Dear friends, I have just taken delivery of my box of /The Book of PF/[1] author's copies, and I'm finding I'm a bit at a loss for words when it comes to describing the feeling. The thing exists. And it feels great to finally see the thing for real. (OK, I cheated a bit and had five copies printed locally for OpenCON[2], but these are the real ones, slightly different binding)
We didn't manage to release the book the same date as OpenBSD 4.2 (yes, that was the original plan), but the thing has been written, printed and should be on its way to all those who preordred as well as to better bookshops everywhere. I'm not directly involved in distribution and can not make any guarantees about when you'll get yours (a slightly more experienced author has written an explanation of that[3] - only this one was printed in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA), but even if it's late for the holidays I hope you'll enjoy your copy and find the book useful. Now of course the usual factors interfered even with the author copies. There is a thing about courier companies and 18th century buildings. Even faced with a relatively small one such as the one I live in, DHL managed to make two attempts at delivery at the disused entrance clearly marked 'deliveries at the other door please', so the delivery finally happened at my office - also located in a 18th century building, but at least one where the DHL people have been before. But it finally arrived and life's good :) One interesting factoid (fsvo) is that this happened within hours of the twenty-five thousandth unique visitor (since EuroBSDCon 2006 that is) hitting the book's predecessor, the online PF tutorial[4]. So happy hacking holidays everyone, [1] http://nostarch.com/pf.htm, also see http://www.bsdly.net/~peter/freshbooks.jpg or (slightly faster) http://home.nuug.no/~peter/freshbooks.jpg [2] http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20071207191612 - that's me completely obscured at the back to the right in the third picture (ok, I'm in a few others ;)) [3] http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=105723966516199&w=2 [4] http://home.nuug.no/~peter/pf/ -- Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team http://bsdly.blogspot.com/ http://www.datadok.no/ http://www.nuug.no/ "Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic" delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds.
