Friday, April 30, 2004
Outsourcing not a panacea?
Accoring to this article on news com, outsourcing may not be saving companies money after all, or it may be suitable for only certain, limited types of jobs. Companies are finding that the difference in skill and creativity between onshore and offshore programmers really does make a difference. That may be hopeful news for technical writers, who are of course, the most creative of all IT workers (grin).
Thursday, April 29, 2004
Bad movie physics
I have a BA with a minor in physics and I read a lot of science fiction (most science ficition writers at least try to get it right, so I have a hard time watching the typical Hollywood action or science fiction flick without groaning. Insultingly Bad Movie Physics explains what's wrong with most movies, in great detail. Yes, driving through a plate glass window on a motorcyle will get you seriously cut up, shooting a bad guy with a shotgun will not blow him twenty feet backwards through a wall, and you cannot jump off of multistory buildings without doing serious damage to at least your knees and ankles. This article should be required reading for all high-school science students.
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Cold fusion heats up
Technology Review has an interesting article about current research into cold fusion. Although largely discredited after most experimenters failed to reproduce Pons and Fleschman's results, some experimenters have persevered and it now appears that there may be something to it after all. It will never be the energy panacea that many people hoped for, but it seems that it might turn into something useful after all. Heck, even a device that could provide heat a home hot water tank to boiling without reliance on fossil fuels would be useful. In any case, the US Department of Energy thinks that it's worth a closer look and is funding more research.
Good science fiction fan site
Trufen.net is a site/blog devoted to science ficiton fandom. Note that the focus isn't on science ficition per se, but on science fiction fans and fandom, though of course there is some news about science fiction books and authors, including a long report on the recent Nebula awards and sad news that Andre Norton has broken her hip. I'll be putting this into my list of sites that I read regularly.
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Open Office/Office 2003 comparison
eWeek has a detailed comparison and evaluation of Open Office and Microsoft Office 2003. If you're thinking of an alternative to MS Word (and who isn't), it's worth a read. It seems that Open Office Writer holds up pretty well, but powr users may prefer Excel. As for myself, I've looked at OO and I could happily use it for personal stuff, but I'd feel lost without the equivalent of Word's macro support.
Monday, April 26, 2004
Sony introduces 24 GB recordable disks
Sony has introduced a 24 GB recordable disk using a blue laser to get higher recording density. Let's see. At 1 MB per minute for a 128 KB MP3, that'd be about 400 hours of MP3s per disk. Heck, you could still get about CDs on a disk that size without compression. Of course you'll need a new drive to write and read the disks and the article doesn't give any idea of pricing. By the end of the decade, these or something close to them, will probably be the standard format replacing DVD.
Sunday, April 25, 2004
Several years of books
Back in the distant past, when I had time to read several books a week, if not several books a day, I kept a running list of books that I read. Martin Wisse has gone one better; he keeps a booklog, a weblog of reviews of books he's read. He's a science fiction fan, so there's a lot of reviews of SF, but a wide selection of other fiction and non-fiction as well. And the sidebar has links to other booklogs.
Saturday, April 24, 2004
The Crazy Years - Cancer patient stopped from flying
When you read this, keep in mind that the September 2001 terrorists were young, Saudi Arabian males ....
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) -- Airport security screeners refused to let a cancer patient board a flight home to Denver because they said she no longer resembled her identification photos. Athena LaPera, 35, finally flew out of Orlando International Airport on a Frontier Airlines flight Wednesday night, two days after she was turned away by security screeners. LaPera said she has lost weight and hair because of chemotherapy treatments since the photos were taken for her U.S. passport and Colorado driver's license.
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) -- Airport security screeners refused to let a cancer patient board a flight home to Denver because they said she no longer resembled her identification photos. Athena LaPera, 35, finally flew out of Orlando International Airport on a Frontier Airlines flight Wednesday night, two days after she was turned away by security screeners. LaPera said she has lost weight and hair because of chemotherapy treatments since the photos were taken for her U.S. passport and Colorado driver's license.
Friday, April 23, 2004
Get It Right tips on language
Get It Right is a collection of tips on language and usage. The tips are mostly about common writing errors and usage that many writers have trouble with, for example, who and whom, reflexive pronouns, I and me, and so on. Sure, if you're a technical writer, you know all that stuff, right? Well, maybe not. It's worth a look, and if you have school age kids, bookmark it for them.
Thursday, April 22, 2004
Little Steven's Underground Garage
Miami Steve Van Zandt is the lead guitarist for Bruce Springsteen's E-Street Band. He's an excellent musician in his own right too, having released several very good albums. He's one of the lead actors on the Sopranos. And he has his own radio show, Little Steven's Underground Garage. You have to wonder if he ever sleeps.
I've known about the show for a while but haven't found it on the radio until recently I discovered that Toronto's Q107 plays it Sunday night at 10 p.m. That's not a great time for me to listen to it, but fortunately it's archived on his web site and you can listen to the current and older shows through a Flash player. I'm impressed - he has impeccable taste when it comes to selecting songs, from songs by new and unknown bands to classic tracks from the 60s and 70s. Highly recommended.
I've known about the show for a while but haven't found it on the radio until recently I discovered that Toronto's Q107 plays it Sunday night at 10 p.m. That's not a great time for me to listen to it, but fortunately it's archived on his web site and you can listen to the current and older shows through a Flash player. I'm impressed - he has impeccable taste when it comes to selecting songs, from songs by new and unknown bands to classic tracks from the 60s and 70s. Highly recommended.
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Neal Stephenson interview in Salon
Salon Magazine has a lengthy interview with Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon. Most of it focuses on his new Baroque Cycle books, Quicksilver and The Confusion. (Salon requires registration but you can get a "day pass" by watching a brief Flash ad.)
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Say no to SDV
It's been more than a year since the loss of the Columbia, and it looks like it'll be at least another year before Shuttle flights resume, if they do resume. Since the disaster, there's been a lot of discussion and speculation about the future of the Shuttle program, including possible replacements. Some proposed replacements are Shuttle Derived Vehicles (SDV), converting the Shuttle into an unmanned cargo lifter. Space Daily has a good article about SDVs, pointing out many of the flaws and design challenges in these proposals. I wonder why NASA just doesn't pay Russia to restart the Energia program, or license the technology?
Star Wars trilogy details
The original Star Wars trilogy will finally be released on DVD in September and details are starting to come out on what will be included in the DVD set. It looks very cool, with more than 10 hours of extra material on a fourth disk, as well as commentaries for the movies.
Monday, April 19, 2004
Why car repairs are so expensive
It seems that the law of unintended consequences applies to car repairs; the use of advanced technologies in automobiles may be making them too expensive to repair, according to a long and absolutely fascinating article in the Christian Science Monitor. One case in point was the BMW rolled by a teenager; both car and teenager survived, but the cost of replacing the eight air bags in the car was more than the cost of a new vehicle. Another cause of expensive repairs is the use of electronics, which are only available from the manufacturers at retail price, and the use of lighweight matieral like aluminum and composites, which few body shops have the tools or expertise to deal with.
Another interesting point from the article - the repair manuals for a car can now total up to a million pages and are distributed only electronically. A million pages of manuals would probably weigh more than the vehicle, if printed. Maybe the future for technical writers is in the automotive industry?
Another interesting point from the article - the repair manuals for a car can now total up to a million pages and are distributed only electronically. A million pages of manuals would probably weigh more than the vehicle, if printed. Maybe the future for technical writers is in the automotive industry?
Sunday, April 18, 2004
Playlists of free MP3s
With all the music industry FUD about the evils of downloading music, it's easy to forget that there is a lot of legitimate and free music available for listening and downloading. It's a great promotional tool for artists and bands and many take advantage of it. There are also many groups who let people tape and circulate their live performannces (see the Internet Live Music Archive for a huge selection).
Now there's a service called WebJay that collects listener-created playlists of music that's available on the web. There's a pretty wide mix of music in these playlists, most of it by "unknown" artists, but it's an interesting idea and certainly beats browsing the radio dial for something interesting to listen to.
Now there's a service called WebJay that collects listener-created playlists of music that's available on the web. There's a pretty wide mix of music in these playlists, most of it by "unknown" artists, but it's an interesting idea and certainly beats browsing the radio dial for something interesting to listen to.
The British school of user interface design
According to this article, many of our software developers must have studied user interface design in Britain, where the ability to confuse and confound the user has been raised to a high art.
Friday, April 16, 2004
Interesting discussion about FrameMaker's future, alternatives
Recently, Adobe announced that it was discontinuing the Macintosh version of FrameMaker, and since then there's been a lot of discussion from both Macintosh and Windows FrameMaker users about FrameMaker's future and possible alternatives to FrameMaker. Although most of the discussion has been on the Mac side, I think it behooves Windows users of Frame to be keeping an eye out for alternatives. Adobe's support for FrameMaker has been less than committed and Frame is getting pretty long in the tooth.
MacInTouch has had an interesting discussion on this topic recently, and it's well worth a read. I was particularly interested to note that there some InDesign plugins available that provide some long-document features for InDesign (indexing and cross-references, for example), as I remember Adobe stressing the extensibility of InDesign at its launch six years ago. I've been hoping that something would come out of the open source movement, but so far the two leading contenders, OpenOffice and KWord, are both far from being a suitable replacement.
MacInTouch has had an interesting discussion on this topic recently, and it's well worth a read. I was particularly interested to note that there some InDesign plugins available that provide some long-document features for InDesign (indexing and cross-references, for example), as I remember Adobe stressing the extensibility of InDesign at its launch six years ago. I've been hoping that something would come out of the open source movement, but so far the two leading contenders, OpenOffice and KWord, are both far from being a suitable replacement.
Neal Stephenson interview in Wired
Wired magazine has an interview with Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and Quicksilver (which is still sitting on my shelf unread, sigh). His latest novel, The Confusion, is the sequel to Quicksilver and the second book of three in The Baroque Cycle, a very long (3,000 page) historical epic. Stephenson is an immensely frustrating writer; he's very inconsistent and he can't plot at novel length, but parts of his books are so brilliant that you don't remember the bad bits. If he ever figures out how to plot more tightly, he'll be brilliant. Snow Crash is still his best book, although parts of Cryptonomicon are sheer genius.
Thursday, April 15, 2004
Free Framescripts
If you're using FrameMaker and FrameScript, you may be intersted in some free scripts offered by Klaus Mueller. These were originally available only to members of the Yahoo framescript-users group, but are now posted to the ITL AG site. The GraphicsScale and PrettyPrint scripts are particularly useful. Thanks are due to Klaus for making these freely available when they are clearly good enough that he could justify charging for them.
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
More on converting Word to XML
CMS Watch has an excellent article by Michael Gross on the perils you might encounter when trying to convert Word doucments to XML. The problems lie not so much in Word's limitations as a tool (although there are many) but in the sloppy way that most untrained users (and most Word users are untrained) use the tool. Speaking from my own experience, I've seen all of the problems he cites in his examples in documents that I've had to edit, and more. If you are planning a project that involves converting Word to a structured format (or even to unstructured FrameMaker), you might want to look at this article first. You'll probably end up revising your time estimates after you read it.
Incidentally, CMS Watch looks like a site worth looking at if you are involved, or planning to get involved, in content management.
Incidentally, CMS Watch looks like a site worth looking at if you are involved, or planning to get involved, in content management.
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
The Memory Hole
It used to be a cliche of the Cold War, that certain unlucky Soviets became non-persons, written out of the official histories and their faces airbrushed out of photographs. Now, in the digital age, such manipulation of history is all too easy. Web pages can be altered or removed, often without anyone noticing. Sites like Google, the Wayback Machine, and Archive.org help to preserve the digital past. Now we also have The Memory Hole, which acts as a digital archive for things that some people (especially governments) would prefer to keep secret.
The largest portion of the site consists of material about the September 11 attacks, including police and firemens' transripts. There's also material from the US intelligence community and some oddball stuff, like mortuary procedures from like Dover Air Force Base. This is one site I'll be keeping a regular eye on as a good background to the news.
The largest portion of the site consists of material about the September 11 attacks, including police and firemens' transripts. There's also material from the US intelligence community and some oddball stuff, like mortuary procedures from like Dover Air Force Base. This is one site I'll be keeping a regular eye on as a good background to the news.
Monday, April 12, 2004
An historic day
Today is an historic day, the 43rd anniversary of the flight of Yuri Gagarin, the first human being to orbit the Earth. It's also the 23rd anniversary of the first flight of the space shuttle.
Gopherspace
When I first got on the Internet in 1993, Gopher was the primary means of browsing for information. Gopher servers organize information in a hierarchical directory structure, but without the hyperlinking of the World Wide Web. The Web offered more flash and more flexibility and Gopher soon faded into insignificance. But as this article in Wired points out, there are still more than 250 Gopher servers on the net, and developers are still developing for it.
I was surprised to learn that current browsers like Mozilla still offer support for Gopher, so you can still browse what's left of Gopherspace. It may look dated, but it does have its uses; it's a lot easier to write a Gopher client for a portable device like a PDA or a cell phone than it is to write a web client.
I was surprised to learn that current browsers like Mozilla still offer support for Gopher, so you can still browse what's left of Gopherspace. It may look dated, but it does have its uses; it's a lot easier to write a Gopher client for a portable device like a PDA or a cell phone than it is to write a web client.
Sunday, April 11, 2004
The Crazy Years - Part 8 - Illiteracy in action
The Guardian reports that a hospital paediatrician's home was vandalized because the local yobs mistook her job title for the word "paedophile". It seems that the British educational system has declined even has declined to a level paralleling the United States, where a teacher was disciplined for using the word "niggardly".
Saturday, April 10, 2004
Blind Lake nominated for a Hugo
I've been meaning to write a review of Robert Charles Wilson's latest novel, Blind Lake, but haven't had the time. But it gives me a great deal of pleasure to see that it has been nominated for a Hugo award. I've been a fan of Wilson's books ever since reading his first novel; he's almost certainly the best science fiction writer in Canada and one of the best writers in any genre - if he was writing mainstream fiction, he'd be getting the same acclaim as our other major mainstream novelists.
Blind Lake is his best novel and it's the best science fiction novel I've read in several years, at least since Vernor Vinge's A Deepness on the Sky. I don't think any review of mine could do this wonderful book justice, so here's a brief quote from Robert Saywer's review on Amazon.ca (Saywer is also nominated for a Hugo for Humans). "Beautiful, often poetic prose; finely nuanced characters; science right at the cutting edge; and great metaphysical/philosophical ruminations. What more could one ask? Let's hope this one snares Wilson his well-deserved Hugo and Nebula Awards." And here's a review on SFRevu.com which pretty much echoes my thoughts on the book. I really do hope that Wilson wins the Hugo (and the Nebula too, for that matter), he deserves it.
Blind Lake is his best novel and it's the best science fiction novel I've read in several years, at least since Vernor Vinge's A Deepness on the Sky. I don't think any review of mine could do this wonderful book justice, so here's a brief quote from Robert Saywer's review on Amazon.ca (Saywer is also nominated for a Hugo for Humans). "Beautiful, often poetic prose; finely nuanced characters; science right at the cutting edge; and great metaphysical/philosophical ruminations. What more could one ask? Let's hope this one snares Wilson his well-deserved Hugo and Nebula Awards." And here's a review on SFRevu.com which pretty much echoes my thoughts on the book. I really do hope that Wilson wins the Hugo (and the Nebula too, for that matter), he deserves it.
Friday, April 09, 2004
The Exorcist in 30 seconds
Seeing as it's Holy Week and all, I thought this seemed appropriate. It's the funniest thing I've seen on the net since Cows with Guns.
Thursday, April 08, 2004
Bert Rutan gets sub-orbital license
Bert Rutan and his company Scaled Composites has received a license to fly his SpaceShip One to suborbital altitudes. Rutan is one of the leading contenders for the X-Prize, to be the first company to fly a reusable spacecraft to sub-orbital altitude. He's recently added a thermal protection system to his spacecraft, so it looks like he'll be ready to go soon.
Update: He isn't wasting any time. SpaceShip One made it's second powered flight yesterday, to an altitude of 105,000 feet and a speed of Mach 2.
Update: He isn't wasting any time. SpaceShip One made it's second powered flight yesterday, to an altitude of 105,000 feet and a speed of Mach 2.
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
Coyote
Coyote is the latest science ficiton novel by Allen Steele. Billed as "a novel of interstellar exploration", it's more of a novel of interstellar colonization and a coming of age story. It starts off with a group of "dissident intellectuals" hijacking a starship from a repressive American regime, then travelling 47 light years to Coyote, the habitable moon of a gas giant planet. where they set up a colony they call Liberty. The novel is what John Brunner referred to as a fix-up, a collection of short stories welded into novel form. Some of the parts are very good, but overall the shifts in point of view and tone weaken the book a bit, and the ending seemed rushed and a bit implausible to me. Still, it's good entertainment, even if it doesn't break any new ground. Science Fiction Weekly has a longer review here.l
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Ringworld TV series
The Sci-Fi Channel has announced that it is producing a 4 hour miniseries based on Larry Niven's SF classic Ringworld. That is one I am really looking forward to seeing. Digital effects are good enough now that the Puppeteers might be doable.
Now THIS is a subwoofer!
If I won a big lottery, I'd probably want a new house with it's own audio/visual room. And I'd hire Royal Design to build it. They've built the most amazing subwoofer I've ever heard of, with a 60 cubic meter cavity and capable of putting out 100 watts at 10 Hz with 1 watt input. It's below the floor of the listening room. It'd be interesting to hear what it sounds like with a crispy Grateful Dead soundboard recording.
Star Trek at sea
ComputerWorld has a well-illustrated article on the US Navy's new ship, the Swift, a 246 foot, high speed catamaran. The interesting thing about this ship is not it's speed (which isn't stated in the article) but it's high degree of computer automation. The ship is steered with a joystick and the bridge looks like something out of Star Trek. There are no paper charts.
Monday, April 05, 2004
World Wide Words
Here's another good word-related site, World Wide Words, compiled by author and language expert Michael Quinion. "All the pieces here are about English words and phrases—what they mean, where they came from, how they have evolved, and the ways in which people sometimes misuse them." Fair warning: this site could be a real time sink.
Sunday, April 04, 2004
Ghost Town
Living as I do, a couple of kilometres from the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, I found Ghost Town is more than a little unsettling. It's a photographic tour through what remains of the town of Chernobyl, site of the world's worst nuclear accident in 1986. The photographs are poignant, eerie, and disturbing. I don't usually worry much about safety at Pickering; Candu reactors are inherently safer than the Soviet design that exploded at Chernobyl and our operating standards are high. But I'd feel a bit safer if I knew that everyone working at PNGS had seen this photo essay.
Mainly Martian
Mainly Martian is a blog about Mars, written by Oliver Morton, the author of the book Mapping Mars. The latest posts are about the discovery of methane in the Martian atmosphere and go into a lot more detail than anything I've seen in the media, or anywhere else online for that matter. If you're interested in matters Martian, this is one to bookmark.
Friday, April 02, 2004
Dreams of Space
If you are interested in space, art, or science fiction, Dreams of Space is for you. It's a large collection of space-oriented art, well organized, and with sources provided. Most of the art appears to be scanned from books. I'm going to save some of these images for my wallpaper directory.
Thursday, April 01, 2004
Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness
To go along with the This is Broken site, here's the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness. Most of the entries in this hall of shame are illustrantions, not manuals, but I particularly like the "User Manure" on page 3. Note that the site has been Slashdotted, so it may be hard to reach for a while.
This is broken
This is Broken is a blog devoted to bad design and broken implementations, like exit signs with arrows that point away from the exit and dialog boxes that are too small for their error messages. It's funny and sad at the same time. Software developers who have to write error messages should pay special attention to some of the flubs shown here. (Note that it's not all software shown either; there are lots of other "real world" examples.)
