Core Dump

Eric S. Raymond is well-known in the open source software movement. He's written an essay called "The Luxury of Ignorance-An Open Source Horror Story" about his experience in trying to do something relatively simple, connect to a printer installed on another computer on his home network. It was not a happy experience, and the essay should be read by every software developer and technical writer. From his introduction:

"GUI tools and voluminous manuals are not enough. You have to think about what the actual user experiences when he or she sits down to do actual stuff, and you have to think about it from the user's point of view. The CUPS people, despite good intentions, have utterly failed at this. I'm going to anatomize this failure in detail, because there are lessons here that other open-source projects would do well to heed. The point of this essay is not, therefore, just to beat up on the CUPS people — it's also to beat up on every other open-source designer who does equally thoughtless things under the fond delusion that a slick-looking UI is a well-designed UI. Watch and learn..."

If you are documenting software, especially if you are writing online help, or if you are writing software, read this essay. Your users will thank you.

The Heinlein Society has published an online concordance to Robert Heinlein's works. If you are a Heinlein fan, this may prove to be a real time waster, as it's extensively hyperlinked, and you can spend an inordinate amount of time browsing through it. You can browse alphabetically, or by book. It includes every character, place, and most proper names. It was put together by M. E. Cowan - I can't imagine the amount of work it must have taken.

As if I needed another reason not to go flying to the US, it now turns out that the TSA (the agency responsonsible for security screening at US airports) can now fine you for having a bad attitude. From the linked article in the Washington Times: "No kidding. The TSA is asserting the right and the power to fine you, a law-abiding American citizen or lawful visitor to this great land, simply because its employees don't like your "attitude." One of eight "aggravating factors" listed in the new Guidelines is the "attitude of violator." Of course, you may not know until long after you've departed the airport, landed and gone on home, that your "attitude" sufficiently rankled some TSA employee after they found an item of contraband mistakenly left in your carry-on, such as to warrant a hefty fine. "

I think I'll take the bus.

I watched a fascinating segment about space elevators on the CBC National News the other night. If you're not aware of the concept, the idea is to string a long (100,000 km or so) and very strong cable between the earth and space and use it as an elevator to lift cargo into space, rather than by using rockets. The idea's been around for a while; I remember reading novels by Arthur C. Clarke and Charles Sheffield that used the idea back in the 1970s.

But the stumbling block has always been the strength of the material that you need to build the elevator. You need something light and really strong. Apparently we now have such a material, carbon nanotubes, which are tubes made up from carbon buckyballs (I love that word),. Buckyballs are also known as fullerene, in honour of Buckmister Fuller (who was a truly fascinating character who was about a century ahead of his time); think of them as a soccer ball made of 60 carbon atoms. A metre-wide ribbon made of thse would be strong enough to use to lift cargo into space.

The cost would be less than what we've already spent on the International Space Station and once completed, you could lift cargo into Clarke (geosynchronous) orbit for $100/kilogram. Several companies are now seriously working on building a space elevator. Let's just hope that NASA never gets involved.

Greenpeace has the report on global climate change that I mentioned a couple of days ago. I should have pointed out that it's not a forecast, but a scenario, written to help planners think of possible strategies to cope with such events. Still makes for interesting and quite scary reading.

Those of you who have been using CVS may want to take a look at Subversion. It's intended to be the open-source replacement for CVS and it handles differencing for binary files, which should be good news for anyone using it with FrameMaker (or Word, for that matter).

A leaked Pentagon report on climate change reads like an SF disaster novel, forecasting a world driven to the brink of war back famine and lack of fresh water. I'd like to read the full report, which is only summarized in the Yahoo article; hopefully it'll surface somewhere on the net. There's a more detailed article here.

About two weeks after landing on Mars, the Spirit rover experienced a technical problem that caused it to stop communicating with Earth. The EE Times has an article that explains what happened and how engineers at JPL solved the problem. In simple terms, they filled up their flash memory file system. The details sound a lot like problems I've seen on systems that I've worked on, but in this case the developers were a hundred million miles away from the malfunctioning system.

Well, I might as well give the Morning Star her due, and post a link to these excellent, digitally restored pictures from the USSR's Venera Venus landers. I remember seeing some very grainy, dark copies of these many years ago, but the restorations, made from the original raw data using sophisticated filtering techniques are far superior. Oddly enough, the surface of Venus looks a lot like the surface of Mars, a desertlike surface strewn like rocks. The pictures don't give a hint that the temperature is hotter than the melting point of lead and the pressure is immense (90 atmospheres).

Just in case you haven't found it yet, this is the official JPL Mars rover site. Some neat articles and links to ALL of the pictures taken by the rovers - and it takes a long document to explain the file naming scheme.

The Mars Quest Online is more educational and focus and quite a bit easier to navigate and is the place to go if you want to see the latest images.

Wired has a couple of articles about the possibility of war in space. The first is about US plans for new technology including lasers and hypervelocity orbital bombs (Jerry Pournelle came up with the idea years ago and called it THOR). The second is about a Russian test of a hypersonic warhead that can supposedly evade antimissile defences.

I have to wonder with Bush and his hawks in power in the US and Putin and his KGB cronies in power in Russia, whether we might be looking at a resurgence of the cold war.

CreativePro, a site that has a lot of information about DTP, photgraphy, and graphics tools, has published a reasonably favourable reivew of FrameMaker 7.1. The review makes special note of the new PageMaker and Quark import filters, and also that the Word filters have been upgraded, as all Adobe programs are now using the same filters.

I haven't asked for an upgrade to 7.1 yet (I'm using 7.0) as none of the new features, except possibly the Word import, have any relevance to what I'm doing right now. If I move to structured authoring (something I'd like to do, but don't have the time to implement), then I'll go for it.

This article first appeared in the January issue of Communication Times, the monthly newsletter of the Toronto STC chapter.

Like many technical writers, I've never taken a formal grammar course, yet I'm expected to be a paragon of grammar, punctuation, and style. So in a tight spot, I use a style guide. The following resources may help you the next time someone questions why you put a comma before the third item in a list, or asks you whether the proper abbreviation for gigabyte is GB or Gb.

The Chicago Manual of Style is one of those books that belongs on every technical writer's reference shelf. It's full of exhaustive lists of rules for punctuation, style, and grammar. The CMS is aimed at editors and writers working in the publishing field, not at technical writers, but it's proven invaluable as the court of last resort in resolving problems. But even a book as hefty as the CMS can't cover everything. The CMS web site has an excellent FAQ, which covers many questions that never made it into the book. The FAQ answers are more informal than the manual itself and often exhibit a droll sense of humour.

The IEEE Computer Society Style Guide is a good resource for writers who are preparing software documentation. It focuses more on technical terms, abbreviations, and acronyms rather than finer points of grammar and style and is very comprehensive. Unfortunately, it's not searchable, although you can search on the whole IEEE web site. A good complement to the IEEE guide that focuses more on language usage, is Grammar Punctuation, and Capitalization, a guide for scientists and engineers at NASA's Langley Research Center. It's a good for technical writers, because the examples are given are for technical fields like aerospace. The guide is available in HTML and PDF versions.

The York University Style Guide is a good reference for Canadian usage, as well as topics relevant to academic writing. It also has a long section on "preferred language", discussing disabilities, gender, ethnicity, race, and religion. The Guardian Unlimited Style Guide, produced by the British newspaper, is a good reference for current terms and is downloadable in both PDF and Word formats.

Canadian technical writers often have trouble distinguishing between Canadian, American, and British spelling and usage. The best site I've found for Canadian spelling and usage is Dave VE7CNV's Truly Canadian Dictionary of Canadian Spelling, which has the added benefit of showing French and Spanish equivalents. British Canadian and American Vocabulary
is a similar site, but the word order is by the British spelling rather than Canadian. The Wikipedia collaborative encyclopedia has a more general discussion of Canadian English. (The Wikepdia link may be unreliable due to recent server problems.)

One of the most useful sites I've come across, and one I use almost daily, is the Clear Language and Design (CLAD) Online Thesaurus. This is a large list of commonly used (and misused) words and alternatives, for example, for "originate" it gives "create", "invent", "set in motion" and "start". There's also a very handy list of phrases, and you can also search the thesaurus. CLAD is a local company, and they've done a real service by putting this site together.

The Philadephia Inquirer has an interview with William Gibson, who is on the road promoting his latest book, Pattern Recognition (a book, incidentally, that was so plotless that I couldn't finish it). Gibson coined the word cyberspace in his novel Neuromancer, which has one of the best opening lines ever published. From memory: "The sky was the colour of a television set, tuned to an empty channel."

The Onion has a good interview with science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Despite it's source, the inteview is not a fake. Clarke discusses, among other things, his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on 2001, his views on religion, and the book he's working on now.

I've been spending a fair bit of time learning FrameScript and am now getting to the point where I can do something useful with it.

Case in point: over the last couple of days, I have written two scripts: one puts a hypertext newlink marker made up from the text of the heading in each heading paragraph in a document, the other creates a gotolink marker from
a dialog box list of all newlink markers in a document. If you've had to create hypertext links in a FrameMaker document, you'll realize what an improvement this is over having to type the marker text manually.

I still need to tweak the scripts a bit; the headings script should check to make sure the heading text is unique and insert gotolink script should let me select the file from a list of the book's files. But as it stands now, they are useful and will save me quite a bit of time and effort, especially in my current project, which will have a lot of links.

Incidentally, I am finding it much easier to pick up FrameScript than VBA. I think that's because Frame's object model is much more logical than Word's and it's also well documented.

So if you are thinking about getting FrameScript, you can do some useful stuff with it and fairly quickly too. I am working on a longer review or article about FrameScript 3, which I hope to post somewhere with a wider audience.

As if you need one, but anyway ... here's an article that analyses an innocent looking spam that the author received. It turns out that the spam (apparently a greeting card notification) turns out not to be so innocent; it overwrites Windows Media Player with a trojan and does several other nasty things.

The article has been slashdotted, so if you can't get through to it, try again later - it's worth a read. And if you are using Internet Explorer, do give Mozilla a try; it is a lot safer than IE and it's a better browser anyway.

Google is the most pipular search tool on the Web, but as good as it is, it can bury you with irrelevant results for a poorly formed query. The Google Guide is a tutorial on using Google, including Google's advanced search features and some of the new features that Google has added recently. The site is a subset of the information offerred in the author's book How To Do Everything With Google. Unless you are a research librarian, the information here should be more than enough.

Typography and Page Layout is a site devoted to teaching the principle of good typography and design. Here's author John Magnik's introduction to his site: " Incorrect choice of Fonts and poor Page Layout can ruin an otherwise good advertising campaign or product promotion. Subconsciously the readers attention can be directed to other topics or store shelf products - it's a science! These are proven facts that should not be treated lightly." The emphasis is his.

I like this site because he explains many of the principles behind basic design rules and discusses both page design and typography. There's also a good section on proof reading and proof readers' markup and a PowerPoint presentation on printers's measurement (pica, em, en, etc.). I'm bookmarking this one.
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Bruce Sterling, science ficiton author and futurist extraordinaire, now has a blog. This is one I should add to the sidelist for Core Dump.

One of the things I like about FrameMaker is that indexes are hyperlinked back to the index entry, so you can click on the page number and jump back to the text in your document. Microsoft Word doesn't have this feature, at least until now. Word VBA guru Steve Hudson has just released Indexer 1.0, which adds hyperlinked indexes to Word. Here's part of his email to the word-pc mailing list.

"$US 50 - Indexer. Turbo charge your index preparation by using the hyperlinked page numbers that indexer creates for you. Return to a standard index any time you like. Update the turbo indexes at the press of a button. There's also a quick mark index function to link to whatever keyboard shortcut you like, and highlighting of all index entries. Index tweaking with Word has never been easier."

You can order it from Steve's web site www.wordheretic.com using the PayPal link. Information about the add-in will be posted there in a few days.

I always wanted a good microscope when I was a kid. Maybe it had something to do with being really nearsighted. Unfortunately, my parents couldn't afford a really good one, although I did have fun with the one they did get me. Now you can go online and play with a virtual electron microscope. The Molecular iExpressions site is devoted to microscopes and there's much good information here and some things, like the virtual electron microscope, that are just plain fun.

You can also get galleries of microscopic images at other sites, here and here.

The New York Times Magazine (free registrtion required) has a long and rather scary article called 'The Virus Underground", about the subculture of virus writers. It's pretty easy to write a virus or worm these days, using on of the wizard-driven kits that are available from the underbelly of the Internet. The scary part is some of the article is a discussion of how viruses and worms might become even more sophisticated and dangerous in the future.

There's one heck of a strange object showing up in the high-resolution panorma taken by the Opportunity Mars rover. It looks something like part of a buried skeleton, vaguely rabbit shaped. And yes, it is in the NASA panorama; you can download it from JPL if you want to check. Maybe it's just a piece of debris from the air bags, but it sure does look strange.

The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) has been kind enough to post links to online versions of most of this year's nominees for the annual Nebula awards, which are awards for the best science fiction of the year, nominated and voted on by SFWA members. There's hours of good reading here.

According to this article in the Toronto Star, my old home town of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario will soon be on the bleeding edge of Internet technology with a community wireless network with the feed being distributed over the local PUC power lines. They're being rather smart about this; instead of bringing the Internet feeds into people's homes over the power lines, they're feeding wireless nodes along the lines. This means that anyone can pick up the feed using standard wireless modems. You'd have to be in an area that they service, currently only the downtown, and have an Internet account with the PUC (Public Utilities Commission), but it's still a neat idea. I hate to say it, but the Soo is about the last place I'd every expect to do something like this. Good for them. Maybe it'll bring some high-tech jobs to town; they could sure use them.

The Toronto Star article link may be available for a limited time only, but this was also recently discussed on Slashdot.

Project Orion was an outlandish-seeming idea that might have given us access to the planets in the 1980s, if it had been developed. An Orion spaceship is propelled by exploding nuclear weapons behind it; the blast from the explosions pushes the ship forward. It sounds crazy but fairly detailed studies were done, including scale models launched with high-explosives, and it would have worked. But the project was killed in the 1960s, due to (justifiable) concerns about exploding nukes in the atmosphere.

However, there's no reason a ship couldn't be assembled in orbit and launched from high above the Earth. Orion variants are still being studied, a new one involves using magnetic implosion technology to compress sub-critical masses of fissile material. A ship built using this technology could travel to Mars in 60 to 90 days and would be much larger than current proposed Mars missions.

You can find out more about Project Orion here and here.

. It featured prominently in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's excellent alien invasion novel, Footfall. Incidentally, only thing that the Orion-drive spaceship in the movie Deep Impact had to do with Project Orion was the name and the fact that the drive was nuclear.

Cory Doctorow's second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, is now out and you can also download it for free. Cory is a young and up-and-coming SF writer who works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and who also has one of the better blogs around, Boing Boing. Last year, he released is first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom under the same Creative Commons license, meaning that you could download it and pass it around freely. He's pretty sure that this helped sales of his first book and is trying it again with his second.

I enjoyed Down and Out - it's an interesting mystery with a lot of speculation around the future of really advanced computing (personality downloads and backups feature strongly in the plot, for example). I could have done without his Disney fetish, but I'm still looking forward to reading the new novel.

Locus Magazine has published it's 2003 recommended reading list of science fiction and fantasy. Locus is the monthly newsmagazine of the SF field and this list is a pretty good guide to quality over the last year.

In looking at the novels, I've read three of them and have a couple more on my to-be-read shelf. There are about a dozen that I've already identified as wanting to read if I see a copy at the library or when they come out in paperback. I am kind of surprised at the inclusion of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver in the science fiction list; while the book is technically about science, it's really a picareseque historical novel, possibly an alternate history fantasy, but not SF, at least not by my definition.

I finally got around to watching the revival of Battlestar Galactica that the Space channel broadcast a couple of weeks ago, and much to my surprise, I really enjoyed it. I was never a fan of the original series, but the new production was much better. Of course, you'd expect the effects, at least, to be better (and they were), but given the limitations imposed by the scenario, the show held together pretty well. It's still pulp space opera, but it's quite a bit better than the new Star Trek Enterpise, for example. Although not up to the best episodes of Babylon 5, it was better than B5's pilot, so there is hope for the series, if they decide to do one.

If you're interested in space exploration NASA's Planetary Photojournalism site could be a serious time waster. It has a huge collection of photographs and other images, organized by planet, as well as images of the sun and other solar system bodies.Most pictures include detailed captions explaining the science behind the pictures and there are links to the sites for the vehicles that took the pictures. I could spend hours browsing this one.

eHelp is now shipping RoboHelp X5, the latest version of its product. If you're interested in checking it out in more detail, they have a Flash-based demo that you can view in your browser, assuming you have the latest Flash plug-in. As for me, the demo looks good, but I'm sticking with WebWorks Publisher for now.