Check out my latest Perlscript, which generates a book layout as a PDF from a plain text file. The stories are written by elementary school students, and my job is to split the narrative into pages, one per student, with large frames for the kids to draw illustrations. The script automatically resizes the frame to allow for text and leading, and it automatically increments the page number in the lower right-hand corner.

Currently, the source code is on my Woozle homepage and an example PDF is available here. You'll need Adobe Acrobat or some other PDF viewer.

The first page is just a big empty frame because the title page is 100%  illustration. But don't stop there ... turn the page for the rest of the story!

Famous for Five Minutes Department:

Seth David Schoen of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has quoted me in his web journal at vitanuova.loyalty.org. The quote in question is way down at the bottom of the page. It's a silly pun I posted to the Crackmonkey list, only amusing to those who are familiar with Emad el-Haraty and Eben Moglen.

What do you know, I'm an Apprentice.

I haven't looked at my Advogato account in a really long while.
Maybe I'm ready to start posting here again.

Ruggedizing a Cafe Box

1. Remember to keep the BIOS passwd-protected, and not have any removable media (A:, CDROM) in the boot-path.

2. Make as much as possible mountable read-only. This should be doable with /usr with little or no modification. It could almost be done with root, except things need to mount on it. The best way to do this is with NIS / NFS, so that a cluster of diskless computers shares network access to a remote filesystem.

3. For a standalone machine, there's a way to do this by making all the partitions except for /var read-only, then disabling a lot of things that need to write to the disk and symlinking everything essential to the /var partition.

4. Create a restricted ~cafe account. Configure your *DM (XDM, KDM, GDM, whatever) for autologin to ~cafe. For the public login, make as much read-only as possible. One way to do this is chmod -R a-w ~cafe, and then see what breaks.

5. Enable quotas. This will prevent .netscape/cache from eating anything but the ~cafe dir.

6. Pick up a journaling FS when convenient.

Jamie Zawinski used diskless terminals and NIS/NFS in his nightclub for a setup so bombproof, you could even UNPLUG 'EM without halting the system and they don't have to fsck, since they get all their important files over the network.

gtk-shell mozilla-splash

#!/bin/sh

/usr/local/bin/gtk-shell --label "Mozilla is loading, just wait a minute..." --button "OK" &
/usr/bin/mozilla http://www.as220.org

It's not perfect, I'll concede that. There's still no flashy graphic of a marauding lizard. But it serves its purpose: to occupy the user's attention for 45 seconds while Mozilla loads. Their instinct will be to move the mouse and click on the "OK" button, just to send the window away.

Even though the button serves no other purpose than to close the window, it fills a very important role in the psychology of the GUI environment: it gives an impatient Microserf something to look at while the program loads.

I've polled enough of the Cafe computer users here to know that they share the misapprehension that apps launch slower on Linux. This is untrue, as anyone with a stopwatch recording launch times for Windows and Mac apps can attest. The only difference is that many Linux apps are totally lacking in application feedback, making the percieved load time much longer.

The gtk-shell splash scripts (for Netscape, Galeon and Mozilla) on the AS220 Cafe Freebox will serve the purpose for now. Maybe I'll even learn how to code a meaningless "thermometer" display (you know, like rpm -ivh only slicker) and include a rampaging Giant lizard logo.

But it would be even nicer if the mozilla -splash flag worked in the next release. Even though it may seem like window dressing, it should actually be a priority.