middle of tech editing Learning JavaScript, second edition, and not sure what to include. On the one hand, it’s extremely important to me that the book be accurate, so my inclination is not to including anything that isn’t implemented in […]