week 26, 2003 archives
fun with texinfo
here's a fun note that may help someone else pulling their hair out trying to get texinfo's texi2dvi to handle input that uses sequences like @^i to generate the letter 'i' with a circumflex ('î'). if you get errors like this:
! Missing $ inserted.
<inserted text>
$
<to be read again>
^
l.1234 this '@^
i' has a funny hat.
it means that you forgot \input texinfo in the first line of your texinfo file.nokia 3650 for free (with t-mobile service activiation)
so through amazon, it's now possible to get the nokia 3650 for free with t-mobile service activation. (actually, it's only free with a service plan of $40/month or higher, otherwise it is $100.)
at&t's rates for data are pretty terrible in comparison to t-mobile's. $3/month just for access with at&t, and $0.02/KB, compared with $3/month for 1MB with t-mobile, and $3/MB beyond that.
no oscon, uuascla
i'm skipping the o'reilly open source conference this year, but i'll be giving a talk at the unix users association of southern california - los angeles on july 10 in el segundo.
"just say no" with russian dressing
the museum of anti-alcohol posters is great stuff. i'd buy prints of all of them. (although this and this would be nar the top of the list.) it's too bad there's no translations of the text. i find it interesting that the russian word for alcohol ("алкголь") is so close in pronunciation to the english word. (they probably both have the same origin in arabic.)
(link to the museum via jesse walker on reason's hit & run.)
xsltproc, docbook, chunked html output, and doctype
i spent some time earlier this weeking trying to get xsltproc convert docbook to customized chunked html using the docbook xsl stylesheets, but could not figure out how to get it to not output a <!DOCTYPE> with every page. (i'm generating pages that include php calls to generate the header and footer.)
charity, june 2003
this marks my twelfth month of regular charitable donations. and the last month i’ll be doing three charities—it’s just too much of a headache to do that much research each month. instead, i'll just be doing a triple-sized donation to one charity a month, and i’ll rotate between local, national, and international charities.
- international: netaid (site is kind of broken—try here)
- national: navy-marine corps relief society
- local: east valley community action group
united states military relief societies
just storing these for future reference, since i keep having to go back to this news item on the america's army site to look them up.
