deborah: the Library of Congress cataloging numbers for children's literature, technology, and library science (Default)
deborah ([personal profile] deborah) wrote2011-03-25 10:53 am

NaturallySpeaking demonstration

Yesterday, on the DCA blog, I posted "Accessibility and back office archives tools", for which I made a screencast of myself using NaturallySpeaking to use a less-than accessible tool. There was enough positive feedback about the screenreader screencasts to which I linked that I thought there might be some interest in these as well.




In an entirely unrelated aside, when did it become acceptable for un*x programs to start shoving everything -- configuration, logs, state, data -- into /usr/local? (Yes, Tomcat, I'm looking at you.) In my day, whippersnappers, you put your configuration into /etc, your logs into /var/log, your state into /var/run, and your data into whatever was appropriate based on your file system. With obvious modifications based on what operating system you are actually running, maybe using /opt or something instead of /usr/local, etc. In theory, you should be able to get by without even backing up /usr/local, because you could rebuild it completely from source or package, what with all your configuration and state and logs being stored in other places. And as a side effect, it always had a very controllable and knowable size, because it didn't have things like logs that grow arbitrarily if unexpected things happen, and sometimes are exceedingly difficult to roll on a regular basis, and yes, Tomcat, I am still looking at you.

Is this based on a theory of file system management that changed while I haven't been paying attention, or is it just sloppiness based to the new ubiquity of good un*x package management?
libskrat: (bookspecial)

[personal profile] libskrat 2011-03-25 03:22 pm (UTC)(link)
My money would be on "Tomcat sucks."
allen: (pooka)

[personal profile] allen 2011-03-25 04:33 pm (UTC)(link)
At least with the Java stuff there's usually just one distribution package for all platforms. And they don't want to confuse the people who are developing on Windows and then have to go look for the log files in different places on un*x.
rantingnerd: Earth-Moon (Default)

[personal profile] rantingnerd 2011-03-27 06:41 pm (UTC)(link)
Tomcat definitely sucks.

Our problem is the inconsistent choices of level at which to symlink away. Should /usr/local/apache/logs be a symlink to /var/log/apache, or should we just move /usr/local/apache -> /var/apache/?

(I'm of the opinion that one should move as high up in the hierarchy as possible, but clearly my opinions carry little weight in this regard. :-P)