asciidoc

Some days ago I found accidentally an article about AsciiDoc. It seem to be a handy tool for writing short documents like articles, books and man pages. It is a text document format and can be translated to HTML and DocBook markups. You can find some examples on AsciiDoc homepage which demonstrate the capabilities of AsciiDoc.

kahvi.org

If you are passionate about free electronic grooves you should definitely visit KAHVI.ORG. Though not open source songs from there are free of charge while providing in most cases a good quality (subjective).

Mission: to gather and
provide free electronic grooves
area of operation: internet
(statement by kahvi.org)

If you know any other sources of good free music, please let me know.

The Joy of Writing

In the past day I wrote a couple of text for work and private purposes. And today I made use of the CLI tools diction and style that should help me to make some text I wrote better. What can I say? Those do! As a non native English speaker it is sometimes hard to find mistakes and at least for English diction was of great help for me. Both are well known “old” standard UNIX commands.
How to use it? Just convert your text to pure *.txt if you not already have it. Then fire up a command line interface. Since I run KDE I prefer Yakuake because of its easiness.
Then I first used style to get an overview over my text.
Just enter:

style -L en "input_text_file.txt"

The output will help you to understand if changes in the sentences may be useful. But remember you still have to decide yourself. If you consent proceed with diction to find misused, bad or wordy diction.

Enter:

diction diction -L en -s "input_text_file.txt"

The “-s” option will make some suggestions for better wording (if there are any). This will also help you to understand what might be wrong with your text.
The output will be shown in stdout (screen usually). If you want to have it in a new text file just enter:

diction diction -L en -s "input_text_file.txt" ~> "new_text_file.txt"

Nevertheless, don’t expect any wonder. These tools are just an aid for lazy writers.