Sorry for not keeping up with you and Max!

I self-published the Ruport Book, as you know, along with Mike Milner. That had its pros and cons. But now, I’m working on a book for O’Reilly, so I’m cutting my teeth on a ‘real contract’ too.

No advice has worked for me, other than this simple fact:
A book is written by stringing words together into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into pages, pages into chapters.

Sit down and write a sentence. Decide to keep writing until you burn out or run out of time. Do this as frequently as possible, and your book will be written.

I stand still and freeze when I think about what effort it’ll take to write a whole book, and I fly when I’m just trying to nail a section or paragraph.

Also… pick the right examples and the book will go much easier. I sit around for days on end thinking about that, and then once the example fits, I can see a whole chapter come flying together in my head, that I just need to put out on paper.

Bad examples are poison, and have the opposite effect. I’m sure this advice is barely useful, but I guess I felt the need to throw in my two cents.

Also, always remember that your family and your well being are more important than your book. Words on paper may outlast you, but they’re not alive.

I knew another consulting firm that took Mondays off instead of Fridays, and it seemed to work well for them. My only issue with that is that it seems that a lot of work gets done on Mondays, because you’re catching up on everyone elses weekend as well. I think Friday is the better day to take off, like 37signals is doing.

The excellent example given here is good, but it doesn’t match the IP address range my VMware Fusion was using by default, and I stupidly used the same fixed addresses. Sadly, it seems ISC’s DHCPd will simply give out dynamic addresses if you try to use it to assign addresses for which it doesn’t have configured on it’s own interface.

For example, my vmnet8/dhcpd.conf had this in it:

subnet 192.168.216.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.216.128 192.168.216.254;
option broadcast-address 192.168.216.255;
option domain-name-servers 192.168.216.2;
option domain-name “localdomain”;
option routers 192.168.216.2;
}

And I was trying to follow the above example, so I did something like this:

# Static addresses for VMs - gbg, 5/24/2008
host dargo {
hardware ethernet 00:0c:29:56:74:65;
fixed-address 172.16.253.10;
}

And kept banging my head as over and over again it kept assigning a dynamic address from the 192.168.216.x range .. finally, after much debugging I finally figured out the trick:

host dargo {
hardware ethernet 00:0c:29:56:74:65;
fixed-address 192.168.216.10;
}

Now, it assigns it perfectly. Much thanks to thirdbIT for taking the time and effort to post this information, hopefully I can give something back if someone can learn from my stupid mistake.

Cheers,
Greg