devGuide.net News: Books, Training, New Media

OpenOffice.org: PDF Master Class Webinar

Jacek Artymiak — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:23:19 PST

DATE: Saturday, Nov 29, 2008
TIME: 10:00am PDT (6:00pm GMT)
check your local time

WEBINAR
OpenOffice.org: PDF Master Class Webinar

PRESENTER
Jacek Artymiak

Please join us for a live training webinar.

The OpenOffice.org suite is a trove of hidden treasures for authors and publishers. The PDF creating functionality that was previously available only after you paid a couple of thousand of dollars for Adobe Acrobat Distiller and a typesetting package is now available for free. Publishing print books, eBooks, interactive documents with internal and external links is now possible as soon as you finish your manuscript, straight out of OpenOffice.org.

Would you like to publish your latest book as a PDF download? Perhaps you'd like to publish a sample chapter with a link to the bookstore? Or maybe you'd like to distribute a downloadable catalogue with links to your on-line store? Or a presentation with links to the websites you are talking about? Maybe a spreadsheet with links to the source data? Would you like to control access and the viewing experience? It is all possible with OpenOffice.org!

This 2hr session will cover the following topics:

ebook design
formatting books, articles, presentations, and spreadsheets for on-line distribution
typography
embedding internal and external links
creating templates
controlling access
controlling the viewing experience
selling eBooks and eBook & print packages
using free document hosting services
using RSS and mailing lists to create ebook clubs

As a part of the package you will also receive eBook templates and a companion eBook.

Attendance is limited, so the sooner you register, the better your chances of booking a free slot. We'll send you a reminder and the password before the webinar starts. We will also send you the training materials required to follow this session.

Feel free to share this announcement with your friends and colleagues.

Date: Saturday, Nov 29, 2008 at 10:00am PDT (6:00pm GMT)
check your local time
Duration: 120 minutes

Cost: 49.99 USD. We will email you the password required to attend this webinar before we start.

We do issue VAT invoices, send us your VAT ID, name and address of the company paying for this webinar.

This webinar comes with full satisfaction guarantee. If you are not satisfied, we'll refund your fee, no questions asked.

You may also be interested in Creating eBooks for the Apple iPhone and Nokia Smartphones Master Class Webinar.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
A computer connected to the internet, running Microsoft Windows XP, Vista, or Mac OS X. We are using the GoToWebinar service and it requires installation of client software.

Questions? Please send email to webcasts@devguide.net

About Jacek Artymiak

Jacek Artymiak owns and runs devGuide.net, an Open Source publishing and training company. He has written over 100 articles and over 20 books on Drupal, Google Docs, Linux, OpenBSD, OpenOffice.org, Open Source, firewalls, networking, security, and system administration.

Training: eBook Publishing for Mobile Devices

press — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 18:19:22 PST

DATE: Monday, Dec 29, 2008
TIME: 9:00am PST (5:00am GMT)
DATE: Tuesday, Dec 30, 2008
TIME: 9:00am PST (5:00am GMT)

WEBINAR
eBook Publishing for Mobile Devices Webinar

PRESENTER
Jacek Artymiak

Please join us for a live training webinar.

Would you like to deliver your ebooks to the 14+ million iPhone and iPod Touch market? How about 120+ million Nokia and Blackberry smartphones and Ultra-Mobile PCs (UMPC) aka. 'netbooks' such as the ASUS eeePC? Interested? Join us for a 2-hour sessions during which we'll cover the following topics:

designing ebooks for mobile devices
delivering ebooks to mobile devices
monetizing your content
creating and managing on-line ebook clubs

Feel free to share this announcement with your friends and colleagues.

Read this page for more information.

Training: Drupal Virtual Lab

press — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 18:35:36 PST

One of the biggest obstacles to learning any content management system is the amount of upfront work you have to do to get started. You need to buy hosting, domain, configure email, database, install the software, debug the interactions between the software and the hosting provider's servers, wait for the domain name settings to propagate through the global DNS system, and do a whole bunch of little things just to get to the welcome page.

You can avoid that and hire a consultant who can do it for you, but what if you want to actually learn Drupal? You can spend hours trying to put all of the pieces of the puzzle together, or you can use our Drupal Virtual Lab.

Free Training: Mastering DimDim

press — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:21:28 PST

DATE: Monday, Jan 5, 2009
TIME: 8:00pm PST (Tuesday, Jan 6, 5:00am GMT)

WEBINAR
Mastering DimDim Webinar

PRESENTER
Jacek Artymiak, author of Online Collaboration Tools

Follow up & and answers to your questions

Please join us for a free live training webinar.

During this webinar you will learn the following things:

why on-line meetings will play an increasingly important role in your work
how to use on-line meetings to work more effectively
what is DimDim
how to use DimDim
which features are useful, which ones you should avoid

Attendance is limited, so the sooner you register, the better your chances of booking a free slot.

Feel free to share this announcement with your friends and colleagues.

Date: Monday, Jan 5, 2009 at 8:00pm PST (Tuesday, Jan 6, 5:00am GMT)
Duration: 120 minutes

The Macintosh at 25 (1974/1/24 -- 2009/1/24)

Jacek Artymiak — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 14:23:03 PST

(I wrote this inspired by the Dave Winer's post on his 25th anniversary of Mac site.)

I'm writing this on an early 2008 MacBook. Even though it is my seventh or eighth Mac, I don't think of it as just another computer. Macintosh has always been special to me, and I think is always will be. I know it is silly to get emotionally attached to a piece of electronics or a brand, but I will freely admit that I like it more than any of my other computers, which come and go and I rarely feel any need to write about them. The reasons are many, but I suspect one of them is the long time I had to wait before I could buy my first Macintosh. And it had to do as much with the lack of money as with the realities of 1984.

These were very bleak times in Poland. I used to spend 4-6 hours in queues to buy food, trying not to get lynched by the crowd furious that I was able to legally buy more food than others, because our family was larger than the average 2+1 (two parents, one child) family size promoted in Poland at that time and we had more food stamps. I remember dreaming of computers while standing in a queue in a big shop packed with people waiting for the delivery of meat, which would stay on the hooks for at most 30-60 minutes.

These were the last years of the Eastern European communist regimes, but the communists were still trying to control the spread of 'subversive' information.

I still don't know how, but a group of enterprising journalists in Warsaw managed to convince the board of an official Polish youth newspaper Sztandar Młodych to spare some of their paper stock to print a new computer magazine. It's difficult to imagine today, but the supply of paper stock for newspapers and magazines was wholly controlled by the state and the communist party. You could not buy it without a permit and you had to submit every issue to the state censors before it went to print. There were no private newspapers or magazines, and there were no private print presses.

I remember reading about the Macintosh in Horyzonty Techniki or Bajtek, the first computer magazines published in Poland. It wasn't easy to buy those mags, because they were selling so quickly that you had to be really lucky or on very good terms with the press kiosk salesperson to get a copy. The first issue of Bajtek sold in 200,000 copies in a country where maybe a couple of hundred people owned a Commodore C64, ZX Spectrum, or Atari 800XL. Buying a Macintosh was not possible for many reasons: there were no computer shops, you could buy a new Polonez car for the price of a new Macintosh, and with the economy being was it was, you could drive the car for 2-3 years and sell it at double the original price. But the main problem was political. Poland was blacklisted as a communist country, and neither Apple nor any official supplier would sell it to me, even if I had the money (I didn't).

I had to wait for eight years before I could buy my first Macintosh. There were a few 'small' things that had to happen before that. Solidarity had to be recognized as a legal movement in Poland, the communists had to face the facts and step back from power, the Iron Curtain had to collapse, the Soviet Union had to be disassembled, the Red Army had to pack their stuff and go home, my work and money had to finally have some value, and I had to be able to finally be allowed to hold a passport and freely travel abroad.

I finally got my first Macintosh in 1991 or 1992. It was Performa 200 (a Macintosh SE re-issue, if I believe correctly). I bought it in the UK and it has served my well for many years, before I had to sell it.

Happy Birthday, Mac!

Press Release: OpenBSD Deployment Kit

press — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:00:00 PST

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

CONTACT:
Paul Stevens
devGuide.net
press@devguide.net
http://devguide.net

devGuide.net Announces OpenBSD Deployment Kit

Lublin, Poland, Jan 12, 2008 - devGuide.net has announced today the first release of the OpenBSD Deployment Kit for automating and customizing deployment of solutions based on the OpenBSD operating system. The OpenBSD Deployment Kit helps save the IT staff's time by providing ready-made, real-life examples accompanied by detailed documentation that explains how to adapt each scenario to create reliable, custom deployment solutions based on the OpenBSD operating system.

The OpenBSD Deployment Kit contains over two dozen deployment scenarios, from small-scale labs to large-scale corporate networks with automated, customized deployment servers. It helps save time spent on designing and building customized solutions that can be handed over to lower-level staff for the actual deployment while the higher-level staff focuses on more demanding tasks.

Each customer receives over 100 pages of printed and electronic documentation, a full set of OpenBSD installation media for the i386 platform (floppy disks, CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, and a bootable USB installation drive), over two dozen pre-built VMware-based virtual machines for designing and testing custom deployment solutions, and a set of training videos that can be played on computers running Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, Linux, or BSD operating systems. Also included are versions for the iPhone and Nokia smartphones.

The OpenBSD Deployment Kit is available now for an introductory price of 249 Euro, including shipping. To place orders visit www.devguide.net/openbsd/deploymentkit.

For additional information on the OpenBSD Deployment Kit, contact Paul Stevens, or visit www.devguide.net/openbsd/deploymentkit.

ABOUT DEVGUIDE.NET - devGuide.net is a new media publishing and training company specializing in Open Source software and technologies. Established in 2003 by Jacek Artymiak, the author of Building Firewalls with OpenBSD and PF, Second Edition, devGuide.net has helped over 7,000 customers improve the security of their corporate networks.

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