Archive for December, 2006

Writing a blog post people will actually read

There are a lot of long, lengthy posts on the planet these days, and I am guessing 90% of us probably ignore them because there are a lot better things to be doing with our time.  If you want to make your posts more accessible to the vast majority of the population, let me lend a hand:

  • Use bullet points.  These will allow us to view lists more easily
  • Use bold for key points.  This will allow the reader to quickly digest atleast the key portions, possibly leading them to reading the rest of the idea
  • Use heading tags.  If your post is a very long and drawn-out, use headings 1-3 to better organize your post

As I am sure people here have noticed, Jono is able to write very well and his posts actually get read.  One of the things he does is actually use HTML to help convey a message (although he does much more also).  In further, since the planet is a opt-in, if we choose to write here, lets make it entertaining for the viewers.

Run your java apps under Aiglx

Some people may have noticed, but java apps (like netbeans etc) don’t work under 3d accelerated desktops.  This will solve your issue: java -Dawt.toolkit=sun.awt.motif.MToolkit -jar javaprogram.jar

ESR

“We can choose to fail. If we don’t support the media formats that contain the content users want to see, we lose the 64-bit desktop. It’s that simple. Doing nothing guarantees that we lose, probably to MacOS X.

Every type of content that is unavailable on Linux hands another content-based killer app to a proprietary platform that does support it. Just as we needed a binary-only Netscape in 1998, we’re going to have to stomach some binary-only crap for now if we hope to be ready in time. If we ignore this issue, the dominant 64-bit platform will be owned by our enemies.”

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