Core Dump

The Refdesk Quick Reference page is a large reference page that contains links to hundreds of other reference sites and tools. This one is well worth bookmarking, especially if you find yourself spending a lot of time doing Google searches for odd topics.

The main Refdesk site is even larger. I really am going to have to make a point of using this more often and making sure my kids know about it. I sure wish I'd had this when I was in school - it would have saved a lot of time poring through reference books at the library.

The state school superintendent of Georgia wants to strike the word evolution from the state's science curriculum. She wants to replace the word evolution with the term "biological change over time".

Science fiction author Charlie Stross has posted an article called The Panopticon Singularity, in which he speculates on how technology could "permit the construction of a Panopticon society -- a police state characterised by omniscient surveillance and mechanical law enforcement."

If you read between the lines in newscasts or newspapers, you'll see many signs that we're already well on the way to something approaching what Stross envisions.

Business 2.0 has published its annual review of the 101 dumbest moments in business for 2003. If you need some comic relief from work, this should provide it, unless of course, you happen to work for one of the companies cited.

Number 8 is particularly funny, if you happen to be Canadian.

Cory Doctorow, SF author and EFF spokesman, has a lengthy rant on his Boing Boing blog about why you should avoid proprietary technologies. He focuses on music, but you can easily extend his arguments to other areas (word processing file formats, for example).

It'll be interesting to see how things shake out in the next few years. Right now, you can play MP3s from any source on any computer. How long will it be before an operating system patch stops you from playing any music that doesn't have a DRM license wrapper attached? After 2006, television broadcasters will be able to block your ability to record TV programs. It could get even worse - your speakers, for example, might have a chip in them that would keep you from playing any non-DRM music. Run Linux instead of Windows? Forget it - the speaker manufacturer won't license Linux drivers.

Hang on to your old PCs folks; you may need them some day.

Spotted in Dan Gillmor's eJournal, an interesting post on Microsoft recently patenting certain of their WordML technology, which is, of course, based on XML. My slightly paranoid opinion, is that Microsoft will use this to find a way of blocking third-parties (OpenOffice, for example), from building software that integrates with Office 2003 or converts Office 2003 XML into their formats. I could be wrong, of course, but having seen the way Microsoft has operated in the past, I wouldn't bet on it.

Blogger has added syndication to its services, so I've added a site feed to the blog. The link is on the sidebar. Blogger is using Atom rather than plain RSS, so you'll need an Atom-enabled feed reader to use it. I'm using Bottom Feeder; you can find more readers on AtomEnabled.org.

Feed readers are an interesting bit of technology. I've been using the Usenet for years; an RSS feed reader makes web sites, web logs, and news services accessible in much the same way as a Usenet news reader manages newsgroups. It's definitely something you want to use if you regularly look at a lot of feed enabled sites.

I have just watched one of the neatest things I have ever seen - a live feed, over the Internet, of the JPL Mars lander team as the Opportunity rover successfully landed on Mars. I was watching it via a rather jerky RealAudio feed but it was still one of coolest Internet moments I've ever had. I won't mind paying my Rogers bill next month - I got my money's worth.

I also need to add, as someone who's life was shaped by reading Robert Heinlein's Red Planet at the age of ten, that watching this webcast made me feel proud to be human. This is something that we can all be proud of, the human urge to explore and discover, now not just on Earth, but a new planet. I hope my children or my grandchildren will get to play in Martian dust.

New York lost a little bit of it's soul yesterday when The Bottom Line closed it's doors. The nightclub lost its battle with the City Univiersity of New York, who wanted the site for other purposes. I've never visited New York but the Bottom Line was high on the list of places I'd have gone to if I did. It was home to a huge roster of performers, including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, the Jerry Garcia Band, and the Jefferson Starship.


Update 01/26/04: There's a good article in the New York Times about the closing.

Over the past few years, I've become increasingly reliant on Google and a few other search tools to find information, both at home and at work. (My kids are the same way; I have thought about making Google our default home page.) John Battelle's Searchblog is a weblog devoted to "thoughts on the intersection of search, media, technology and more", and it's full of fascinating stuff. Particularly interesting is the mention of Furl, a new tool for tracking web sites that you've visited and might want to go back to some day. I may have more on that later, once I've had a chance to use it a bit.

Bend Word to Your Will is the title of a long (> 100 pages) article, really a book, by Clive Huggan, about customizing Microsoft Word 2001 for the Mac so that it works the way you want it to work. Although most of the examples given are for the Mac version of Word, anyone working on a PC will be able to apply most of the material directly to Word for the PC with very little effort. (I do wish the author had included keystroke commands for both versions, but that's really a minor complaint.)

One thing I especially like is that he places a lot of emphasis on using paragraph styles, and explains techniques for using them properly. He also explains how to customize toolbars and menus in some detail. The section on customizing Word options is particularly good; I've been using Word for longer than I care to think about and I still learned a few new tricks from reading this book.

One final tip. The book is formatted for A4 paper. If you're printing it on standard North American paper, update the TOC and cross-reference fields first. Do check out the MVPS Word FAQ site while you're downloading the book; it's an invaluable resource for Word users. (I wish there was a FrameMaker site that was as comprehensive.)

This comes courtesy of Tom Eagles. Thanks, Tom!

Question: What is the truest definition of Globalization?

Answer: Princess Diana's death.

Why: An English princess with an Egyptian boyfriend crashes in a French
tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian
who was drunk on Scottish whisky (check the bottle before you change
the spelling), followed closely by Italian paparazzi on Japanese
motorcycles; treated by an American doctor, using Brazilian
medicines.

This is sent to you by an Canadian, using American >technology. You're
probably reading this on your computer that uses Taiwanese
chips and a Korean monitor, assembled by Bangladeshi workers in a
Singapore plant, transported by Indian lorry-drivers, hijacked by
Indonesians, unloaded by Sicilian longshoremen, and trucked to you by Mexican illegals.

That, my friends, is true Globalization!

The Future of Security is a rather pessimistic look at what could happen in the computer security field by 2010. It's not pretty.

I hope things don't get as bad as the author of this piece thinks they might, but I think that they probably will. Given the proliferation of spam, viruses, and worms over the last year or so, I think that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better, and we probably won't much like what the "better" turns out to be.

Playboy gets the nod to sue Netscape. Is it a case of "Adult profiling"?

Online search engines can associate words with certain themes or tastes. These are used, in turn, to point users to advertisements, or might produce related popups and other annoyances. Now Playboy Enterprises is after Netscape for use of keywords which "tarnished and diluted" its name, thereby producing links to inferior adult-themed Web sites and products. See the CNN Law Center article.

It's an odd and ironic reaction: as reported in the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal (back in 1999), "Playboy [...] has a reputation for marketing itself as a warrior for sexual liberation and freedom of speech". Anyway, it boggles the mind what might tarnish and dilute a veteran skin-rag like Playboy. Is it getting hot in here?

People can be identified or grouped according to their keyword choices when searching online. You can well imagine how certain words might associate one with certain products, such as adult XXX rated stuff. Will keywords "Playboy" and "playmate" get you into the same profile as Easter-friendly keyword "bunny"? And not only that, you'll risk diluting Playboy's venerable product!

Apparently, in addition to racial profiling by police forces, there may be also adult profiling by corporate interests.

I've been looking at the structured authoring features of FrameMaker 7 and so far I haven't been really impressed. The lack of direct suport for schemas and XSLT really bothers me; if I'm going to have to learn structured authoring techniques with XML, I'd really rather learn something that I can translate to another tool when Frame fades away. I thought that the XML support built into Word 2003 might be an alternative, but it looks like that's not going to be viable either. There was a detailed post on the comp.text.frame newsgroup recently, and it looks like Word doesn't fully support the XML standards either. (Why am I not surprised?)

The major issue is that Word doesn't support typesetting with anything other than it's native WordML tags, so you can't control layout with DocBook markup. I'll keep looking at structured authoring in both tools, but I doubt that I'll be doing anything in the immediate future.

Now that Adobe has officially announced that PageMaker has reached the end of the road, many FrameMaker users are wondering if the same thing will happen to FrameMaker (especially Mac users, who now appear to be orphanned as the 7.1 release won't be available for the Mac). Some people have touted InDesign as a potential replacement.

Dave Cortesi has written a detailed comparison of InDesign and FrameMaker, which is well worth looking at if you are thinking of switching.

I'll quote a brief section from his introduction:

"In many cases, the InDesign feature is an improvement on FrameMaker, to the point that a list of certain features reads like a FrameMaker "wish list" (for example, text frame inset values, or automatic generation of chapter TOCs).

Other points are just differences without great advantage either way. And there are a number of very important missing features that prevent InDesign 2 from being considered as a replacement for FrameMaker. "

I attended one of the launch events for InDesign in 1999. At the time, I thought that it would only take Adobe one or two versions to introduce enough long-document features to replace FrameMaker. This hasn't turned out to be the case. It may be that they are working on a separate product, using the core typographic engine and structured using plug-ins. But there's been no word of it yet.

In the meantime FrameMaker users continue to pine for features that should have been added years ago.

Like personal computers, digital tape recorders, Google, and pocket calculators, this page falls under the category of "I really wish I'd had this when I was in university." It's a collection of Java applets for visualizing various mathematical and physical concepts. If you know of anyone with a kid in high school or university, point them to this page. They'll thank you for it.

Here at the asylum for wage-slaves (a.k.a. the office), an initiative was proposed to celebrate birthdays within the large R&D department. Some people already do this within teams or small groups. Thankfully, this has not been a tradition within the technical writing team. I am not in favour of this notion, as most of employees already recognize/celebrate life events such as pregnancies (maternity leave) and weddings. It's also understandable to recognize the burdens borne by colleagues such as severe illness or loss of loved ones, not to mention those escapees who flee for greener pastures (those layed off are marched to the door within minutes, so there's no chance to celebrate OR mourn the loss, as the case may be). Anyway, I see birthday celebrations as personal. I like to keep personal life separate from office life; like in politics, keeping church and state separate.

IMO, celebrating birthdays (especially suddenly ... after many years of not doing so) amongst colleagues is too sentimental and nostalgic, not to mention personal. Fine: if colleagues who are also friends want to celebrate the anniversary of their entry into this world, so be it, but please not a department-wide tyranny of money-collecting for gifts or the gathering of masses to gawk at the aging wage slave.

What do you think?

According to BASTAARDS (Brotherhood Against Social Trends Aimed At Restructuring Democratic Society), in the realm of office politics, people who like office birthday rituals are moles. This caustic and sardonic Web site lampoons office moles: "The highlights of their otherwise dreary lives are the pitiful office birthday celebrations that invariably consist of some colored bunting, a few cheap pieces of tinsel in a mass-produced, politically-correct and totally humorless birthday card".

I guess I'm a curmudgeon around here. It may be a result of my birthday being Christmas Eve. Oh well.

CBC Radio yesterday featured a news article about a report critical of the Iraq invasion. "Bounding the Global War on Terrorism" was released (December 2003) by Dr. Jeffrey Record of the U.S. Army War College. The College is a military think-tank. Record is a visiting professor and has authored books critical of many U.S. conflicts since (and including) the Vietnam war.

Record writes that the war on terrorism is not grounded in reality and is not sustainable; the objective should focus on reasonable security objectives that respect the limitations of U.S. military power. This is a significant criticism by a respected researcher and professor of international affairs/relations. See the Strategic Studies Institute for other publications on U.S.-international relations.

The colour, high-resolution panorama of Mars from the Spirit rover is now available in QuickTime VR format. This has to be one of the most amazing, awe-inspiring things I've ever seen. The first science fiction novel that I read as a kid was Robert Heinlein's Red Planet, and science fiction and space exploration have been major influences on my life ever since. To be able to sit here and zoom and pan around the surface of an alien world makes my hair stand on end.

BTW, if you haven't played around with QuickTime VR panoramas, I highly recommend looking at some of the other panoramas on the panoramas.dk site. It is a seriously neat technology.

If you've ever wondered what results you'd get by setting your text in a different program, you can get an idea by checking out the samples on The Typesetting Gallery page, which is part of Aaron Shepard's Publishing Page. There are other typographic resources here, including an abridged version of his booklet, Books, Typography, and Microsoft Word, which may help those of us who are stuck using Word to get at least halfway professional-looking results.

I posted here a while back a link to the Robert Heinlein Society web site. There's another good Heinlein site out there, run by James Gifford. The Robert A. Heinlein Home Page is focused more on bibliography and academic critism. The biographical sketch is one of the most detailed I've seen, and the bibliographies are extensive.

If you're new to Heinlein, I particularly recommend the FAQ and the article comparing the book version of Starship Troopers to Peter Verhoeven's abomination of a movie.

There's been a concerted, if somewhat unreported, effort by Christian groups in the US to take over the mechanisms of the US government, effectively turning the United States into a theocracy. If you're at all paranoid about this, then maybe you don't want to visit theocracywatch.org, because it's just going to make you even more paranoid.

I have to admit that I thought that the Christian Coalition and people like Pat Robertson had pretty much fallen by the wayside over the past few years, but that's not the case. I particularly recommend reading the page on the influence of the religous right on George Bush's policies. Scary stuff.

A number of news sites are reporting that US President George Bush is poised to announce a major space initiative. Details vary but most agree that it will include a human return to the Moon, possibly a permanent presence there, and a mission to Mars.

The shuttle will be retired in favour of a new series of spacecraft based on Apollo-era designs. The interplanetary missions will be powered by a highly secret new space drive created from technology salvaged from the crashed Roswell UFO.

Like most things Bush, only part of the above is true. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what.

Update: There was a very succint and interesting post by Henry Vanderbilt, on sci.space.policy, which got reprinted on Jerry Pournelle's View from Choas Manor web journal. It's well worth the time to read. His conclusions are that the initiative will fail if given to the current NASA organization, something with which I completely agree -- if you want to understand why read the Atlantic article on the Challenger mentioned earlier in this blog.

Even with cataract surgery, I'm still pretty nearsighted and focusing a camera is difficult. (I don't have an autofocus SLR at the moment.) I tend to rely on depth of field to cover errors, but I still end up with too mary slightly soft pictures. To some extent, you can use digital tools to correct this, in particular the Unsharp Mask tool in Photoshop. But it's tricky to apply and if you get it wrong or overdo the sharpening, the results can be worse than the original problem.

CreativePro has an excellent tutorial by Bruce Fraser on the proper use of the Unsharp Mask tool. I've seen other tutorials about this and this one is one of the best. You can probably apply it to PaintShop Pro as well, as it has an equivalent tool.

As the holder of a rather rusty B.A. in English Literature, I really enjoyed this article, in which an engineer dives into the world of post-modern literary criticism. I particularly liked this part of his conclusion: "It is a cautionary lesson about allowing a branch of academia that has been entrusted with the study of important problems to become isolated and inbred."

I'm not sure I'd describe literary criticism as an important problem, but if you've read any recent literary criticism (say anything written after 1970), you'll probably agree that he has a point. A cautionary example is Samuel R. Delaney, once a brilliant science fiction writer, who now produces incomprehensible papers on the whichness of what.

The November 2003 issue of The Atlantic had a lengthy and very good . It was particularly interesting because it provided a lot of detail about the functioning of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and internal NASA politics that I hadn't seen elsewhere. As a technical writer, it's sobering to see the degree to which poor communication contributed the disaster.

The article is now available online, as well as a long interview with the author, Wiliam Langewiesche.

Bruce Sterling is well known as a leading cyberpunk/science fiction author, environmental activist, and libertarian. He's written many excellent articles for Wired and other magazines. His latest book is Tomorrow Now: Examining the Next Fifty Years, which I haven't read, but will one of these days.

Reason Magazine has a lengthy and absolutely fascinating interview with him. If you're more into the audio side of things, you can listen to an interview with him (in MP3 format) that was run on Toronto's CIUT radio.

If you haven't read anything by him, I highly recommend Islands in the Net or Heavy Weather.

If you appreciate language, you should read this column by Fred Reed from his Fred on Everything web site.

A small sample: "To appreciate literature requires intimate familiarity with the language. Art is freedom exercised within rules. (There. We’ve settled that.) Just as you cannot tell good jitterbugging from bad if you do not know the structure of the dance, so you cannot tell good writing from bad if you don’t know the language works. Few any longer learn the rules."

More space stuff - there does seem to be a lot of it recently. This is a Quicktime VR panorama of Mars, created from some of the first images from the Spirit rover. It's black and white and not very high resolution, but it's still neat.

I can't wait to see one created from the 12 megapixel images they were showing today.

The International Space Station has sprung a slow leak. It's losing pressure at the rate of about 1 mm. per day, so far about 9 mm. or the equivalent of about one quarter of a pound per square inch. The situation isn't immediately dangerous and the astronauts are working to find the source of the leak, which is more than likely a valve. At the current rate, it would take about three months for the pressure to drop enough that they would have to consider abandoning the station.

This article was originally published in the December issue of Communication Times, the newsletter of the Toronto STC chapter.

XML is a relatively new technology, but it seems to be cropping up everywhere. It's sure to affect the work of most technical writers, whether they have to document a tool or system that uses XML to exchange data, or they have to learn how to use an XML-based authoring tool or content-management system. Here are some resources that can help you learn more about XML.

The SGML-XML Cover Pages on oasis-open.org are one of the largest XML sites on the Web. To give you an idea of how large, the site map is 36 pages long when printed! The site is well organized, with a good mix of news, articles, and reference material, and with links to all of the core specifications. You can even get updates through an RSS news channel.
The World Wide Web Consortium is one of the main drivers of new web technologies, including XML. Their XML Page contains the core recommendations and specifications as well as links to groups that are working on more advanced and unfinished technologies, such as XML Query.

O'Reilly is one of the best computer book publishers, and they own the XML.com domain, which is another large repository of everything XML. As you'd expect from a publisher, this is a content-heavy site, with lots of articles, book excerpts, and columns from experts in the field, all neatly organized. The Resources directory is a gold mine of information.

The XML Tutorial on w3schools.com is a good place to start learning XML. The tutorial covers both beginning and advanced topics, and there are lots of examples. You can take a quiz at the end to test your knowledge. Once you've taken the XML tutorial, you can continue on with tutorials on XML-related topics like DTDs, XSL, and SOAP. Better yet, all of these tutorials are free.

The Starlabel.nl XML Page is another large XML metapage. I like this one because it is well organized and really is one large page, which means you can skim through it quickly if you're in a hurry.

Although there are many commercially available tools, much of the development takes place in academia and the open source movement. Free XML Tools and Software is a metapage with links to just about every free XML tool available. If you want to learn XML you'll need tools like an editor, a parser, and a validator, and you'll find them all here.

Finally, if you're going to be writing documentation in XML, you'll probably be using a schema. DocBook is the most commonly used schema for documentation, and the docbook.org site has a complete reference to it. Users of Word 2003 can now save their documents in XML and Microsoft has documented the WordML schema.

I bought a cheap Daytek DVD player over the Christmas holidays. At $60, it was an impulse buy. For that price, I got pretty much everything except an optical digital audio output. If you're wondering if these cheap, no-name players are any good, this article has a good analysis.

Basically, unless you have a high-end home theatre system, you won't notice much if any difference between one of these low-cost players and a brand name machine. But there are hidden costs, given that most if not all players are produced in China in factories where working conditions may be dubious at best.

The "great sucking sound" is the sound of jobs being exported overseas. Here's an interesting article about the subject. You may not agree with the author's conclusion, but he does have a point - we'll always need plumbers.

Gollum rapping. This is hiliarious. It's a Flash file and may take a minute to download over a slow link.

Like most people I know who have been on the net for a while, I get an inordinate amount of spam. In the last year, the volume has increased from a few messages a day to over a hundred. I'm now using Mozilla as my email client, and while Mozilla has a decent junk mail filter built in, it's only catching about half of the spam I receive.

There are a number of spam-filtering proxies available. They sit between your mail client and your ISP and filter the spam, usually adding an identifier to the suject, so your email client can filter the supsected spam into a junk mail folder. Some offer the ability to preview mail on the server and delete it before you download - a particularly useful feature in the case of Swen worm messages, which are typically about 150K in size.

I just installed an open source program called K9 and I'm quite impressed with it. So far, with a little bit of training, it's nailed every spam I've received and has had no false positives. (It uses Bayesian statistical analysis, so it gets better over time, as you tell it what is and isn't spam.) It's very easy to install and configure, and unlike many open source programs, has good documentation (on the author's web site). It makes it easy for me to check messages on the server so I can delete worm-infected messages without having to download them, and it's much faster to do it with K9 than going through the web mail interface for my email accounts. I'm going to set it up for all our email accounts here.