Email Me Daynotes Gang

How Tom Saved The World And Other Stories To Tom, it was just another day filled with pains in the... neck. To the rest of us, it was another battle in the fight to save the world.

Tom Syroid had an interesting post on Sunday. He said that he's gotten a lot of email about his recent adventures in Linux; he talked about the amount of time that, at least from one point of view, is being completely wasted dealing with Linux on things that would only take Windows a few minutes. One example he referenced was spending six hours configuring a shared printer under Linux; because some of the machines at Syroid Manor are still running Windows, in order for that printer to be visible to everybody, it must be shared under Samba. The resulting headaches took six hours to resolve.

So why do we put up with it? Why don't we all go back to Windows? Why is it, when Tom mentioned his six hours of Samba madness, he didn't even think about switching to share it under Windows again?

The reason is that there's a very definite payoff. Tom posted his experiences with Samba to his site.

Now when I go to do the same thing later this week, I'll know how to skip the six hours and go straight to the solution. Or maybe I'll spend the six hours, and see if I can find a different solution - and if I do, I'll post it, too.

Despite all the chatter about man pages and online documentation, the truth is that most of the documentation out there is either out of date or just plain bad. Want to set up a Samba server? The most popular HOW-TO that people are told to use was written in 1997. In fact, if you do a search for documentation on just about any application or task, you're likely to find that most of it is out of date. What little there is that's actually current is terrible; the writer of the documentation referenced a problem that's been fixed for months, or assumed that everyone using the documentation already knew what the application does, or is written by someone for whom written communication is a dark and mysterious subject.

That will only get worse. One of the great strengths of Open Source is that things change quickly; unfortunately, that means programs are updated so fast that no documentation stays accurate for long. Dedicated teams of documentation specialists might be able to manage it, but no one else could; certainly not volunteer developers. Even O'Reilly, every geek's favorite publisher, can't keep up - many of their best offerings, from "Sendmail" to "DNS and BIND", are badly out of date. By the time the next editions are written, edited, printed, and on the shelves - they'll be out of date, too.

But there is a system that does work - the Daynoters. When Tom spends six hours working out how to share a printer in Samba and writes about it on his site, that documentation becomes invaluable - for a while. Within a few months, the new release of Samba will be out, and even if it doesn't fix the problem directly it'll likely change the solution so that Tom's process doesn't work anymore. But by that time, maybe Brian will write a new one. Perhaps I will. But someone will be working on doing what you're working on, somewhere on the web. You just need to find them.

The Daynotes Gang is one excellent source of that. You could just follow Tom's pages, doing things when he does them, and you'd probably have a pretty kick-butt network, ready to do whatever you need. Or maybe you like mine better. Maybe Brian's setup is a closer match for your needs. Regardless, we do these silly things so you can do them again, later, without all the mistakes and frustration. And in six months, when Tom's experiences aren't worth anything to you because Samba is completely different, I'll do it again. Or Bob Thompson will. Maybe you go online, announce in a newsgroup or on a mailing list what you're doing and is anyone else doing it, too? You compare notes - and both of your lives are easier.

Documentation is dead. But if you play the cards right, and put in your fair share of six hour days so the rest of us can do it in one - then maybe Linux won't suck anymore. So please, go tell Tom how he helped save the world. For a while, at least. Then go out and help to save it, yourself.