Core Dump

The classic HitchHitker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show is online, in RealAudio streaming format, at KCRW, a Santa Monica CA college radio station.

From a quick look at their online music guide, it looks like this one is worth bookmarking is you want an alternative to commercial radio. They stream in RealAudio, Windows Media, and MP3 format.

I really miss album covers. The CD format just doesn't leave enough room for decent artwork. Album covers were works often works of art that justified buying the album just for the cover; I can think of a few albums whose covers gave me more enjoyment than the music.

The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were site has designs for 100 album covers by 100 graphic artists who were approached to create the definitive album cover for their favourite album. The project is the basis of a touring exhibition that will start at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. This is fascinating stuff and well worth a look. My favourite one so far is the portrait of Miles Davis by Frank Whipple.

If you've had to document an API, you've probably used some sort of autodoc tool to take the comments from the programmers and create a structured set of documents or HTML pages. Michael Hoffman has put together a list of autodoc tools. I've used Javadoc and DoxyGen, but until I looked at his list I hadn't realized that there were so many.

Newsweek has a long and mostly favourable article on the forthcoming final installment of The Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King. Its fairly detailed, so if you want to watch the movie with your preconceptions intact, don't read it.

According to an article on FOXNews.com, Dell is moving technical support for some of its computers from India back to the U.S. Apparently customers haven't been very happy with the level of support that they've been receiving. However, this affects only corporate customers - home users of Dell machines will still have to deal with the script-kiddies in Bangalore.

I had to call Dell for support a month ago and I was not happy. Previous calls a couple of years ago had been handled reasonably efficiently by techs who seemed to know what they were talking about. The latest call involved an issue with system restore, and the tech was completely unable to resolve the problem. Eventually, I figured it out on my own (and no thanks to Microsoft, who had set up a dialog box with a checked checkbox to turn an option OFF), but given that the problem was caused by the way that Dell configured the machine, they should have been able to solve it.

However, whether the support will be any better from North American call centers is debatable. But at least there won't be a half-second delay due to satellite uplinks/downlinks. You may be able to train support techs to solve problems, but you can't beat the speed of light.

I use Norton Internet Security 2002 on my main machine. I now have a router with a firewall, so I don't really need the Internet Security part, but the ad blocking and connection logging features are useful. I was considering upgrading to the 2004 version, because the spam blocking/filtering looked good, but then I read this article. Guess I won't be upgrading after all. When they remove the product acitivation I'll think about it.

A fascinating article about the economic growth in south China. If you're worried about jobs being exported to India, this article is really going to scare you.

Snopes reports that the county of Los Angles has indeed banned the use of the term "master/slave" in any documentation submitted to them by compter vendors. Tech writing groups in California will no doubt be working overtime to revise their documentation, assuming they can find a suitable replacement term.

Quarbon, makers of ViewletBuilder, have sued eHelp for patent infringement. The suit was filed on September 23, so it's not likely to affect the impending sale to MacroMedia, who either have deep pockets or feel that the suit has no merits. The press release doesn't give a lot of details, but from discussions on the HATT mailing list, I'd guess the suit is aimed at eHelp's RoboDemo.

At Comdex, Quarbon introduced ViewletCam, which is a recording product that will record and save anything done on a PC in their Flash-based viewlet format.

SlashDot is one of the most popular news sites (News for Nerds, News that Matters) on the web. It's even given rise to a word (slashdotted, what happens to a web site when a million or so people hit it at once because it was featured in a SlashDot article).

There's a plan underway to retool SlashDot's HTML code to update it from the current HTML 3.2 format to XHTML and CSS. I found this article really interesting, because I'm thinking about doing exactly the same thing with my own web site. If the examples shown here are any indication, the new design looks a little cleaner and loads faster, and will have save a lot of bandwidth.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the relative merits of FrameMaker versus Word for technical documentation. I thought that I’d share a real-world example of why I prefer FrameMaker.

I have to produce a PDF user’s guide and web-based online help for a web-based tool. The user’s guide is about 100 pages long and has about 40 screen captures. I originally used Word to write the user’s guide and Quadralay’s WebWorks Publisher for Word to build the online help (a customized version of WebWorks Help.)

The version 2.1 upgrade took 10 days to document. I had originally estimated three or four days, but ran into major problems, mostly with Word, this time around. Things like Word crashes resulting in corrupted files, numbered lists breaking, paragraph styles changing formats for no apparent reason, page numbers not staying the same, and so on. (And yes, I do know how to use Word properly).

After this release, I finally managed to get FrameMaker 7 and WWP 2003 for FrameMaker. Conversion of the file from Word to FrameMaker took about a week.

The version 2.2 update took me four days, not counting the conversion. And it was a bigger update than version 2.1. I had absolutely no issues with how FrameMaker or WWP behaved. WWP for FrameMaker, incidentally, seems to be quite a bit faster than WWP for Word.
Given our plans for updates to the product, switching to FrameMaker from Word should save me at least four weeks of work per year.

Earlier today I sat through a web demo of eHelp's new RoboHelp for Framemaker (hereafter RHF). I have to say that I was impressed. They've come up with a product that manages to be very tightly integrated with FrameMaker, looks easy to use, and has some powerful features.

Anyone who has more than a nodding acquaintance with FrameMaker should have no problem using RHF; eHelp have done an excellent job of using FrameMaker-style paragraph, and character designer dialogs in RHF. In fact, they've improved on Adobe's design while maintaining familiar elements. (Adobe should be ashamed; this product shows what FrameMaker could and should be like.)

The demo was clearly aimed at WebWorks Publisher (WWP) users (I'm one of them). Points they stressed:

• You can import WWP mappings and style definitions.


• It keeps your help project and FrameMaker book in synch at the file level. Change one and the other changes.


• You can conditionalize chapters.


• You can have multiple output formats (WebHelp, HTML Help) in the same project and build any or all of them.


• There's no "complicated macro language". (More on that later).


• You can create "breadcrumb" links through the GUI with two or three mouse clicks.
  

Other nifty features. RHF supports multiple book projects. Variables can have one value in your FrameMaker book and a different value in your RHF project. There's an interactive style designer that previews what your style will look like when you make changes.

If you still do WinHelp, you're out of luck, at least in this version.

One thing I did not like was they way cross-references were handled. In the demo, the whole text of a "For more iinformation, see ...
cross-reference became a link. In WWP, only the section title becomes a link, which is the way I think it should be. Perhaps this behaviour can be changed.

The lack of a macro language to me is a weak point. While they have a seriously impressive graphical interface, people may want to tweak things that the GUI designers couldn't anticipate. With WWP, you can tweak anything, if you can figure out how. On the surface, WWP may be a harder product to use (although the current version is quite usable pretty much out of the box), but I thnk it's a deeper and more powerful tool.

If it had come out a month earlier, would I have ordered it instead of WWP for FrameMaker? Probably not, but I already have an investment in learning WWP. I didn't see any features that would compel me to switch. If I was a new user, the choice might have been different. Quadralay has some real competition on their hands here, especially for users who have used Robohelp Offiice or who are skittish about ease-of-use issues.

Since this was a demo, I can't comment on real-world issues like stability, speed, bugs, or quality of support. If I can find some time, in the new year I want to try their evaluation copy and give it a closer look.

It'll be interesting to see what happens over the next few months, especially now that eHelp has been acquired by Macromedia. I just hope the competition results in two better products, rather than one falling by the wayside.

In its continuing quest to take over the known universe, Microsoft has introduced a competitor to Google News, called MSN NewsBot. I have to admit I like the way they group popular subject areas (Science/Health, Technology, Entertainment) better than Google News, but I prefer Google's start page. The current version, in beta, seems to be UK-based.

Sci-Fi Overdrive is a syndicated radio show about science fiction. Recent shows have included interviews with recent Hugo winner Robert J. Sawyer, Orson Scott Card, Bill Mumy from Bablylon5, and many other interesting folks. You can listen online via streaming audio or download shows in MP3.

This is really neat and almost makes up for not being able to get the Sci-Fi Channel in Canada (Space TV is a pale immitation).

http://www.zone-sf.com/home.html is a web site devoted to science fiction. I'm not a hundred percent sure, but it seems to be a British production. In any case, there are a goodly number of reviews, essays, articles, author profiles, and miscellaney. This will get added to the short list of sites that I check regularly. Just added is a short interview with Jerry Pournelle, whose web site I visit daily.

New.com.au has put together a slide show of the best pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, animated, and with sound. This may take a minute to load, but be patient, it's worth it.

Ever since reading A Canticle for Leibowitz when I was in high school, I've been a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction. Snowfall and Kingdom River, by Mitchell Smith, are first-rate examples of the subgenre. Smith's setting is several hundred years in the future, after an ice age has covered much of North America in glaciers, and reduced civiliation to a 17th century technological level. I'm guessing that more than just an ice age must have occurred as there appear to be no high-tech enclaves in warm parts of the world, and even the secret of gunpowder has been lost.

But quibbles about setting aside, Smith's story is well worth reading. He has a fine eye for character and a lyrical style that manages to be elegant without being florid. Cantasia, a doctor and protagonist of Snowfall, is one of the most memorable characters I've met in sf recently, and it took quite a while for the disappointment to fade after I realized that she wasn't a character in Kingdom River. However, that book has its own strengths.

These books are the first two thirds of a trilogy; the third book is due in February, and I'm really looking forward to it. In the meantime, I'm going to try to track down some of Smith's other (non-sf) books.

The SciFi.com has long reviews of Snowfall and Kingdom River.

The Danish Government's InfoStructureBase has published the XML schemas for Microsoft Word Document ML. This is the variant of XML that is used by Word 2003. "With the Word Document ML specification anybody can generate, view and process Microsoft word documents on any format. "

This is significant as it means that the Word 2003 document format is now open for developers of third-party applications to play with. I had a quick skim through the introduction; it's more human-readable than RTF, but I wouldn't want to have to write it by hand.

Incidentally, the InfoStructureBase is worth a browse. It'd be nice to see the Canadian government set something like this up.

Update-November 18: This article on news.com provides quite a bit more detail about what Microsoft is doing, and why.

ONe of the more glaring differences between FrameMaker and Microsoft Word is that FrameMaker doesn't come with an integrated macro or programming language. Say what you will about Word's limitations as a technical documentation tool, but you can overcome many of them with some a judicious use of VBA. Even the simple macro recorder can save a lot of time.

Fortunately for Framemaker's users, FrameScript, a third-party tool, offers some of VBA's capabilities. The latest release, FrameScript 3, now in beta, adds quite a bit more to the pot, with extended control over system variables and the ability to build custom dialog boxes and forms. A good example is the Change Paragraph Format script that comes as a sample with FrameScript 3; it allows you to change multiple paragraph formats from one format to another, a useful and very slick piece of work, and the code is provided with comments for your edification.

Earlier versions of FrameScript let you modify menus and create new menus and menu items, but I don't believe you could createc custom dialog boxes without using the FrameMaker Developer's Kit, which meant that you needed to know C. That limitation is now removed. I've taken a quick skim through the version 3 docs and it doesn't look any more difficult to use than VBA -- if you know any programming languages, you should be able to do useful things with this.

The new extensions will make it a much more powerful tool. I'm seriously excited about this - we should start seeing some very nifty addons for FrameMaker after this comes out. I plan on ordering it for work and will report back here once I have a chance to do something useful for it. My pilot project will be a dialog box to insert hypertext Jumped to Named Desination markers by choosing them from a list. (Inserting hypertext markers is another area where Word has got Frame beat hands down.)

I'm not sure when FrameScript 3 will be officially released - unofficial postings on the FrameScript mailing list would seem to indicate that it's very close now.

The Elegant Universe, a 3-part NOVA series on cosmology, the quest for a unified field theory, and string theory is now available for viewing online in either RealVideo or QuickTime format. I taped this when it was broadcast recently and I've watched the first two parts. It's excellent, although anyone with a real science background might find it a bit watered down. Still, it's visually striking, seems to be accurate, and makes a rather esoteric subject accessible to a wide audience. Well worth watching.

Bootdisk is one of the better PC troubleshooting sites I've seen. There are links to boot disks, of course, but there is a lot more, including links to lots to troubleshooting, tweaking, and updating tips, drivers, and useful utilities.

It's been a very good year for fans of Robert Heinlein, at least after the sad news of Virginia Heinlien's death. Heinlein's first, and until recently lost novel, For Us The Living, will be published in less than a month. Now comes news that Spider Robinson will be writing a novel called Variable Star, based on an outline completed by Heinlein in 1955. As well as being a prominent SF novelist in his own right, Spider is well known as one of Heinlein's biggest fans. I can only imagine the mingled sense of trepidation and joy he must be facing in writing this novel.

To quote from his post to alt.fan.heinlein: "Some writers enjoy writing. I'm the other kind: I enjoy *having written*. But these last few weeks, for almost the first time in thirty years, the writin itself has been a pure and holy joy. Which I share now with you.

Wish me luck."

I'm sure he won't need it, and I can't wait to read Variable Star.

Incidentally, if you're a fan of Heinlein's science fiction (and if you aren't, you should be), check out the web site about Heinlein maintained by the Robert Heinlein Society.

Last night’s presentation at the Toronto STC meeting, was a demo of Rascal Software’s Veredus, given by CEO and president Rob Frankland. Veredus may represent the future of single-sourcing and help-authoring tools. This is an XML/XSL-based tool that hides the complexity of XML authoring behind a slick, highly-graphical, and reasonably intuitive interface. It’s aimed at small documentation groups, say 1-10 writers, and has multi-user features that should be suitable for groups of that size.

Veredus has some features that will make FrameMaker users weep with envy. Indexes are built and displayed on the fly. Conditional indicators offer an unlimited palette of colours and shades, and you can build complex conditionals with Boolean operators. Graphic placement is drag and drop, as is resizing.

Veredus comes with templates for building most major help formats. It can also output to PDF, but formatting control is quite limited in the current release. Unfortunately, this will restrict its usefulness as a single-sourcing tool, at least until the next release (due early next year) comes out.

Customization of formats is possible through the interface, but you can’t modify the underlying schemas or XSL transforms. Rascal Software plans to offer a separate tool to allow this sometime in the future, and are also considering tools that will be more suited for larger enterprises. Since all files are saved in XML, you could edit or post-process them in other tools, but it would be a one-way process. You can import RTF, MIF, HTML, text, and images.

I can’t offer any comments on bugs or stability based on the brief demo I saw. You can download an evaluation copy from Rascals web site if you want to try it out for yourself.

Anyone who is considering help authoring in RoboHelp or WebWorks Publisher, and doesn’t have a requirement for complete control of printed output, should take a good hard look at Veredus. It’s an impressive product. As for myself, I’ll wait until the next release, but I will look at it. This is one of the most interesting tools I’ve seen in some time and could very well be a major contender if future releases add some of the functionality mentioned at last night’s demo. I said, in a discussion on the Framers mailing list last week, that I don’t really expect to be using FrameMaker in five years. After seeing the demo, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was using Veredus.

Cost is $899 US and there’s a competitive upgrade available for $699.

And just in case you were wondering, Rascal is a horse.

November 13 - Update: Veredus is Latin for swift courier horse.

Popular Science has an article picking the 100 best new technological innovations of 2003. Given magazine production schedules, it's probably only up-to-date to about August, but it's still an interesting and exciting list. Bert Rutan's X-Prize entry in avaition, Mitsubishi's Megaview Wall thin rear-projection TV, Bushnell's Instant Replay binoculars. Lots of nifty stuff. It's an interesting contrast to Discover magazine's top 100 science stories of the year (published in December), which is something I always look forward to reading.

If I had to pick one, I'd go with Bert Rutan's Spaceship One- and, damn, do I want a ride in it!

I came across Ordo on a list of weird and wonderful links, and it certainly fits. Their About page says: "We publish DIY projects, recipes, travelogues, random links, exquisite essays, 200-word stories, found objects, animated work (beautiful or wretched), profiles, strange letters, QA's, and multimedia confessionals."

So, at random: 15th-century editions of Chaucer, Buckmister Fuller's dymaxian world map, tour the fabulous ruins of Detroit, jousting, and much more. Definitely a cool site.

With all of the controversy surrounding the downloading of music over the Internet, it rarely gets mentioned that there's a flourishing subculture of bands and muscians who want people to download and share their music. Fans taping and circulating live performances was a major factor in the success of groups like the Grateful Dead and Phish, and many other groups now encourage the practice. Before the Internet, fans cirulated tapes (and later CDs) through the mail; now we can download from FTP servers, Usenet newsgroups, and P2P file-sharing services like Further and BitTorrent.

And now we have the Internet Live Music Archive. From their splash page: "Welcome to the Live Music Archive. etree.org is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format. The Internet Archive has teamed up with etree.org to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy. All music in this Collection is from trade-friendly artists and is strictly noncommercial, both for access here and for any further distribution. Artists' commercial releases are off-limits. This collection is maintained by the etree.org community."

If you browse the archive, you'll be presented with a list of hundreds of bands and musicians. Many, maybe most, are unknown outside of their home towns, but there are a fair number of better-known acts: Steve Kimock Band, Little Feat, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Moe, Derek Trucks Band, and many more. Most shows are audience recordings, but there are a goodly number of pristine digital soundboards, and given the state of recording technology these days, even audience recordings can sound wonderful and capture the excitement of a live show too. Shows are archived in lossless (.shn or .flac) format, to fully preserve the original sound quality.

This is a wonderful resource for music lovers and offers a real alternative to the homogenized pap that the RIAA, Clear Channel, MTV, and the major record labels are trying to push down our throats.

If you want to download music from the Live Music Archive, you'll need a fast connection (or a lot of patience) as a typical show spans 2 or 3 CDs at about 400 MB per CD in compressed format. You'll also need some software to verify the accuracy of the downloaded files and extract them to .wav format for burning -- all of which you can find on the etree.org site.

Ain't It Cool News is reporting that the original Star Wars trilogy (episides 4-6) is finally coming to DVD, in September 2004. This will be followed by a series of trailers for Episode 3, which is scheduled to hit the screen in May 2005, with a DVD release in November 2005.

I'm not sure I'll buy these, though my kids may overrule me. I've seen them so many times that I pretty much know every scene and line by heart. Presumably there'll be a lot of interesting bonus material to sweeten the pie for people like me (which means pretty much everyone in the known universe over the age of 10).

What I'm waiting for is the extended version of The Two Towers. Now that, I'm going to buy.

The Encyclopdia of Typography and Electronic Communications has got to be one of the most detailed resources on typography that I've seen. None of the definitions are very long, but there are a lot of them. Definitely worth bookmarking.

Yesterday, the sun released the largest solar flare ever observed. The big one last week was rated as X17 or thereabouts. This one was an X28! NASA's SOHO page has some good pictures. There's also a good BBC article.

Unfortunately for aurora observers (but probably fortunately for everybody else) the flare was directed away from the Earth. We may get enough of a glancing blow to trigger some auroral displays anyway, so watch the skies tonight. (I have to admit to being greatly disappointed at this solar cycle, as every time there's been a prominent display of Northern Lights, it's been cloudy.)

How old am I? In the immortal words of Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson, "Too old to rock and roll, too young to die."

There's been some discussion on the framers mailing list about some hints Adobe reps let drop at last week's FrameUser's conference about the next update to FrameMaker. Apparently it will offer native support for Photoshop and Illustrator graphics and improved handling of SVG graphics and XML. That's about all I've seen on this so far.

Adobe has always kept quiet about future releases, so I doubt we'll hear much more until it comes out. There's no word about when we can expect the update.

I've updated the Desktop Publishing and Graphics page of my web site, pruned out dead links and added many new ones. There are links to MS Word, FrameMaker, PaintShop Pro, and Adobe Photoshop resources.

Earlier this week I posted a link to some screenshots for Longhorn, the next release of Microosft Windows. Although it's not due out until 2005 or 2006, Microsoft is already getting developers geared up with a "beta" release and new tools. Among those is a new help system, largely based on a variant of XML called MAML - Microsoft Assistance Markup Language. Help will be hooked tightly into applicaitons and be able to use information from the operating system or applications to display only information appropriate to the context. This could be very useful -- one example I can think of from personal experience, is that it would be easy to check whether a user has admiistrative privileges in an application and hide administrative topics if they don't, something that isn't at all straightforward now.

You can download a Powerpoint Presentation that gives a pretty good overview of what new help system will look like and an idea of the underlying architecture. More details about Longhorn are on this page on the Microsoft site.

According to the presentation, Microsoft is already working with help-tool vendors to make sure that Longhorn's help system will be supported when it comes out. The major vendors seem to be signed up, although Quadralay is notable for its abscence.

I'm not going to get too excited about this yet; MS has a history of announcing new technologies that never make it too production (including a couple of help systems), but it is worth keeping an eye on. The picture should be a lot clearer in a year or so.

Thanks to Mike Stover for posting the links on the wwp-users list.

I've added the ability to post comments to my postings. I used a free service called HaloScan. It was easy enough to set up, so I'll give it a shot and hope people use it.

I was surfing the web last night looking for some graphics I could use as the back cover for a CDR - I wanted something with a 60s psychedelic feel - colourful and swirling. I found this site.
"Surreal, psychedelic, trance, sci-fi, new age and fantasy art" is the description on the intro page and that doesn't really do it justice. I'd love to have some of this in poster format.

As it is, the gallery images are big enough that youi could save them as wallpaper if yoiu don't mind a bit of softness in the image. And they have a free, email gretting card service that uses the images.

This is an example:

I've always wanted to see a space launch but have never been able to manage it. Considering I've been a serious space buff since childhood, that's really frustrating. If I could go back in time and catch just one launch, it would be a Saturn V, the Apollo moon rocket. By all accounts, a Saturn launch was a majestic, religous experience.

I wouldn't say that this Saturn V model rocket kit would make up for seeing the real thing, but it looks really neat anyway. The model is over five feet tall and launches with quite a satisfying roar, if the video of a launch is any indication. I wonder if they ship to Canada -- although I can just imagine how much fun I'd have trying to get this through customs.