Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 76
December 17, 2012
TWP sponsoring BSDCan 2013
The money has left my bank account, so I guess this is official: Tilted Windmill Press (the LLC under which I self-publish) is the official T-shirt sponsor of BSDCan 2013.
Why do this? First, it’s important to give back to my community. BSDCan is one of the biggest and oldest cross-BSD conferences, and this sponsorship will buy plane tickets for several speakers. Second, independent publishers must meet two standards: a) write good books, and b) don’t be a jerk. This should put a touch more w...
December 5, 2012
Absolute OpenBSD pre-orders now available
No Starch Press now has pre-orders for new Absolute OpenBSD. Order direct from the publisher, and get both the ebook and the paper for one price.
If you use the coupon code ILUVMICHAEL you’ll get a discount, and I get a commission on the sale. If you use another coupon code, I still get paid, but not as much. I’m not deeply concerned which way you buy it, so long as you buy it.
Here’s the cover of the new edition. It incorporates art from the first edition, plus a new background.
On a vaguely re...
November 30, 2012
Next Nonfiction Book
I’ve made it a practice to not announce book topics or titles until the book is well underway. Writing a big book takes not less than a year (Absolute FreeBSD) and up to three years (Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd ed). Once I hand in the completed first draft to the publisher, there’s editing, tech edits, copyedit, page layout, and so on. It’s a few months to get the book into production.
Delaying the announcement also gives me the chance to determine if the book is realistic. I’ve made no secret that...
November 21, 2012
1st draft of Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Ed. complete
Last night, I finished the first draft of the new edition of Absolute OpenBSD.
This is the longest book I’ve ever written (23 chapters). It’s taken longer than any other nonfiction book (3 years). Now that a first draft exists, I can state with some confidence that the book will be out about next spring-ish.
As a first draft exists, if I get trampled by a rabid caribou between now and then, the book will still come out.
This weekend is the first time in years that I will have had no work to do o...
November 15, 2012
Absolute OpenBSD 2nd Edition status, 15 November 2012
Chapters 1-22 are written. Only chapter 23 remains.
The first 23 chapters are either in preliminary tech review (Henning Brauer), editing (No Starch Press), technical review (Peter Hansteen), or copyediting (No Starch Press). And every time any one of those folks are done, the chapter comes back to me for rewrites. Which is as it should be, of course… unlike some publishers, NSP gives me every chance to improve the book, as opposed to having some unpaid intern with a degree in medieval lit “fi...
November 8, 2012
Easy Security Project: standalone ssh-ldap-helper
I’ve been waiting for quite a while for an official way to centrally manage user authentication keys in OpenSSH. If you have a dozen servers, copying authorized_keys files around is a pain. If you have more than that, it’s really really painful. The OpenSSH guys have had good reasons for not wanting to link LDAP libraries straight into OpenSSH. They also gave some general guidance of what they’d want to see in a patch that supported LDAP authentication.
Jan Chadima from Redhat took OpenSSH up...
October 19, 2012
Amazon Author Rank vs Writers
Amazon recently introduced Author Rank, where they list authors in order of popularity. I’ve had a lot of discussions about this feature and what it means to writers.
Amazon provides a surprising number of features for authors. Their Author Central system lets me see how many of which book sold, and where, over a given time period. There’s a neat little app that shows where in the country my books sold, according to Bookscan data. Bookscan data might not be complete, but it’s more information...
October 8, 2012
Get Your Haiku Published in the new “Absolute OpenBSD”
Something weird happened as I worked on the second edition of Absolute OpenBSD: people started sending me haiku. The first edition included a haiku at the beginning of each chapter, something apropos to the topic.
TCP/IP
Learn how it fits together
You cannot escape
I reviewed the old book before outlining the new version, and the haiku made me wince. They’re mediocre at best. I considered dropping them from the new edition, or perhaps replacing them with quotes on trust, but an informal Twitter p...
September 26, 2012
Log Only sudo Failures
The sudo(8) privilege management tool is very admin-friendly in that it logs successes and failures. I don’t really care when my users successfully use sudo. I do care when they use it unsuccessfully, however. A sudo failure indicates that either the user doesn’t know their system password, or they’re trying to use forbidden commands.
sudo keeps logs. The interesting thing is, successful log messages are of priority notice, while unsuccessful attempts are of priority alert. This opens up an ea...
September 10, 2012
On Bogus Book Reviews
There’s been a furor recently about authors faking reviews in one manner or another: Either by buying reviews, or by sock puppetry. As nobody can generate reams of morally-outraged words like offended writers, it’s created a pretty big buzz in the publishing world. Here’s my thoughts on these types of reviews. For brevity, I lump all of these reviews into a category I’m going to call “fake reviews.” It’s not strictly accurate, I know, but I can’t come up with a better phrase at the moment.
I’m...
