Category: Nonfiction Books

General publishing announcements

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Word doc placed in Indesign gets numbered headings

This has bit me more than once, and according to Google it affects nobody else on the whole Internet. Do I feel special or what?

I write books in Microsoft Word, using Styles. Paragraph and character styles are essential for producing electronic and print books.

At random times, when I import a Word doc into Indesign for print layout, numbers appear before the headings. These numbers do not appear in the Word document. Resolving this problem drives me near to madness.

InDesign and Word both have features to number chapters and sections. The “place document” process somehow tickles one of them just right to activate this behavior.

To get rid of it:

  • Go into the Word doc.
  • Modify the problem Style.
  • Select Format
  • Go to Numbering
  • Select a numbering scheme, and immediately select “no numbering.”
  • Save the doc

    You can now import without numbered headings mysteriously appearing.

    Recording this for my future reference will hopefully vaccinate me against ever having this problem again. That’s what disaster preparations are for, after all!

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    “Tarsnap Mastery” pre-pub reviewers wanted

    The first draft of “Tarsnap Mastery” is ready for pre-pub review.

    Colin has reviewed the manuscript, so I’m fairly sure that the technical stuff is correct. But Colin knows Tarsnap very well, so he read the book already understanding what I’m trying to teach.

    And in aggregate, y’all use Tarsnap much more than I possibly could. There’s thousands of you. You’ve probably figured out ways to abuse the service that I would have never thought of.

    If you’re interested in doing a pre-pub review, send me an email with the subject “Tarsnap pre-pub review.” Please give me a sentence or two saying:

  • how experienced you are as a sysadmin
  • how experienced you are at Tarsnap

    I can’t take everyone who volunteers, but I want to get a fair balance between different levels of sysadmin and Tarsnap experience.

    The book draft PDF is 16MB. Send your message from an email address that can accept a file that large. If the email bounces, I’ll assume that you didn’t read this far in the instructions, and hence don’t really want to review.

    Please send any comments in plain text. I don’t look at comments until the due date, so one big response is fine.

    I’ll need any comments back by 9 February 2015.

    If you want more detail on pre-pub reviews, look at my web site.

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    Jan 2015 Status & Next Projects

    Welcome to 21 January 2015. Here’s the news.

    I finished the first draft of Tarsnap Mastery yesterday. Today I went through it one more time, then shipped it off to Colin Percival for his comments on the last few chapters. Once I have his corrections, I’ll solicit reviewers.

    Networking for Systems Administrators is at the copyeditor. It’s due back Friday. I expected this book to be pretty easy, but the tech reviewers savaged it. The end result will be a much better book, but it still wasn’t much fun and took longer to repair than I expected. With any luck, though, I’ll be able to get the electronic version out before the end of January and print in mid-February.

    These two books are not available for pre-order through the Tilted Windmill Press web site. Books that I offer direct pre-orders on have done much more poorly than books without direct pre-orders. (Part of that might be topics, of course.) Other authors tell me that Amazon uses a book’s initial sales velocity to compute a book visibility to other buyers. More than 90% of my TWP book sales come from Amazon, so I care what happens on that platform.

    The sequel to Immortal Clay is rolling along.

    Now that Tarsnap Mastery and Networking for System Administrators are in a lull, I’ve started seriously pulling material together and filling in the outlines for my next FreeBSD Mastery books:

  • Jails (#fmjail)
  • ZFS (#fmzfs)
  • Specialty Filesystems (#fmspf, because #fmsf is taken)

    If you watched my most recent BSDNow interview, this is not a surprise.

    The books will assume you know what’s in FM: Storage Essentials, and there is a certain amount of interconnection between all three. For example, to use jails you should know about devfs and unionfs. The Jails book will include the incantations to perform the devfs and unionfs tasks needed for jails, but the explanations for them will be in the Specialty Filesystems book. Similarly, the Jails book will have ZFS rituals in it, but the ZFS book will have the knowledge behind those rituals.

    So, if you know some of these systems but not all you only need buy exactly what you need.

    I might split the Specialty Filesystems book into two parts, one for local filesystems and one for networked filesystems, depending on how long the book gets and the final content. My goal for these books is to make them about 30,000-40,000 words.[1] FMSE was 45,000 words, and N4SA is about that long. The sudo and Tarsnap books are closer to 30K, while SSH is right around 35K.

    I expect that once I finish them, I’ll have a bundle at Tilted Windmill Press much like the existing Security Bundle.

    When will these be finished? I really want to take the finished print books to BSDCan in June.

    [1] Why restrict book length? While the various ebook platforms do not restrict how long books can be, they do restrict how much I can charge for them. Most traditional publishers do not have that restriction. I must stagger roughly around that fuzzy intersection between “give good value,” “include what the reader needs,” and “can’t pay the mortgage.”

    Note that the on-demand printers do limit the size of print books. The bindings at the larger size books are not great. I refuse to release shoddy print books.

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    Volunteering Early to Tech Review

    Another “write this once so I can refer to it later” post. If I sent you a link to this post, it’s probably because you asked to tech review a book before I’m ready for tech reviewers.

    This week, I received several requests from readers who want to do a pre-publication tech review of one of my new books, like Tarsnap Mastery or next year’s FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS. Generally these readers are enthusiastic fans who get confused between “Lucas released a new book” and “Christmas.”

    I need fans like you. Seriously. You’re my best hope of staying in business as a writer.

    When you send me that email, I do hang on to it until the book needs a tech reviewer. But my email is a tarry morass. Like the La Brea Tar Pits, it often sucks down the innocent. The further in advance you ask, the more likely I am to lose your email. The precise traits that give my books their character make email management difficult.

    Should it be otherwise? Yep. I wish it was. But I’ve decided to stop fighting it.

    I always announce requests for tech reviewers here, on this blog.

    I’ve also observed that the further ahead people ask, the more likely it is that the volunteer can’t provide any feedback. Being free in December means nothing for your availability in February.

    Also, I can only handle a limited number of tech reviewers. I specify the criteria when I ask for reviewers. For example, in Networking for Systems Administrators I wanted about half ignorant readers and half knowledgeable network people. I asked people to specify which they were in their offer. For #n4sa I wound up with a lot of experienced volunteers and not so many ignorant ones so I needed to solicit more newbies (which I did find, so don’t go volunteering now).

    Your early request doesn’t have the information I need to choose you or not. When I solicit volunteers, I’ll reply to your original offer with a link to my solicitation post.

    But the best way to be chosen as a tech reviewer on a specific book is to watch my blog. Offer to tech review at the time I’m ask for tech reviewers, with the information I ask for in the request.

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    Sudo talk now on YouTube

    My talk Sudo: You’re Doing It Wrong is now live on YouTube. (Thanks to TJ for letting me know.) The talk is based on my book Sudo Mastery.

    This talk went better than my NYCBSDCon talk. Probably because I hadn’t confused “buzzing with caffeine, adrenaline, and sleeplessness” with “raging tonsilitis.” The Q&A at the end took us wildly astray, and ended with the general conclusion that “Lucas needs to present to mug.org about how to use SSH correctly.”

    I gave away a couple books, one Sudo Mastery and one SSH Mastery. The SSH book went to the first person to raise their hand and admit that they used passwords with SSH.

    But I’m sure none of you use password-only authentication with SSH. You’re all good, decent, moral people who wouldn’t do anything that vile.

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    SMLR on “FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials”

    The Sunday Morning Linux Review folks have a review of FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials in show 141. The review starts at about 39:30, but the whole show is worth listening to. As always.

    For my own reference, here’s a couple key quotes that I’ll probably use for marketing later. (I either write them down here, or have to go listen to the show again when digging up blurb quotes later.)

    “Lucas lays a solid foundation about disks.”

    “The devil is in the details, and the details are in the book.”

    And when it comes to slices versus partitions: Mary is right. Listen to her, guys.

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    Next tech book: Tarsnap Mastery

    Now that “Networking for System Administrators” is out for review, it’s time for me to dive into my next tech project: Tarsnap Mastery. Tarsnap is an encrypted online backup service run by Colin Percival, retired FreeBSD Security Officer.

    Colin has asked me to write some Tarsnap documentation for years. Now that I’ve moved my personal servers from hardware in my control to “the cloud,” I need a solid backup system. Tarsnap fits the bill nicely. If I have to deploy it and get everything nicely working correctly, I’d better document it before I forget it. Otherwise, I’ll be arguing with the software when I’m trying to restore my services after a disaster.

    And if I have to document it, I might as well sell the documentation to you lot. Because if you need online backups, you want them to be encrypted, right?

    Tarsnap has a decent user base, and it’s growing. Tarsnap runs on everything from Mac to Minix. Hopefully, there’s enough new users to support a book. Worst case, Tarsnap Mastery can’t do any worse than DNSSEC Mastery.

    As I write the Tarsnap book, I’ll be prepping to write more books on FreeBSD storage. My goal is to finish the research for one book as I finish writing another, so that I can jump directly from one project to the next. Scheduling this is something of a pain, but it’ll improve with practice.

    I’ve spent today reading the entirety of the Tarsnap-users mailing list archive, wrapping my head around typical user problems and Tarsnap’s rougher edges.

    I now have a headache. I blame Colin.

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    “Networking for System Administrators” – Tech reviewers wanted

    I’ve completed the manuscript for Networking for System Administrators. I’m now looking for a couple types of technical reviewers: people who know TCP/IP and networking, and people who are likely to read this book.

    Normally I’d ask for feedback in a few weeks. But the holiday season is at our throats, and we all need to spend some time fending off the incoming pile of coal, so: I’d need your comments by 5 January 2015. If you can return it to me earlier, that’s fantastic.

    If you’re interested in being a tech reviewer, please contact me via email at mwlucas at michael double-you lucas dot com, just like the domain name of my blog. (No, that’s not a literal double-you, it’s the letter w. Choke on that one, spam-bots!) Give me a sentence or two telling me what sort of reader you are and why you want to review this book.

    You can read more about the tech review process at my tech reviewer information page. This is a little different because it’s a complete manuscript. Why review the whole manuscript at once? Because the Mastery books are short. At least, they’re supposed to be short (cough).

    I have more detail about the book at the original announcement linked above, but here’s how the actual table of contents finished up:

    0: The Problem
    1: Network Layers
    2: Ethernet
    3: IPv4
    4: IPv6
    5: TCP/IP
    6: Viewing Network Connections
    7: Network Testing Basics
    8: the Domain Name System
    9: Packet Sniffing
    10: Creating Traffic
    11: Server Packet Filtering
    12: Tracing Problems
    Afterword

    I expect the copyeditor to need a couple weeks with the manuscript. It should be available in print and ebook in late January.

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    “FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials” print available!

    You can now get FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials in print on Amazon.

    If you buy the print from Amazon, you can get the Kindle version for $2.99. Sadly, that’s the closest thing to a proper print/ebook combo I’ve been able to do.

    For completeness’ sake: you can also buy it directly from my CreateSpace store. As sales go, that’s where I make the most money. It’s also the most expensive version. If you want to pay extra so I make more I won’t object, but I will suggest you avoid the middleman and go straight to me.

    It will appear in places like Powell’s in the coming weeks.

    Now to finish “Networking for Systems Administrators,” complete the design on the next tech book, finish the outline for the Immortal Clay sequel, and finish outlining the intertwined morass that is my next three FreeBSD Mastery books.