Core Dump

Gordon Meyer's Usable Help has an interesting rant on job titles for technical writers. A snippet: "Technical writing is another profession that doesn't get much respect, and as a result many of its people are eagerly seeking new important-sounding titles for themselves so they can avoid the plain-vanilla label of 'tech writer.'"

My title, incidentally, is "technical writer". I can live with that, though I'd prefer "information developer", because a lot of what I do isn't writing.

I saw The Day After Tomorrow yesterday. It turned out to be better than I thought it would be based on some of the reviews I'd seen. I had no expectations for any sort of intelligent plot, based on the previous track record from the producers/director (Indenpendence Day, Godzilla). It wasn't quite as dumb as Independence Day. I got about what I expected, a big, silly B movie with some good special effects.

It's hockey season in Canada and for the first time in a decade, a Canadian Team, the Calgary Flames, is in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Tom Eagles has this to contribute:

The Lord's Player - Canadian version

Our country,
Which art up north,
Hockey be thy game.
Thy summer come,
But not for long;
In our country,
As it is in Minnesota.
Give us this game,
Our daily fix,
And lead us not into OT
But deliver us regulation victory.

For thine is the pass, the shot, and the goal.
Amen.

(c) Tom Eagles 2004

Thanks to Mike Bryans for passing along a link to this article about the Festival Express, the mystical 1970 rock and roll train trip across Canada, with the Dead, the Band, Janis Joplin and others. The film footage has somehow surived and been made into a film that will be released on DVD in the fall. I'm looking forward to seeing it; I never heard about it until after it was over, but any chance to see the 1970s Dead would have been worth it. Based on personal experience, 5 minutes could change your life.

There are several good mata-news sites, Google News being among the best, and several image search sites. Newsimage.com combines the two functions, presenting images from the news. You can search the site or browse by topic. Clicking on an image links you to the story. I like this site; it's fun to browse.

I noted here recently that Google are reported to be working on a desktop search tool. Now, according to Wired, Microsoft are developing a similar tool and it should be released in the next year or so. Next to Linux, I suspect that Google are Microsoft's worst nightmare, so this isn't a surprise.

Indexing is one of those things that technical writers love to hate. We know that indexes are one of the primary ways that users access information in a book or an online help system, and we know that producing a good index is one of the skills that make us valuable. Yet how many technical writers like indexing? How many of us can actually produce a good index? Not that many, I'd wager.

I've been trying to improve my indexing skills for a while now, but finding information about how to produce a good index hasn't been easy. Now Bright Path Solutions have just released a white paper called "Creating Usable Indexes: A Systematic Approach to Editing Indexes for Quality and Usability". Its 21 pages provide the best guidelines on indexing I've seen in my entire technical writing career. This paper is a gem; in fact it's one of the best pieces of technical writing instruction that I've seen anywhere. If you are at all interested in improving your indexing skills, request it from Bright Path. Your readers will thank you.

(Dislaimer: I have no relationship with Bright Path Solutions. This is a completely unsolicitited bit of praise for an excellent piece of work.)

Update: I should have mentioned that the author of the paper is Dick Evans, who certainly deserves some credit. I posted this note to techwr-l and it got jumped on because of the description of the whitepaper as "free". One poster complained that it's not free, because you have to give them your email. I don't think that Bright Path have any nefarious reasons for not making it available for open download (perhaps bandwidth contraints), but if you're paranoid about things like that you can always use a disposable email account.

theofficeblog is a blog for office suites. Most of the posts deal with MS Office, as you might expect as it is the most popular, but there are a reasonable number of posts about other office suites and groupware.

Phish, the Vermont-based jam band who have become my favourite live band over the last few years, have announced that they are splitting up at the end of their summer tour. I've only seen them live once and thoroughly enjoyed the show, as much for the crowd vibe which was strongly reminiscent of a Grateful Dead concert, as for the music, which was wonderful. I like improvisational music and Phish are about as good at it as anybody. As much as I'm going to miss them, I respect their decision to call it quits before they turn into a nostalgia act.

MSNBC has an interesting commentary about what George Lucas needs to do to save Star Wars Episode III. Let's face it; Episode I was awful and II not a lot better. Something needs to be done and this article has several suggestions. Some are tongue in cheek (hire Ed Wood to direct), but others (like getting a writer of the calibre of Leigh Brackett, who worked on the first episode) make a lot of sense. As for me, I'm not holding my breath, but I am looking forward to the DVD release of episodes IV-VI in the fall.

MSNBC has an interesting commentary about what George Lucas needs to do to save Star Wars Episode III. Let's face it; Episode I was awful and II not a lot better. Something needs to be done and this article has several suggestions. Some are tongue in cheek (hire Ed Wood to direct), but others (like getting a writer of the calibre of Leigh Brackett, who worked on the first episode) make a lot of sense. As for me, I'm not holding my breath, but I am looking forward to the DVD release of episodes IV-VI in the fall.

I've been using a table-based design for my personal site pretty much since I put it on the web. I use CSS for styles, but not for layout. I've been thinking about moving to a more "modern" layout, using CSS for menus and positioning, but I haven't had time to implement it, and I'm not that familiar with some of the more advanced CSS features. This article gives a good comparison of the table vs. CSS design and concludes that there are still good reasons for using tables in web site layout.

I watched Big Fish last night and was completely blown away by it. I haven't liked much of Tim Burton's recent work, but he's defintely returned to form with Big Fish. It was warm, funny, and surreal. I think you'd have to watch it about three times to get all of the little things going on in the background. Highly recommended.

Susan's 2020 Hindsight blog has an interesting post on JPL's open house, with including pictures of some prototype Mars rovers. Also on her blog a few days earlier is a post about Spirit having had to be rebooted due to a software glitch, something that I hadn't seen posted elsewhere.

A couple of good thought-provoking articles in the weekend newspapers.

First, from the Globe and Mail, "The Larder is Bare" describing global declines in grain and other farming production due to climate change. Could we be on the cusp of food shortages and more famines?

The second, from the Toronto Star, "Cuba shuts out shoppers over tough U.S. sanctions". Could a recent crack-down by the U.S. on shipments of goods to Cuba be a harbringer of a campaign by the Bush government to forment economic discontent in Cuba, or even to oust Castro? Just in time for the fall election?

Making online help context sensitive is probably the hardest task that authors of help systems face. It's technically challenging, adds extra work to the authoring cycle, and requires substantial effort from the developers of the application as well. It's enough of an effort that many applications never get more than a help menu to start the help system.

LinKit! by Affixion is a tool that lets you add context senstivity to help system without having to modify the application source code. It works by associating help windows with windows in the application and linking them to a separate program that users run to open the help to the correct window. Tony Self has written a lengthy review of it which WinWriters has published. LinKit! has some limitations, it's Windows-based and only works on HTML Help (.chm) files. But for some organizations, it might be the fastest and easist, or even the only, way of adding context sensitive help to an application.

Techwr-l is the technical writing mailing list. I've been a techwr-l member for many years, but I stopped getting the list mail because I just couldn't keep up with the message traffic. I now prefer to skim the message headers, looking for interesting messages or threads. But the web interface is awkward and painfully slow.

Well, now there is a better way, assuming that you just want to read techwr-l. If you want to post or reply to messages, you'll need to use the web interface or an email program.

First you need to need a feed reader that can handle Atom feeds. I'm using Bloglines, which is web based, because I can use it from anywhere I have Internet access.

For some years, Google has been publishing Usenet newsgroups on the Web. (If you don't know about Usenet, you can read more about it in my article "Usenet for Technical Writers" at www.raycomm.com). Techwr-l has had a Usenet feed since it started; that was actually how I first started reading it, via a BBS-Usenet bridge before I had Internet access. You can read techwr-l on the newsgroup bit.listserv.techwr-l. You could use the standard Google Groups interface to read it, but their new feed syndication makes it even easier. Go to groups-beta.google.com and search for techwr-l. Click on the bit.listserv.techwr-l link and you'll see the most recent techwr-l messages.

Below the search field is a More link. Click it. You'll get a summary page for the group that has all sorts of interesting information (links to each month's messages and lists of the frequent contributors). At the bottom there are links to the Atom syndication feeds. Right-click on Recent Message Summaries and copy the link.

Now go back to your reader and subscribe, using the link you copies from Google. You'll see only the beginning of each post, but if you click on the message subject you'll jump to the full message on Google. You might find that there's a lag between when a message is posted on the techwr-l list and when it shows up in Google Groups, but if you read the list infrequently, that's probably not going to be an issue for you.

Why do it this way, and not use Google directly, you might ask? Well, you certainly could, but the reason I use a feed reader (Bloglines in my case) is that I have the site feeds for about thirty web sites on one web page, which I can read from anywhere I have Internet access, showing all the most recent updates. It's far, far, faster and easier to go here than jumping all over the Web. If I want to reply to a techwr-l post, it takes a minute or two to get back to the techwr-l site so I can post.

Update: As someone on the techwr-l list kindly pointed out, Bloglines offers email subscriptions, so you can easily set up a mailing list subscription and feed it to Bloglines. I'm using this now for techwr-l. It's not threaded, so it's not as easy to read messages as the Google Groups interface, but it's still nice to have it on the same page as all my other feeds.

On Saturday, March 20, more than 180 photographers in 40 countries around the world celebrated the Equinox by creating VR panoramas. This site showcases the results of their efforts.

I really like QuickTime VR panoramas and there are lots of them here. If you feel cooped up and want to take a quick trip around the world, this is a good way of doing it.

The DVD of last year's Toronto SARS-stock concert will be released as a 2-disk set in Canada and a single disk elsewhere in the world. About 90 percent of the concert will be included in the 2-disk set, with a fair amount of bonus material as well. This CANOE article includes the full list of tracks included. I wouldn't mind watching this, though I doubt that I'll spring for $40 bucks for the set. Might make a decent rental though. If you want the Stones, go for their 4 Flicks DVD, which is outstanding.

I guess this could go under "learn something new every day" category. The New York Times has a short article describing how you can use PowerPoint to run a slide show of images. This is something that never occured to me to try before this (I usually use IrfanView at home), but it sounds like a useful technique.

I guess this could go under "learn something new every day" category. The New York Times has a short article describing how you can use PowerPoint to run a slide show of images. This is something that never occured to me to try before this (I usually use IrfanView at home), but it sounds like a useful technique.

If you're writing documentation in XML, should you be using a WYSIWYG tool? Does seeing the layout (or an approximation of the layout) help or hinder you to see the document's underlying structure?

That's the discussion that's currently going on in a message thread on the the techwr-l mailing list. If you want to read it, you can either subscribe to the list, or view the thread through the Usenet bit.listserv.techwr-l newsgroup mirror (the link is to the new Google Groups beta). It's one of the more interesting discussions that I've seen on techwr-l recently.

For me, I find that visual cues to the layout are helpful. I've worked both ways, full WYSIWYG (Word and FrameMaker), and markup only (HTML editing in a text editor, IBM GML on a mainframe terminal). The Blogger interface to this blog is plain text with markup tags, for example. But there are some good reasons to have an idea of what your final layout will look like; for example, I like to keep my help topics to about one screen in length. And in the real world, most authors will be used to a WYSIWYG environment. Where it gets interesting is when you're writing for multiple outputs at the same time. Those of us who've had to struggle with juggling several condition tags in FrameMaker will know the mental contortions that can cause.

According to this article in the New York Times, Google is preparing to introduce a tool that will allow you to search the data on your PC. The article bills it as a direct challenge to Microsoft, which is planning to introduce powerful search technology into the next (Longhorn) version of Windows.

Personally, I'd rather use something developed by Google than by Mirosoft; at least so far, they seem to be a more ethical company. And I could use a good search tool for my PC. I've tried a couple, and none of them have been very satisfactory.

Apparently it is now possible to emulate a Mac running OS/X on a Intel-based PC. This article shows it in action. The major problem is that the emulation runs at about 1/40th the speed of the host processor, so it'd be running at about 40 MHz on my 1.7 GHz P4. Let's see, that's about twice the speed of the the 386-20 I had 15 years ago. Let's hope the emulator gets a speedup - 1/10 the speed of the host PC might be usable, at least to play around with and startle your friends when they visit.

Major Geeks is primarily a site for downloading those esoteric utilities that true geeks like playing with. There's a lot of good and useful stuff here, organized by category, so it's easy to find. There's also a message board, which I'm going to try out to see if I can get an answer to a problem I'm having with my kid's PC.

Complete RSS is a search engine for RSS feeds. It looks promising, for example, a search on "science fiction" turned up 20 feeds. If you're too lazy to search, there are some links to lists of popular categories.

XML is widely regarded as the coming thing in technical writing; XML evangelists promise that the day of single-click publishing of content to multiple platforms and types of documents is just over the horizon, or maybe even here now. Well, CreativePro has an article about a designer's experience with a FrameMaker/XML publishing system. It's not pretty, though it is funny in a painful way.

There's been a lot of discussion about the article on the framers mailing list. I'd recommend reading it if you're thinking about adopting XML, be it with FrameMaker or some other tool. It gives a real-world perspective on the problems that you might encounter.

I've been getting a lot of spam recently, especially on my Rogers.com account, so I read the cover story of the April 19 InfoWorld, "E-mail is broken", with special interest. It's a long article and includes some pieces written by industry luminaries like Ray Ozzie and Dave Winer. The more I read about this subject, the more convinced I am that the basic e-mail architecture has been fundamentally broken by the spam onslaught, and that some serious work needs to be done to fix it. This article proposes some solutions, although some of the authors feel that email is now being superseded by new technologies like RSS feeds. I tend to skim through InfoWorld pretty quickly, but this article kept my interest. Definitely worth a read.

There's an interesting post on Jerry Pournelle's web site about the hysteria in the US over terrorism, Islamists, and Al Quaeda. The overall point is that it's not a huge issue and certainly didn't justify the invasion of Iraq. I think that the US (and most of the western world) has gone way overboard on security after 9/11, although some concern is certainly justified (I wouldn't want to see what would happen if Al Quaeda got their hands on a stolen Russian nuke, for example). However, the US should never have invaded Iraq and are now reaping the fruits of their actions. Anyway, it's an interesting post and worth reading, as Pourelle's site often is.

Neil Gaiman has posted his Hugo-nominated short story, "Study in Emerald" to his web site. It's a combination of Sherlock Holmes mystery and H.P. Lovecraft horror.

Google is adding Atom feed syndication to its Usenet service, Google Groups. I've been using the Usenet for a long time, even before I got on the Internet (via a BBS link), and I still follow about a dozen groups daily. This is going to have a major effect on the Usenet world, and it should make newsgroups a lot easier to read.

Google is beta testing the new version of Google Groups if you want to check it out. If you don't know anything about the Usenet and want to learn about it, see my article, Usenet for Technical Writers.

Architect Frank Gehry has been getting a lot of press in Toronto recently for his redesign of the Art Gallery of Ontario and his trophy design for the World Cup of hockey.

He also does organs. This article in the New York Times gives a good overview of the complexities of his design for the pipe organ in the new Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. I'd love to hear it in action, the 32 foot bass pipes should have a real rumble.

Disney animators have completed a six minute animated short film, based on the work of Salvador Dali, that was began in the 1940s and abandonned due to lack of funds. The short is being shown at film festivals and will be released with a Disney feature next year. This is one that I'd really like to see; I've always liked Dali's art (and surrealism in general), and it sounds like they did this right.

A study reported on Scientific American indicates that regular small doses of caffeine do a better job of keeping you awake than irregular large doses. In other words, if you want to stay awake, you should have about two ounces per hour, instead of starting the day with that extra large cup. Something to keep in mind at crunch time.

The nominees for the 2004 short fiction Hugo awards are now online. The Hugos are an annual award, voted on by science fiction fans, and awarded at the World Science Fiction Convention. If you want some good (and free) reading material, this is it.

I've mentioned the Internet Live Music Archive here before. They're part of the larger Internet Archive project which archives web sites, music, video, and movies. Obviously they need a lot of storage, and they're now assembling a petabyte server system. A petabyte is one million gigabytes. That sounds like a huge amount, but it's not really. A home system or a home network will probably be up to a terabyte in a few years. But I wonder how they plan on backing it up?

I've changed the way comments work on the blog. I was using a free, third-party script from Haloscan. But with today's update, Blogger is now offering comments as part of the basic service, so I'm using that instead. It has the advantage that I will be notified by email whenever someone makes a comment, and I can also save postings with comments as a separate page, should the discussion be interesting enough.

Unfortunately, one side effect of the switchover is that previous comments are now gone. I can't see any way of saving them, sorry.

Being very nearsighted, I try to pay some attention to visual accessibility in my documents and web sites. My pet peeve is sites that insist on forcing a font size that's usually about 50 percent too small to easily readable and block the standard browser and operating system mechanisms for enlarging the text. Designers who do that should be forced to sit down and read every page on WebAIM.org. WebAIM stands for Web Accessibility in Mind, and after you've had a look at the site you'll have a much better idea of web accessibility, issues, tools, and techniques. This is an excellent site and I'll be referring to it a lot if I ever find the time to do the redesign of my home page that I've been thinking about for the last year or two.

Blogger just got a major facelift. You won't see the changes in this blog (yet), but from an author's point of view, it just got a lot easier to use. I may change the comments over from the HaloScan comments to the built-in Blogger comments, and I have to look at the new templates. Dan Gillmor has a good article on the changes.

According to this note in the New York Times music column, a DVD about the great Detroit band, the MC5, may never get released, because of legal disputes between the surviving band members and the filmmakers. That's a damn shame, because the MC5 were arguably the best rock band ever to come out of Detroit, if not the entire US midwest, and were a fascinating combination of rock and roll energy, political activism, and total anarchy. I was attending university in Windsor while they were at their peak, and remember the excitement about the release of their first album, but I never did see them live, much to my regret. I do hope that the legal mess around the DVD gets cleared up as the bands story deserves it and I'm sure the performance footage will blow a few minds.

John Udell's blog on InfoWorld has a review of Adobe Designer 6, Adobe's form designer for Acrobat. Looks like Adobe is aiming it drectly at Microsoft's InfoPath product. If you're working extensively with Acrobat forms this will probably be a must upgrade.

Bloglines is a free, web-based, RSS feed aggregator. I've been looking at a number of RSS feed agregators over the last few months, since I first discovered them. I ended up using BottomFeeder and I'm reasonably happy with it, but I'm much happier with Bloglines. It's fast, the feeds are nicely formatted, you can organize them into folders, and best of all, it's web based, so I can use it from any PC that has an Internet connection. Since I can't install or use a feed aggregator at work, this is a real plus. Highly recommended.

CNN has a story on rotting CDs- disks that won't play because the aluminum layer that contains the data has corrorded. I've seen this personally; I have a Grateful Dead double CD, Without a Net, released in 1990, which became unplayable a few years ago. The disk now looks tarnished. I haven't seen this happen to any other of my CDs (yet), but it wouldn't surpirse me as there are quite a few I haven't played in a while. I've also had a couple of CDRs become unreadable, but that may be due to a different decay mechanism. For my money, the most permanent storage medium for data is probably still a book printed on high-quality, acid-free paper. And I suspect that LPs will prove to be much more long lasting than CDs, at least LPs made from quality vinyl (which excludes most LPs from the mid-1970s onward). Note that both of these are analog storage media.

I used to have a large collection of LPs (if you're under twenty, they're those 12" black things that look like dinner plates), mostly now replaced with CDs. I'm not one of those audiophile nut-cases who think that LPs sound "better" or "warmer" or "more natura" than CDs, and my turntable has been broken and unrepaired for years. But I still have some music on LP that isn't available on CD and that I'd like to convert to a digital format. (Easily enough done, if I ever get around to getting a new cartridge for my turntable and find the time to do it.)

But what if your album is badly scratched, dirty, or even broken. Now researchers have come up with a viable way of scanning an album with a laser, then using a computer to play it with a virtual cartridge, perfectly reproducing the sound. The advantage of this technique is that you can play even pieces of a broken record and digitally stich them together. The Library of Congress is hoping to use this technique to digitize some of the old recordings in their archive, which are too fragile or damaged to play with a standard turntable.

My site feed seems to be broken and I have no idea of how to fix it. As far as I can tell all the blogger settings are correct and the file itself is OK. If anyone reading this can help me to debug it, please email me or reply via comment here.

If you enjoy this blog, you'd probably like Rick Henkel's blog, FrameMaker and Other Stuff. As it's title suggests, there are some very interesting and useful posts about FrameMaker and related software, and a mix of other things for variety.

Eric K. Drexler has been called the father of nanotechnology. (If you don't know what nanotechnology is, you're reading the wrong blog). His book, Engines of Creation, helped to popularize the term before there were any of the practical applications we're seeing now. He now has a web site with quite a bit of information abut nanotechnology research, inclusing citations to scientific papers if you want to dig deeper.

If you like cats, you might want to check out Cat Planet It's a new site, devoted to cat fanciers, and published by my friends Cecil and Maria Leung. They're looking for pictures of your cat, if you uwant to submit one. There's a message board and articles about cat care and cat health. I particularly like the site's tagline: "It's their planet. We just live on it." And yes, I live with a cat, and the tagline speaks truth.

Today is the 34th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, where Ohio National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of unarmed students, killing four, some as far as 700 feet away from the Guardsmen. No one has ever been prosecuted for the massacre.

According to this BBC article, the supercomputer that Meta Digital developed to do the digital animation for the Lord of the Rings movies ranks as the third largest in the world. They have 3,300 processors and 500 terabytes of data. Not bad for a company that had only one computer in 1993!

OfficeZealot.com is a site that has the goal of providing "a reference to the best sources on the web for the Office user, developer and IT support specialist". This isn't a site for the user who just wants to find out how to do a simple task, like modifying a paragraph style; rather it's a good site for anyone who wants to push the envelope in Office. There's links to blog and MSDN articles on Office covering a the full spectrum of components, including Smart Tags, which I haven't seen much on elsewhere. If you use Office a lot, and especially if you have to develop for it, this is a good site to watch.

A recent posting by Christoph Nahr in the comp.text.frame newsgroup goes into more detail on using Word with DocBook. Apparently it's not as bleak a situation as first thought, although it would require some serious work to set up the transformations.

In his post, there's mention of a blog by Mary McRea which has quite a bit of content about Word and XML, as well as her office-xml.com site, which appears to be a work in progress but is still worth looking at if you're using (or planning on using) the XML features built into MS Office.

Bruce Sterling has a new novel called The Zenith Angle. His recent novels have focused on the effects of technology in a near future; The Zenith Angle is set in the post 9/11, post dot.com present. Salon magazine has a review of it; here's a brief quote: "Because if Sterling is channeling any of his own emotions through his lead character, Derek Vandeveer, then it is safe to say that he has not been a happy camper of late. "The Zenith Angle" is an outburst of rage -- broiling, tumultuous fury -- directed at terrorists and amoral capitalists alike." This is defintely one book I'm going to read.

In my Technical Writer's Toolkit article below, I mentioned the GIMP as an open source alternative to Photoshop. It's been quite a while since I used the GIMP, and I remember that it wasn't a particularly friendly application, though it did have most of the features I needed at the time. Now a Mac user has taken the time to write an article about his experience with The GIMP, and it's not pretty. The GIMP gets blasted for it's speed, usability, quality of output, and many other factors. Sadly, this seems typical for many open source tools; they have the features, but implementation and usability leave a lot to be desired.

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

I have to admit that I'm a software junkie. I like playing with software, and I'm always on the lookout for new tools that might save me a bit of time or just make it easier for me to do something. Much of the time, the new software gets installed, used once or twice, and uninstalled or forgotten, but once in a while I come across something truly useful, and it becomes a part of my standard toolkit. In this column, I'm going to present a few of these tools. All of them are either freeware or low-cost shareware.

We all use dictionaries, or we should. Most word processing and desktop publishing packages include a dictionary, but they often aren't very good. Online dictionaries, such as Merriam Webster, are an alternative, but you have to be online and load up your browser. Usually I prefer to look up a word on my own PC. For that, I use WordWeb, a small, fast, and free dictionary, containing about 140,000 definitions. For most words, along with the definition, it also shows synonyms and antonyms. The synonym lookup makes WordWeb doubly useful, as you can use it as a thesaurus. You can download an unsupported template that will let you hook WordWeb into MS Word. There is a professional version, costing $20 US, which offers a large dictionary and wildcard searches, (very useful if you are an indifferent speller), and they also sell industry-specific dictionaries. But the free version is probably good enough for most people.

TreePad is a Swiss knife utility. It's a note taker, an outliner, a FAQ and web site builder, a database, a PIM, and more. Yet it's small, fast, and easy to use. Think of it as a combination of Notepad with a hierarchical outliner, but with a lot of extensions. I've used it to keep track of things I have to do on complicated projects, as I can keep a list of to do items easily organized by book. It's not as flexible or powerful as the late and much lamented Ecco Pro, but it's a lot better than anything else I've come across recently. There is a free version and a commercial version with extensive export facilities that make it easy to assemble a collection of notes and save them as a web site, with a dynamic table of contents. You could even use it to do web-based help, at about 1/30 the cost of WebWorks Publisher or RoboHelp.

Although FrameMaker remains the tool of choice for technical writers, most would agree that's it's interface is dated and lacks some useful features. MicroType's Express Customization for FrameMaker goes a long way to making FrameMaker easier to use. It adds paragraph style, character style, and font drop-down lists, a wide range of useful keyboard shortcuts and toolbar button commands, and modifies the help menu to include links to all of the FrameMaker online documents, as well as some provided with the toolbar. And it's free. This one goes on every copy of FrameMaker that I use.

If you do much web or help authoring, you've probably had to incorporate someone else's HTMl into your projects. If that code was generated by Microsoft Word, for example, it could be pretty bloated and messy. HTML Tidy is a free tool which will clean up HTML code. It strips most of the non-standard code from HTML files generated by MS Office applications, completes incomplete tags, fix incorrect nesting, convert HTML to XHTML, and has many other useful capabilities. It can also be used as a plug-in to some HTML editors, such as DreamWeaver and HTML-Kit.

For most technical writers, a commercial graphics editor like PhotoShop or PaintShop Pro is overkill. IrfanView may be a good alternative. It is small, very fast, and has a wealth of features, mostly oriented to viewing graphics of virtually any format. It also has some basic editing capabilities and will do screen captures. If you work with a lot of screen captures, it has an excellent thumbnail and browse mode. It's free for non-commercial use and the commercial license is a very reasonable $10 U.S. If you need more editing power, the GIMP is a free, open-source graphics editor that rivals the power of PhotoShop. It's widely used on UNIX and Linux systems, but runs on Windows and Macintosh too.