Somewhere or other I came across a good piece of computing advice: if you ever learn something you’ll only need twice a year, write it down. So for the last few years I’ve had the habit of keeping notes in my own personal man pages. I created a separate man-page “section” called “pj,” so to bring up my notes on, say, unicode, I just type “man pj unicode.” Some of these notes are totally specific to my system or even apply to scripts I’ve written, but I thought I’d share the pages with broader interest:

bc (read)

bc is a handy calculator program.

bibtex (read)

BibTeX is a very useful citation-management tool for LaTeX,
especially when used with Jurabib. These notes are also available in PDF format.

camera (read)

Some utilities for my digital camera. I actually use simple bash functions to abbreviate some of the more common commands. You can guess what they do: cpcam, rmcam, mvcam.

cd (read)

My notes on burning audio and data CDs, taken from the Linux CD-Writing HOWTO.

convert (read)

Incantations for ImageMagick, a CLUI image-manipulation tool. I don’t use this much anymore, but at my last job it really came in handy.

date (read)

I can never remember the date format to fix my computer’s wandering clock. This is a quick reminder.

fonts (read)

Some of the commands for using fonts in X.

gnupod (read)

How to use gnupod.

j2ee (read)

Just some random reminders about J2EE. Most of my notes didn’t make it into this file (and apparently what did still isn’t in man format).

jstl (read)

JSTL is a nice extension to JSP.

latex (read)

Most of this is about managing a TeX installation, not really composing in LaTeX.

lib (read)

Every now and then, even the Java guy has to know something about C.

log4j (read)

I wrote this for work, but it is still a handy intro/refresher.

man (read)

Notes about writing man pages (heh).

mp3 (read)

Utilities for handling mp3 files.

mysql (read)

Reminders about the MySQL RDBMS.

od (read)

od is a great tool for debugging or various other purposes. I often used it to grock Unicode snags. Here are some of my preferred output formats.

oracle (read)

Reminders about the Oracle RDBMS.

python (read)

When I first learned Python, I was very confused by how its class-loading differed from Java. I wrote these notes to figure it out. They also discuss how to learn about your exceptions, which in Python is rather tedious.

rpmbuild (read)

I had to build rpm files once for my job’s misguided foray into designing an open source web application server.

screenshot (read)

How to take a screenshot in Gnome.

snoop (read)

My IT department hated that I used this tool, but often it was the quickest way to see which computer was causing a bug.

sql (read)

Some reminders for basic SQL.

ssl (read)

This is a real document, not just notes. It shows how to use SSL in a Struts environment. The part about XDoclet is probably specific only to my last job, but the rest should be useful.

struts (read)

In my opinion, the best metric of an MVC web application framework is how easy it is to write a multi-select form element that prefills, shows errors, and submits when valid. I wrote this when learning Struts. If you have a choice, I recommend Tapestry.

tcpdump (read)

My notes on the Solaris brother of snoop.

terminfo (read)

I never really learned X in college, so most of my knowledge comes from fiddling around here and there. Here are some escape sequences that might come in handy when writing your .bashrc.

tex (read)

Handy environment stuff for TeX.

unicode (read)

Converting between Unicode and UTF-8, and the meaning of Byte-Order Marks (BOMs, appropriately).

xslt (read)

XSLT basics. I think XSLT is okay sometimes, but it often seems to me gratuitous.