Core Dump

Noted with sadness, the death of SF writer Hal Clement (in the mundane world, Harry Stubbs), author of the classics Mission of Gravity and Needle. and frequent visitor to SF conventions in Toronto. Mission of Gravity still holds up as one of the premiere examples of world-building in SF.

Last night at Massey Hall, I saw RatDog, the side project of The Dead's Bob Weir. They rocked! It's been more than a decade since I saw the Grateful Dead in Hamilton, and I haven't managed to catch any of the local shows by Phil Lesh, so this was a real treat. I had a really good seat too - 4th row on the right aisle; it was a good thing I brought earplugs though.

Highlights were Queen Jane Approximately and Eyes of the World in the first set, and pretty much all of the second set, especially Ashes to Ashes, which I haven't been able to get out of my head all day, and St. Stephen > The Eleven, something I never thought I'd see performed live again. The band was tight and solid, with a nice jazzy, funky feel - this was dance music and the aisles were full. I'm going to order the live CD of this one.

I came across the Frame Quick Help site last week while looking for new FrameMaker resources and promptly added it to my bookmark list. There's a lot of good reference material here and some interesting writing too - I particularly liked "My Frame Wish List and Bug List" - I really hope that someone from Adobe is paying attention.

Kudos to Tim Murray of TechKnowledge Corp. for assembling this.
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After a bit more than two years struggling with Word, I finally got FrameMaker at work (Toronto Stock Exchange). I've been pushing for it ever since I started, but ran into resistance because of the cost and because "everybody else uses Word". I'd probably have been able to persuade them to get it last year, had Quadralay not come out with WordHelp (now WebWorks Publisher for Word), which removed one of the main arguments in favour of FrameMaker (with WebWorks), that I could use it for online help.

However, Word proved too unstable, especially after we "upgraded" from Office 2000 to Office XP. The major issues I've had with Word have been list numbering problems (despite using a rigorously crafted series of styles), style names being having endless series of "Char" appended to them (which really messes up the mappings when you convert documents in WebWorks), and general flakiness. The last straw was a Word crash that corrupted my file on the day before a project was due, costing me a whole morning's work.

I do have somewhat mixed feelings about going back to FrameMaker. It hasn't aged very well; Adobe has been seriously remiss in keeping it up to date with even minor enhancements (where the heck is multiple undo and drag-and-drop editing; things that every other Windows program has had for years), not to mention the major overhaul it should have had around version 6. Still, it's vastly more stable than Word and some jobs (like creating a PDF of a book from 15 files) will now take minutes instead of hours.

Subjectively, using Frame after working with Word is like the difference between a Lincoln Town Car and a Triumph TR-7. The Lincoln is a lot more comfortable and has all the latest bells and whistles, but the Triumph is faster and a lot more nimble, even if you do have to spend some time under the hood.

I did have a comparison of Word and FrameMaker on my web site, but I've taken it down for now because it's pretty dated. I'll have to update it, once I get settled in with Frame. I will, BTW, still be using Word for a lot of my work, a prospect that does not fill me with joy - keeping the keyboard sequences of the two programs straight is going to tax my memory quite badly.

A few days ago I received an email from the STC (Society for Technical Communication) which mentioned a blog that they'd set up for discussions about what directions the STC should take in the future. I ignored it, as I haven't found much relevant in the STC recently.

My thanks to Tom Eagles for pointing out the interesting discussions going on there. I spent most of this evening reading through them and will have to organize my thoughts and post something coherent - although given that I'm going to see Bob Weir and Ratdog tomorrow night, it'll probably be the weekend before I have time or energy.

Do check out the posts by Tom and by Barb Meier. They're quite interesting.

Microsoft will probably be displaying it's next operating system, codenamed Longhorn, at it's Professional Developers' Conference, and some more information about it, including some screenshots is leaking out onto the 'net. Note that the site is pretty slow.

Given that it probably won't be released until at least 2005, it's a little early to start getting excited (or worried, depending on your perspective).

I've been making some minor changes to my web site, mostly to fix some things that were broken, like the Dreamweaver template which wouldn't allow me to update pages. And I've finally figured out how to fix the last updated date so it displays properly in Mozilla.

Next steps will be to prune out dead links, add some new ones, and possibly to convert the table-based layout to one using CSS positioning to mimic a frames-based layout. I briefly considered using frames, but decided against it. I'd also like to avoid using Javascipt for menus, although I may reconsider that, depending on whether I can figure out how to do decent looking navigation menus using CSS.

If anyone has any good resources for this type of thing, please let me know.

I've also been making some minor changes to this blog layout - I think I've got the archiving links figured out now.

Phil Lesh, bassist of The Dead (formerly the Grateful Dead) has released a soundboard of the first show of his fall tour for free download (and they even provide gorgeous, psychedelic covers). He requests that if you download it, you fill out an organ donor card (Lesh was the recipient of a liver transplant a few years ago).

I'm listening to it now and it sounds great; the interplay between the musicians (especially between Lesh and guitarishs Warren Haynes and Jimmy Herring) is like a good jazz group, but in a rock format. If you like guitar rock, this is for you.

I've been tallking about setting up a blog for months now and have finally gotten around to doing it. The urge to write and publish has hit the point where I need to scratch it, and this seems to be the easiest way.

I'm not sure what the content of this will be - quite a bit of it will probably focus on technical writing (I'm a technical writer), but I have many other interests. Originally, I thought about keeping two separate blogs, one for technical wriiting topics, the other for personal stuff, but as I found when I put my web site, www.soltys.ca, it's hard to separate work and life.

I don't know how frequent posts will be here. I've not been very good at updating my web site recently, but it should be easier to keep this up to date.