Core Dump

If you're a music junkie, you'll enjoy this article. Music critic Eric Olsen has compiled a list of the 10 best bands. His criteria were that they had to be "rock" and "bands" and have substantial musical and cultural influence. Even if you don't agree with the author's choices, it makes for interesting reading, and food for many heated discussions. As for myself, I pretty much agree with six or seven of his choices, but I'd drop Bob Marley and Sly Stone and add The Who and the Jefferson Airplane, and possibly add Nirvana in place of the Ramones.

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

Last month I wrote about typography resources. Since typography and design are closely related, this month I'll provide some design resources. These cover typography, print, graphics, and web design.

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 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.

Web Page Design for Designers focuses on web design for people who may be coming out of the print or graphics design world. It's in the format of a monthly magazine, with a new editorial and articles each month. The articles cover a wide range of topics and are extensively linked to resources on the net. My only complaint is the colour scheme, which is subtle to the point of illegibility at times. Design and Publishing bills itself as the "e-zine for Design, Typography, and Graphics". As well as articles in those areas, the site has articles for the professional designer, with industry news and tips on business.

The Web Style Guide, 2nd Edition is the online version of a book, although if my memory isn't playing tricks on me, the book came after the web site. It's quite comprehensive and has been up for long enough to have become something of a standard resource for web designers. Although oriented to web design, the advice on typographics, use of graphics, and editorial style could be applied to most kinds of technical writing, with good results.

Many authors have extensive collections of their articles or other writing available on the web. William Horton needs little introduction to Toronto writers, having given many excellent presentations here. His web site has handouts from many of those presentations, including "Databasics: Designing Information for Multiple format delivery", "Blunders in Information Publishing", and "Visual Fluency". Robin Williams is the author of many books about typography and design, including The PC Is Not a Typewriter and The Non-Designer's Design Book, both of which belong on every technical writer's reference shelf. Her Robin Williams Type Talk column
concentrates mostly on typography, and I really should have included it in last month's column. If you haven't read any of her books, do yourself a favour and check them out. Lynda Weinman is one of the best known web designers. Her site, lynda.com has samples from some of her books and tutorial videos, most of which are for tools such as DreamWeaver and PhotoShop.
Principles of Graphic Design is a Flash-based primer on graphic design. There's not a lot of detail, but it does provide a good overview. I especially liked the section on the use of colour. You can download a copy to run off your PC.

When I first got into computing in the 1980s, ASCII and ANSI-based art was fairly common, and you still see ASCII art in people's signature files. Typographic Illustration updates the concept to use Flash, so we have Garramond does Dylan, Times New Roman rockng to Led Zeppelin, and so on. You'll need Flash for this and some patience but it's worth it. It's pretty hard to make art with nothing but type but this site succeeds

The Google directory page on Graphic Design and the Yahoo directory pages on Graphic Design and
Web Design provide many more links for you to explore.

A man in Josephine County, Oregon has been arrested for saving a stray chicken, which was living in a parking lot at a supermarket and living off of scraps. The supermarket admits that it didn't even own the chicken. So now this poor guy is facing a felony charge. Due process, anyone?

If you like words and etymology, you'll love The Word Detective. The Word Detective is the online version of The Word Detective, a newspaper column (which I've never seen) answering readers' questions about words and language. The Word Detective is written by Evan Morris. The web site contains back issues, viewable chronologically, or you can view the entries about words individually.

Earlier this month there was new variety of Internet worm that was notable for a couple of reasons: it exploited a vulnerability in firewall software, and it carried a destructive payload that could destroy data or even cause a hard drive to crash. CALDA, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, now has an analysis of the Witty worm and how it spread. If you have any concerns about the security of your computer systems, you should read this. You won't be happier after you finish, either.

From the conclusion: "Witty was the first widespread Internet worm to attack a security product. While technically the use of a buffer overflow exploit is commonplace, the fact that all victims were compromised via their firewall software the day after a vulnerability in that software was publicized indicates that the security model in which end-users apply patches to plug security holes is not viable."

Anyone want to bet on how long it'll be before someone finds a similar vulnerability in a Norton or Symantec product, with an installed base of millions instead of a few tens of thousands?

Bethany Harker recently conducted an online survey about single sourcing and the results are now posted. It's interesting reading, especially the raw results in the last appendix. The sample was rather small (about 20 people), so statistically it doesn't provide much confidence, but it might give you some ammunition if you are planning to move to a single-sourcing workflow.

Chad Dickerson writes a weekly column for InfoWorld magazine. Recently he wrote about documentation from an IT manager's perspective. He realizes the need for documentation, but advocates doing just what's necessary, a typical attitude for most IT types. Note that "just what's necessary" isn't the same as "the bare minimum". If you work closely with a development group, the article should give you a good perspective on how many developers and IT managers think. While I agree with much of what he says, I did take exception with the last sentence: "No one ever got promoted for having comprehensive documentation anyway."

An interesting statistic that I wasn't aware of until I read the Babylon 5.1 column from the SF Site. The top 9 movies of 2003 were all either science fiction and fantasy. Mind you, out of the nine only two or three were good, but it's still nice to see how popular the genre has become. A side note on SF movies while I'm here - I've been watching some of the bonus material from The Two Towers DVD and the level of care and detail that went into the trilogy is just astounding. If you have the DVD and haven't looked at the bonus material, it really is remarkable.

With the release of the remake of Dawn of the Dead, it's appropriate to note that the classic Night of the Living Dead is available for free download from archive.org. The copyright on the movie has expired. Archive.org has many other feature films available for downloading, most of them older than Night of the Living Dead, including the equally bizarre Reefer Madness.

Space columnist James Oberg has written a good article explaining some of NASA's reasons for deciding not mount a repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. I don't agree with his conclusions, but the article is a lot more factual and balanced than most of the reporting I've seen on the subject so far.

Adobe announced today that there will be no further development of the Macintosh version of FrameMaker and it will not be sold after April. Quite a bit of unhappy buzz about this on the framers mailing list.

Desktop Pipeline is a new tech web site, concentrating on desktop software and operating systems. I found out about it through Scott Finney's excellent Scott's Newsletter, an email newsletter that I've been subscribing to for some time. The Desktop Pipeline is part of the TechWeb media group and they also publish other themed web sites and newsletters.

Scott Finney's editorial for the web site is worth reading: "Process and UI are Important IT Concerns" will especially interest technical writers who have to struggle with documenting "barbaric interfaces" as he puts it.

I like dictionaries, especially ones that are online. I generally use the Merriam Webster site, but sometimes it's faster to look up a word on my own machine, rather than loading up a browser. For that, I use WordWeb, a small, fast, and free dictionary tool. WordWeb has a dictionary of about 140,000 words along with 115,000 synonyms. The synonym lookup makes WordWeb doubly useful as you can use it as a thesaurus.

There is a professional version that offers a large dictionary and wildcard searches, which can be very useful if you are an indifferent speller, and they also sell industry-specific dictionaries. But I suspect the free version will be good enough for most people.

The Russian space company Energiya is planning a reusable space capsule called Clipper that could be used as a replacement for the shuttle. It could carry up to six astronauts into orbit and could be reused 25 times.

This could be an interesting develoopment. The Russians have a very good record when it comes to spacecraft design; their Soyuz capsules and boosters are very reliable and they haven't lost any astronauts in space since the 1970s. The only issue will be money as they are chronically underfunded - much more so than NASA.

Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise will be collaborating on a remake of War of the Worlds. I quite liked the 1953 George Pal version, so it'll be interesting to see what they make of it. No information yet on whether it'll have a contemporary setting or be set in Wells' timeframe.

Last month, I posted a link to Eric Raymond's rant on software usability. Apparently, he's had a lot of feedback, quite a bit of it favourable, and has posted another long article about it.

A choice quote:

"Good UI design is not a result of black magic, it just requires paying attention. Being task-oriented rather than feature-oriented. Recognizing that every time you force a user to learn something, you have fallen down on your job. And that when Aunt Tillie doesn't understand your software, the fault — and the responsibility to fix it — lies not with her but with you."

This may be obvious to technical writers, at least the good ones, but it bears repeating.

And this:

"It's been twenty years since the GNU Manifesto and nearly seven since The Cathedral and the Bazaar. I think it's time we stopped congratulating ourselves quite so much on our dedication to freedom and our ability to write technically superior code, and began more often to ask What are we doing to serve the real users? Good UI design, and doing the right thing by Aunt Tillie, ought to be a matter of gut-level pride of craftsmanship.

But if that's too abstract and idealistic for you, think of this. No matter how skilled you are, there are many times when you will be the end user. By learning to demand good UI from others, the time and sanity you save will ultimately be your own."

And of course, the same logic that applies to UI design also applies to documentation design, especially when you are building online help systems and integrating online help into your product.

Quadralay, the makers of the help authoring tool WebWorks Publisher, have announced a new tool to help authors deal with document reviews. WebWorks FinalDraft will let authors circulate a copy of a document for review in a browser readable format. Reviewers use a free plugin to read and comment on the document. The authors can then aggregate the comments and incorporate them into the original document, if necessary. It works with MS Word and Adobe FrameMaker files. It'll be available in April for $399 US.

If the press release is accurate, this could be one very useful tool. I'm going to try to get more information from Quadralay and will post more here when I have it.

Update, March 18: There's more detail now on Quadralay's web site, including a product tour with some screen shots. I'm quite excited about FinalDraft, assuming it works as advertised. I've signed up for an online demo. Incidentally, about fifteen minutes after I signed up, someone from Quadralay phoned me to talk about FinalDraft, so they must be ready to give it a big push.

A few years ago I had a nightmare that I'd been arrested because a manual that I was working on had a mistake that contributed to the destruction of a space shuttle (not as far fetched as it sounds; I was working on a C-370 compiler manual, and that software was used by NASA). In real life, it is possible that a software malfunction can lead to death, particularly in the case of medical devices and avionics systems. eWeek has a lengthy article about one such incident, in which several Panamanian cancer patients died after being overdosed by a Cobalt-60 radiotherapy machine. It's a long article, but worth the time to read, as the problems it describes could happen in many software shops, though hopefully with less severe consequences.

SF author/cyperpunk/futurist Bruce Sterling's speech from the SXSW 2004 Interactive festival/conference is available online. Interesting news about his next book right at the beginning of the speech:

"My next book is a technothriller called Zenith Angle, near future -- it's an sf novel, but not set in the future. Gibson's doing this too. It's a trend among aging cyberpunks. It's not cyberpunk, it's not steampunk, it's NOWpunk."

For some time, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) - the mother of all dictionaries - has been soliciting citation references from science fiction. There is a web site where you can now check out those citations. It makes for pretty interesting browsing, especially to see how many words that we now take for granted got their start or their current meanings in works of science ficiton.

There was a scary and by now, well known, series of psychological experiments some years ago in which participants were told to give stronger and stronger electric shocks to other people; in some cases, they administered what appeared to be painful and possibly fatal shocks just because the experimenters ordered them to. It's amazing how deeply the urge to bow to authority runs in some people.

Here's another case. In Boston, a prankster phoned a Wendy's restaurant, posing as the police, and told the supervisors that the employees were stealing from customers and to perform immediate strip searches. They did, and the employees cooperated. In fairness to Wendy's, this is not official company policy.

The New York Times (free registration required) has a survey article about Mars and science ficiton, written by Kim Stanley Robinson, who's Mars trilogy was one of the highlights of science fiction in the 90s. I have a soft spot in my heart for SF about Mars -- the first science ficition novel that I read was Robert Heinlein's Red Planet, and if you want an example of a book influencing someone's life, that would be it, as I've been a science fiction fan ever since, not to mention that's how I met my wife.

It appears that another US state has been infected with the creationism virus - Ohio is enacting a science cirriculum that teaches "intelligent design". Seems there's not much intelligence in the legistature and educational establishement.

Given the glacially slow pace of updates to Adobe FrameMaker, and the persistent rumours of its imminent demise, many writers have been looking for an alternative. One of the tools that I've seen mentioned is KWord, but I've never done more than look at the web site. Now David Cortesi (d_cortesi at yahoo dot com) has provided us with an in-depth comparison of KWord and FrameMaker. From reading his paper, it seems that he reviewed the documentation, but he didn't run the software.

Unfortunately, it appears that KWord has a long way to go before you could use it to replace FrameMaker. "Based on its manual, Kword is a sort of eager little brother of FrameMaker: there is a clear family resemblance, but no parity in abilities. Kword today has enough ability to be useful for page-layout of simple brochures and newsletters, and for creating uncomplicated papers and reports up to, say, 50 pages. However, Kword has major deficiencies when compared to the full abilities of FM." and he goes on to cite them.

The review is a PDF file, by the way, and is about five pages long.

I think that if a replacement for FrameMaker is to appear, it'll be either from Adobe (we can all dream about a secret, skunk-works style project that replaces Frame with the core InDesign typography engine, a killer 21st-century interface, and full XML capabilities -- as I said, dream because it'll never happen), or a totally new tool like Veredus, that comes out of an entirely new paradigm and gives us the same capabilities as FrameMaker without slavishly copying its feature set. (See my write-up on a Veredus presentation to the Toronto STC chapter here.) Or maybe Open Office will evolve enough FrameMaker-like features that it becomes a viable replacement. Of all these possibilities, I think the second one is the likeliest - a totally new tool, coming out of the XML/XSLT world.

The author of this article used a tool designed to visualize social networks in IRC chats to build social networking diagrams of Shakespeare's plays. Neat. Wish I'd had access to that technology when I was getting my BA in English Lit.

I just finished Cory Doctorow's latest novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. Read it. It's good.

I don't have the time to do a full-scale review; you can read one at Science Fiction Weekly. I will say that it's one of the best examples of near future social and technical extrapolation that I've read in a long time (and near-future stories are one of the hardest types of science ficiton to do well), it's witty and funny and wise, and a big improvement over Cory's previous novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

If you're a technical writer, you really should read this. The protagonist of the book is a "user experience designer", what we now call a usability expert, and his rants on usability are both hilarious and relevant to what we do.

As noted earlier on this weblog, Cory has released his books under the Creative Commons licensel; feel free to download them, read them, pass them along to friends and co-workers, or even buy the physical book.

Here's a tip for WebWorks Publisher users. I found this out while working
on an HTML Help project. It should work with the WebWorks Help template as
well, although I haven't tested that.

You can create popup topics by using hypertext markers instead of
cross-references to the topic. The docs only discuss using cross-references.

For example, in my current project, I have a glossary topic called
"inhibiting a stock". In my manual, I have the sentence: "Use the Customer
Service window to inhibit a stock.", where I wanted "inhibit a stock"
to be a link to the popup topic. However, if I use the cross-reference
technique, FrameMaker wants to insert "inhibiting a stock" into my
sentence, because that's the text of the glossary definition paragraph
that I'm pointing to. That happens whether I use a cross-reference to the
paragraph or create a marker and cross reference to the marker.

FrameMaker needs an enhancement to the way cross-references work so
that you can tell it to link to the target but keep your link text. It'd
be much easier to create hyperlinks than by using markers.

I thought that using hypertext markers might work, so I created a
newlink marker in my glossary, created a gotolink hypertext marker at the
beginning of the text I wanted to make my link (inhibit a stock, in this
example), formatted the text with my GlossaryRef character style,
generated my project in WebWorks - and it worked! "Inhibit a
stock" becomes a link, and when I click on it, I get my "Inhibiting a
stock" popup.

I'm still trying to figure out how to make the link a hover link instead of a
click link. (Quadralay and I are still working that one out).

It's nice to have something work the way you think it should work, for a
change.

Science Fiction Weekly is reporting that there will be a feature movie based on Joss Whedon's short lived but very good TV series, Firefly. The movie wil be called Serenity. All of the original cast will appear in it and it should be out next year.

I suppose it's too late to hope for a Babylon 5 movie, sigh.

I'm reading Cory Doctorow's second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, and quite enjoying it. Cory has made it available for free downloading in the belief that it will build the audience for his books. For more details on why he believes this, see this excellent interview, which covers a wide range of topics. Cory's on the forefront of the digital revolution and the interview is well worth your time.

The Globe and Mail has an article about bad academic writing and the academics who don't think that it's bad, just necessarily complicated. "This "bad" writing is actually 'difficult' writing, they say, a self-conscious and sustained attempt to change the way we think. It's necessary to abandon what we commonly call clarity to unravel conventional wisdom in linguistics or literature or philosophy."

In February, I posted a link to a New York Times article on the virus writing underground. NewsForge now has an equally interesting article on the script kiddie culture - the mostly adolescent and young males who are responsible for many of the denial of service attacks that are going on. Having spent most of the weekend updating my AV software on one of our machines after finding a trojan on it, it makes particularly sobering reading.

When I first got into computing in the 1980s, ASCII- a Tnd ANSI-based art was fairly common, and you still see ASCII art in people's signature files. Typographic Illustration updates the concept to use Flash, so we have Garramond does Dylan, Times New Roman rockng to Led Zeppelin, and so. You'll need Flash for this and some patience but it's worth it.

Howard Stern, the foul-mouthed deminzen of morning radio was recently dropped by Clean Channel, the biggest radio network in the US. I have no particular love for Howard Stern, and I exercised my right not to listen to him when he was on the air, but I had no problem with him being there. I assumed that his radio demise was due to the increasingly right-wing and prurient trend in the US media.

Maureen Farrell, a US media consultant, has another take on the issue. According to her, Stern was dropped because he started voicing criticism of President George Bush. If true, it's another sign of impending right wing/religious fascism in the US. The presidential election this year is going to be very interesting.

The following post first appeared in the February issue of the Toronto STC chapter newsletter, Communication Times.

The Wandering Eye #3: Typography

For more than 40 years, my father worked in the composing room at the Sault Daily Star. When I was a kid, I would visit him and watch him lay out the newspaper with lead Linotype slugs. By the time he retired, he was typesetting on a high-end computerized typesetting system. I don't think his career influenced my choice of careers, but it has given me an interest in typography. Many technical writers never get beyond using Arial for headings and Times New Roman for body text, but even a little typographic knowledge can keep you from making some basic mistakes. The following resources may help you to improve the look of your documents.

The Microsoft Typography site is a good introduction to the True Type fonts used by all Windows-based and Macintosh computers. If you need to know about the nitty-gritty details of character sets, code pages, or embedding fonts in documents, you'll find that information here, as well as more general information about fonts and font design.
TrueType Typography is another site devoted to TrueType, with more third-party utilities and general information. Most technical writers use one or more Adobe products and the Adobe Typography site has information on their type technologies (OpenType, ATM, Type 1, multiple masters)..

The Encyclopedia of Typography is just that. It's not a great site for browsing, but if you need to look up a typographical term, you'll probably find its definition here. It's also very comprehensive, well hyperlinked, and searchable. Planet Typography is an extensive meta-site with links to dozens of other typographic-related sites, all neatly organized. Along with the typographic links, there's also links to related topics like the history of printing and calligraphy. Typographica is an independent weblog devoted to typography.

Aaron Shepard's Publishing Page site has excerpts from a self-published book on how to get professional-looking typography with Microsoft Word. There's also a series of PDF files that show you output from various desktop publishing programs, although FrameMaker isn't one of them.

Of course, if you are interested in typography, you'll want fonts. Most of the sites mentioned earlier include links to commercial font vendors. There are many sites where you can download free fonts. Some are PC Fonts.com, Font Face, and The Dingbat Pages.

Public Lettering is a site that takes you on a walk through central London and explores the lettering and the architecture of the city through the lettering on buildings and signs. The Erotics of Type explores the erotic potential of typography. You probably won't want to use some of the fonts shown here in your manuals, but it definitely explores the more creative side of typography. (And if it was a movie, it would be rated X; you have been warned.)<

As always, if you want to find more information the "http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Design_Arts/Graphic_Design/Typography/">Yahoo and Google directories offer extensive lists of related links.

I was initially excited to hear that Microsoft would be supporting XML in Office 2003, but the actual implementation left a lot to be desired. A while back I posted a link to a newsgroup posting about using the DocBook schema with Word 2003 (not really possible). Today I attended an Arbortext webinar titled "Microsoft Word 2003 and Arbortext - Working Together". It announced a new Arbortext product called Companion, which will enhance the functionality of Word's XML support, initially by offering on-screen formatting from a predefined style sheet. (You can download the presentation slides from ArborText's web site.)

They devoted a significant part of the presentation to discussing Word's limitations as an XML editor, and there are many. Enough, I think, that any idea of doing document publishing with a standard schema like DocBook goes completely out the window. Of course, you can leave everything in WordML, but then you are locked into a Microsoft solution, which is probably what they want. In fairness to Microsoft, they have stated that Word's XML support was intended to provide integration with back-end systems and other programs via XML, and it does that quite well.

But I'm still looking for a good, easy-to-use, and inexpensive XML document authoring and publishing tool. Maybe by the time I retire I'll find one.

I usually don't get too worked up about the Academy Awards, but I was quite pleased to see Lord of the Rings: Return of the King to walk off with 11 Oscars last night. About the only disappointment in that was that it should have been 12, because the supporting actor Oscar should have gone to Andy Serkis for his portrayal of Gollum, but he wasn't nominated.