mharrison

Was going to comment the same... the author should consider renaming their project

As an author/programmer I would love to see a LaTeX implementation... (If only there were more time in the day)

I used Awesome for about a year or so before qtile and haven't noticed any performance differences.

Been using qtile on my TP for 3 years. At work I'm running it in a vm on a MBP with my nice unicomp keyboard.

If you like Python and tiling, I'm convinced this is the way to go. Xmonad is cool but requires Haskell (not that that is good or bad, it's just the way it is) and I'm already proficient in Python.

It depends on your usage patterns. I found myself having tons of slightly overlapping windows, and that I was using the mouse too much to rearrange and move them. There are other "solutions" to this problem, but tiling seemed like the right one for me.

Tiling allows me to quickly max/min windows, quickly change desktops, and layout the apps I want. Is it the one true way? No. There are others means to that end.

If you are referring to my video of clocks, that was a test case for 4 monitor support. Yes xclock looks horrible in tiled fashion, but it is an app that tends to be installed so and thus gets used in tests.

I use kde apps in qtile all the time. It is just a wm and can replace metacity or kdewin if you please.

YMMV and you should use what you feel most productive in. I used KDE for years, then Awesome, and preferred hacking qtile in Python rather than Awesome's Lua.

(Author of said bug and ratiotile layout, and battery widget). Nope, not ideal, but I've been using qtile with multiple monitors for 3+ years now.

Restarting qtile isn't that bad though because you don't lose your windows, just the layout of them. And because I have my most common layout first, it turns out not to bug me.

For me it just feels right[0], even with its warts. I'm glad Tycho and others are pushing it forward! I miss it everytime I use a mac or other machines. Plus the kids think at my child's elementary school think my computer is "awesome"! :)

[0]- http://hairysun.com/About/

Yeah, being a docutils contributer and a creator of another rst2X tool, I just wanted my own bikeshed. There are some compelling features of Sphinx. I'd love to see how their epubs fare against kindlegen....

I originally wrote my ebook as preparation for a 3 hour long conference tutorial. I had given the tutorial previously and thought that I would prepare by writing a book. Well, the book was published in November, the conference was in July. Yes it is hard work. Especially when you have a full time job and family.

Amazon really wants ebooks to be priced under $10. Hence the 70% margins from $3-$9.99. The Hockings, Lockes and Konraths who spit out a novel a month can go down in the $.99 - $2.99 35% margin and make it back by selling 50K copies a week. I don't know that any technical book sells that much in a month. Hmmm, maybe technical books aren't exciting enough and could be spiced up a bit.

WRT formatting, I ended up writing my own restructuredText to epub converter[0]. I format my html specifically so it will go through KindleGen and make acceptable mobi's. (I'm convinced that the author(s) of KindleGen outsourced every other line of that program, then blindly merged them together. I'm not sure how else it could generate such horrible markup... A first year intern should be able to do much better in a month of a summer). Then I also created a mobi/epub friendly css project that has had some contributions from professional ebook creators. [1]

It took a lot longer to write than I would have thought, I had an in-law that writes grants for a living give it an overview, and then got a professional Python editor to give it a wonderful overhaul.

I did cover design myself with Inkscape. It's OK, better than a lot of covers, but not stellar.

As for distribution, e-junkie has a horrible interface (for admins) but does the job for self-distribution. Amazon has about 60+% of the US market, so even though mobi sucks, I put all my focus on making it look great on the Kindle. (In fact I'm in the middle of another book on mobi-friendly epubs) Getting published on KDP is easy, no ISBN required. BN has another 20% of the US market, pubit also easy, no ISBN required. Apple is a pain, and from my research most ipad users buy content from Amazon... Smashwords is fine for novel writers but requires writing in Word (at least until mid 2012), so I just can't justify spend time tweaking Word documents, for a book on Python where it is imperative that spacing and whitespace are correct, for a small slice of the pie. If Smashwords accepted by epub or mobi, I'd put it up there yesterday.

I'm horrible at marketing. Getting reviews and feedback is longtail behavior. Send out 40 copies to people who say they'll give feedback and maybe one or two will respond. (Maybe my peer group is bad) I need to spend more time prettying up the website and on marketing, but I feel good about my book and the reception it has gotten.

Yep it is hard work, but for some reason I'm in the middle of writing two more books.

0 - https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2epub2 1 - https://github.com/mattharrison/epub-css-starter-kit

Been there, done that.

Don't get me started on recruiters ... they could be so much more effective in my experience.