"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

The Answer Guy

By James T. Dennis, linux-questions-only@ssc.com
Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/

AnswerGUY? Who is Heather?

From Thomas L. Gossard on Fri, 03 Jul 1998

Answerguy,

Forgive me if I'm about to insult you. All the replies I've read seem to be answered by Heather. Is Heather not a girls name? If so, why is this column called the answerGUY, not person or girl?

Tom Gossard

Heather is my wife. She usually doesn't answer any of the questions (though sometimes she helps --- she's been using Unix longer than I have --- and she's a professional sysadmin).

However, Heather does convert my mail into HTML and she does all the links and graphics (I just answer the e-mail, do the web research and find URL's to point my correspondents at for more information).

As for why this is called the "Answer Guy" --- I just volunteered to help out with the occasional stray technical question that I knew would find it's way to SSC when they took over the editorial duties of the Linux Gazette from John Fisk (its creator). Marjorie Richardson and her crew decided to post my answers and picked the name. I'd wanted to start doing the HTML (at least to wrap the URL's in anchor tags) since I noticed that these were going up --- but I never had the time.

Finally Heather stepped in, pulled down a couple of mail to HTML filters (like MHOnArc, hypermail, and babymail) and played with them --- tweaking one of them until it suited her tastes in HTML and my style of e-mail (text). She still hand massages the messages for a bit, too.

The other advantage to this way of doing it is that I don't see the whole column going up as one big page --- it's broken into lots of separate pages, like HTML is meant to be. This is hopefully going to help quite a bit in my future since I was starting to hit my own column every time I did a Yahoo search --- usually those were false hits because I'm usually trying to find "something for Linux" (and I'd find sets of keywords in one LG article -- that were in no way related to one another in the article).

So, hopefully the new format will be more "search engine friendly" (for everyone).

Heather replied too.

From Tom Grossard on Mon, 6 Jul 1998 in the comp.unix.questions newsgroup

Heather,

Thank you for the reply. I hope I wasn't rude in my question, just nosey.

Thank you
Tom

Thomas L. Gossard

No problem, really. Glad we could clarify.

Oh yeah, I'd like to add for our lynx-using readers, or those reading the text Whole Damn Thing, I plan to improve the textmode result. But not this time, I just started a new job (still sysadmin'ing) and didn't have time.

For web visitors, the interesting parts:
I ate the fortune cookie first, then read what Jim Dennis copied me on:
However, Heather does convert my mail into HTML and she does all the links and graphics (I just answer the e-mail, do the web research and find URL's to point my correspondents at for more information).

The confusion probably arises from the one message (Love the New Look!!!, http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue30/tag_newlook.html) where I answered someone who loves the new format... since I am responsible for formatting... and linked my name there so respondents on that question could reply to me instead.

Jim answers all the Linux questions; in the original mail to the querent, he has his Answer Guy .sig, but the dressed up column doesn't need that also, so it is trimmed for clarity. Most querent's .sigs are trimmed to enhance their privacy. So seeing most messages .sig-less might be affecting you.

"just answer and research" is plenty, but he loves to do it, and every new discovery could add to his book, so he plays it down. I don't think the column would be nearly as good if our roles were reversed :)

Finally Heather stepped in, pulled down a couple of mail to HTML filters (like MHOnArc, hypermail, and babymail) and played with them --- tweaking one of them until it suited her tastes in HTML and my style of e-mail (text). She still hand massages the messages for a bit, too.

I merged some perl fragments, and added some of my own, to a script I use to preprocess the month's load of Answers. However, I also read his messages, and try to maintain the original "look and feel" of Jim's reply.

Sometimes this means a list type or a blockquote where my script doesn't know any better. Each month I improve it but I will probably never trust it to do the whole job ... cleaning .sigs for privacy, clearing up levels of indirection when Jim draws in a message from mailing lists, and posting a thread as one file are specific examples.

There is also a little bit extra that I add. Most of the URL's I add after-the-fact are things that aren't really special overall (such as hotlinking vendor names) so someone reading the plaintext Whole Damn Thing version isn't really missing anything; they are simply seeing the reply pretty much as Jim sent it. (It's not exactly as Jim sent it -- it's the posted column run through lynx.) If I actually say anything that Jim didn't, it is emphasized and in brackets [] , as I have been taught editors' comments should be. I haven't seen Jim use brackets, except in example code.

Copyright © 1998, James T. Dennis
Published in Linux Gazette Issue 31 August 1998

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