nixternal

If you are located in or near the Chicago land area, this Thursday, May 1, 2008, ICS will be holding a Qt Quickstart seminar. Registration is free and there is the ability to register for upcoming Qt Quickstarts in May for the Detroit, Michigan area as well as the Washington, D.C. area.

Thursday’s event here in Chicago is broken down as such: (Times are Central Standard Time (CST))

Location:

Doubletree Hotel Chicago Oak Brook
1909 Spring Road
Oak Brook, IL 60523

• 08:30 - 09:00 - Registration & Continental Breakfast
• 09:00 - 12:00 - Desktop Applications
• 12:30 - 16:00 - Embedded Linux Applications

Hope to see you there!

If you are around today, October 27th, at 19:00 UTC, join me in #ubuntu-classroom on IRC to get an introduction to Ubuntu Documentation. I have a few words to say first about documentation and then I will open the floor up to questions that I can hopefully answer for you. After doing the 2 Kubuntu sessions this week, it seems the popular route is an open forum almost. Seems more productive to me, just as long as 50 people don’t ask a questions at once Hopefully I will see you there, if you can’t make it, don’t worry, we will have the logs up shortly after for your viewing pleasure. Take care and have a great day!

Alrighty my fellow free software brethren. I have a few questions for you concerning the use of LaTeX when writing your educational papers. I have just recently started using LaTeX because I heard all of the cool people do, and well because, it just flat out produces a much nicer paper than using a word processor. Anyways, here are my questions to those who use LaTeX:

• When using MLA style, what kind of setup do you use?
• What packages do you use?
• What document classes do you use?
• What are your tricks when doing a works cited or bibliography page?
• Anything else you can teach me about LaTeX, using MLA and writing great papers?

I appreciate any and all help that you may have. I have ran around Google looking for answers, and it seems I am always finding a different way to do the same thing. As it stands, for my papers I have used a layout similar to the following:

\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\documentclass[a4paper,12pt,final,oneside,openbib]{article}
 
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[american]{babel}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[dvips]{graphicx}
\usepackage{simplemargins}
\usepackage{setspace}   % simplemargins.sty
\usepackage{url}
 
\setallmargins{1in}     %used with simplemargins.sty
 
% typical author, date, title block
 
\begin{document}
..........
\end{document}

So, if you can help me write a better paper for school, then I will buy you a drink of your choice if we ever meet. Deal? Thanks everyone!

This is just a quick blog post in reply to Andrew Cowie’s post about Learning Linux.

Andrew posted a great book by O’Reilly for beginners all about Running Linux. Like Andrew I would also recommend another O’Reilly published book that might be a tad to much for some beginners, however it will teach beginners the behind the scenes of the Linux OS, and prepare them for the LPIC Linux Certification. The book is exactly that, LPI Linux Certification In A Nutshell.

This book is command line intensive, however I think learning and knowing your way around the command line, the major commands, and configuration files as well as directory structure is something every user should know. Not only does it make you a better Linux user, but it definitely makes your life easier, and of course makes you smarter, possibly even smart enough to earn that illustrious LPI Linux Certification. Oh, and you can pick the book up for around $20 nowadays.