Category: Nonfiction Books

I started writing books on computer in the 1980s.  I used a Commodore plus/4, a Macintosh Classic, a mid-90s Mac laptop, and assorted UNIX boxes.  This assortment of platforms has taught me something important:  as an author, I don’t want my writing tied to any single software vendor.  My documents should be in a format that I can easily access on any operating system or platform.  This excludes proprietary solutions, such as the Commodore plus/4’s text editor, MacWrite, or Microsoft Word.

OpenOffice interested me right away.  I could write and mark up documents, and they would be stored in XML.  Even if OOo died tomorrow, I could find a Perl script to extract my text.  Oracle buying Sun, and getting OOo with it, is enough to make the paranoid angels who live in the back of my head start their chorus.  Oracle cannot take away the software that’s freely available today, but Oracle has absolutely mastered the proprietary software business model.  Oracle is excellent at extracting every possible dollar from every available asset.  And Oracle is smarter than I am.

That’s why the new Document Foundation LibreOffice interests me.  It’s a proactive move to block Oracle from dominating the free office suite space.  (I’d like to commend the Document Foundation on not waiting for Oracle to toss them overboard.)  And the Document Foundation is sponsored by several companies who have publicly committed to, and are even built upon, an open-source ecosystem.  I downloaded and installed LibreOffice on my laptop.

LibreOffice is supposedly the latest OpenOffice, plus fixes for many long-standing bugs that outside developers couldn’t get into the main OpenOffice code.  They’ve replaced the Oracle logos in the latest OOo update, and the window decorations are slightly different.  The LibreOffice beta looks and feels just like OOo.  OOo crashed on me every few weeks, and I haven’t run LibreOffice long enough to reproduce such a crash, but on the whole it seems perfectly fine.

My one complaint is that LibreOffice didn’t import my OOo dictionary.  I write many documents with specialized vocabulary, and I spent a great deal of time getting everything into my OOo spellcheck dictionary.  LibreOffice means that I have to start over.  In the grand scheme, however, this is a minor annoyance compared to the threat that Oracle poses to my writing.

The Document Foundation has stressed that they are not offering an OOo fork.  Oracle is welcome to join with them, or otherwise demonstrate their good intentions.  I feel confident in predicting that in 2012, however, LibreOffice will be a better choice than OOo.

I’ve been asked to do an interview on AT&T’s Tech Channel.  I’m no Steven Bellovin, but what the heck.  It’ll be recorded in NYC on 11 November 2010, the day before NYCBSDCon starts.  No idea when it’ll actually be available.

The TechChannel shows are available online.  It seems that they’re also used as content snippets in real TV shows.  One day, if I’m lucky, my head will appear on a TV near you, with a text label beneath it and my words taken completely out of context.  Probably in a faux-reality TV show about ghost hunting or something.  Ah, fame at last…

My short story Wednesday’s Seagulls was just posted on short-story.me.

For those who wonder why I don’t publish more fiction:  I have this weird idea that I should get paid for my work.  The amount doesn’t matter a great deal — this story made enough for a couple of hot fudge sundaes.  The Internet has made “getting published” almost meaningless, but:  if a piece of writing isn’t good enough that someone will buy it, I don’t want it out there with my name on it.

I’d much rather have less work available of higher quality than publish reams of sewage.

Yesterday’s biannual royalty statement contained an unexpected surprise:  it included ebook royalties for Absolute BSD (published in 2002) and the first edition of Cisco Routers for the Desperate (published in 2004).  Both are out of print, and have newer editions.  While the royalties for these books played out over several years, I certainly never expected to see any new sales of either of these books.

It turns out that both of these are available through ebook licensing services, such as ebooks.com.

This leaves me with mixed feelings.  There’s no real cost to having ebooks available.  For all I know, someone has a serious, legitimate need for high-quality documentation on FreeBSD 4.  Reliable documentation from that era is hard to find, and you have dig to find answers.  I don’t want to forbid people from buying it.

But I suspect that most people who buy these older ebooks made a mistake.  They really wanted the newer editions.

In my mind, the obvious thing to do is to have the licensing service put up a warning along the lines of “This ebook is obsolete.  You probably want this other book.”  That’s what my publisher’s online bookstore does.  But licensing services are independent companies.  I can’t dictate to them.

I could tell my publisher to rescind all rights to sell these older books, and force ebooks.com to remove them from their catalog, and to heck with people who need documentation for older kit.

What do you think?

Mr. Beijtlich is bad for my humility.  Apparently I have to stop asking him to tech review books, so that he can write actual reviews rather than just announce to all his readers that I’m utterly awesome.

This is the sort of commentary that I keep on hand for when my morale is low.

NYCBSDCon accepted my talk proposal:

BSD Needs Books

If you wander into any bookstore, brick or virtual, you’ll see books on Linux, Solaris, Macintosh, and even non-Unix-like operating systems.  The BSD books are far between.  We as a community need to address this if we’re to expand our reach.

This talk covers designing, selling, writing, and promoting your own technical book, with a special emphasis on BSD books.  I’ll cover everything that I wished I’d known before I started, common errors, where the “generally accepted wisdom” is wrong, how to actually complete the book, how you can use your publisher to your advantage, post-publication work, and — most important — how to enjoy the process.

I’ve attended NYCBSDCon repeatedly, and have never been disappointed.  They always have interesting content and the after-hours events are fabulous.  (Yes, I like BSDCan as well, but there is no place in the world like New York City.)

Now to figure out how I do what I do…

…available here.

Interview 1 of 2 on Network Flow Analysis for Ron Nutter’s TechBytes.

Ron interviewed me for Network World, and that (longer) interview will also be up before long.  We recorded these afterwards for his personal tech news site.

In the time between when a book is released and when the first reviews appear, authors experience a variety of symptoms ranging from unease to outright panic.  “Did I miss something obvious?”  “Did I really screw up?”  “Am I the laughingstock of the tech industry?”  Web pages can be fixed, but printed books are immutable; any errors are immortalized.  Over the years, I’ve gotten the symptoms down to an ongoing gentle nausea.

Thankfully, the first two reviews on Network Flow Analysis are out.

I sent Justin at DragonFly BSD Digest a review copy of NFA, and he not only read the book, he’s planning to implement it at work.  I’d call that a thumbs up.

Then there’s a review from Dad of Divas.  DofD reviews lots of stuff on his blog, mostly stuff that he receives as a promotion.  The odd thing is, I have no idea how he got a copy of the book.  The lesson?  The publishing publicity machine is mysterious and inexplicable, even to those of us trapped inside it.

But, having read the reviews, my lingering dread and nausea is gone.  Thanks, folks.

I’m back from Toronto.  Now that I’m caught up on deleting spam, I’ve been able to get to the post office.  All of the free review books are now in the hands of the post office.

As I write this, somehow Network Flow Analysis is Amazon’s #4 best-seller in the category “Production, Operation, and Management.”  Amazon’s classification algorithms appear to be smoking some good stuff, but hey, it’s a best-seller list, so I’ll take it.