LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <ak.linuxsa@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2003 13:49:26 +0930

Re: editting messages

Just picking up on that ancient thread from 31 March again....
(Why not, it's Sunday after all.)


On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 11:25:31AM +0930, Jason Nunn wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-03-31 at 00:39, stephen white wrote:
> 
> > Just
> > curious,
> > but are
> > you on
> > a Vic20
> > or some
> > machine
> > with not
> > a lot of
> > screen
> > space?
> > 
> > :)
> 
> just an old programmer habit of doing 
> everything within 80 characters i guess ;)
> 
> also some clients won't do wrapping (with 
> no way of switching it on), so some people
> end up reading a 700 line message. some people
> won't read your email properly when it's
> like that-- when they have to slide a scroll
> bar to read what you're saying (or they will 
> skip a section of text accidently).
> 
> so, for me it's a communication thing. i just
> want you to be able to read my email properly,
> and the only way i can guarantee that what
> i see is what you see is to put CR's within
> about 50-75 characters ;).


I think someone did some research about 20-30 years ago into line widths and
found that if you halved the width of standard book text, then people
could read significantly faster, but in those days, that wasn't very
practical for the methods of producing books then. 
But newspapers obviously do something of that sort with column structuring.
Very sensible too - if your paper is wobbling in front of your eyes
in a bus, train or tram, then synching to the next line is difficult with
wide lines.

But what I wanted to say is that since text lines only cost a byte at
most, and not even that if an LF is replacing a SP character, then one
may as well go further and start each sentence on a new line.
Does anyone agree with me that it's easier to read text that starts
each sentence on a new line?
Especially in e-mail discussion groups where quoting is fairly frequent,
it's easier to quote someone else's question, furphy or red herring if
it's synched to the line breaks.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
And now, since it's Sunday, here's a little anecdote, a true one, about
the readiness of linux for the big bout with the reigning champion.

Yesterday a friend dropped in for a bit of recreational photography
with one of those modern-fangled digital camera things.
And to add to the apprehension, it required one of those modern USB ports.
Now I've never used either of these two innovations - USB or dig cam.
Maybe that's because when I first bought a webcam, linux was not at all
ready for USB, and I ended up using the parallel port instead.
It just stuck in my mind that "linux doesn't do USB".
(Of course she, being an artistic type, uses a Mac.)

Anyway, I did my usual search in Google which I do when I'm being wrenched
into the modern world by yet another hardware/software/document-format
innovation (like the 4 days it took me to get a "hello world" going
with Docbook and a further 3 days to realise that Docbook doesn't hold
a flame to LaTeX2HTML), and after a few minutes found that the Kodak DX-3500
was indeed supported by linux, although the only reference I found was
in Spanish:
http://www.escomposlinux.org/faro/kodakdx3500.php
(Lucky I learned Latin at school!)
This suggested using gphoto2, which I duly downloaded from sourceforge:
http://gphoto.sourceforge.net/

Well, just on a whim, I thought I'd check my wobbly SuSE 8.1 system to see
if this modern-fangled gphoto2 was there, and lo and behold, it was.
While preparing myself mentally and spiritually to do the 
blood-pressure-raising experience of installing/configuring yet another 
clump of software, I thought I'd find out how out of date the SuSE 8.1
version of gphoto2 was, and was stunned to see it was the same as what
I'd just downloaded.

Even more amazing to me is that when the camera arrived, it just plugged
into the PC and the software worked first go.
And to top it off, although the pointy-clicky "gtkam" was a fizzer (a waste of 
disk space, if you ask me), I fired up the modern-fangled KDE file browser
(the Help-menu says it's called Konqueror - spelling, spelling!),
and was amazed to see it produce little finger-nails (or whatever)
before my very eyes without me lifting a thumb.

And to complete the story, now the jpeg files from this photographic
recreation are in _my_ computer, not hers. 
So I've got photos of her, and she's got none of me.
The worst case scenario was that she would have to take the camera
back and connect it to her Mac and send me 40 1-MByte files over the net.
So instead of an embarrassing time fiddling with software installation CDs
from Kodak to go into my old Wind95 machine, a good time was had by all.
To paraphrase that old Adelaide furniture ad: Thank-you Mister Linux!
(You know the one with the little girl who goes to the furniture store
in her toy car....
Whoops, erroneous memory. 
It's the real-estate ad which has "Thank-you mister....".
The little girl in the toy car is the one who says "Deliver".)

Anyway, I'll get out of your way now.
Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

-- 
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