Core Dump

Florida Today has a Cassini journal to cover the arrival of NASA's Cassini probe at Saturn later tonight. Latest news is that they may have trouble receving signals because high winds in Australia may make it impossible to use the large antenna there.

With all of the buzz recently about Bert Rutan's flight of SpaceShipOne, it's interesting to note that amateur rocketeers are facing an increasingly harsh environment in the United States, according to this story from Wired. That's sad news, as a whole generation of kids will never experience the thrill of launching their own rocket. Either that, or they'll have to live down reputations as proto-terrorists. I remember, as a teenager, going across the river to Soo Michigan to buy Estes rocket motors, because they weren't legally available for sale in Canada, and coming back across the bridge with a pocket full of them. Lord knows what would happen now if I tried that, probably safer to smuggle dope.

PC World examines some of the urban legends surrounding the computer field in this article. For example, using a magnet to hold a floppy disk to the fridge really will wipe the disk (does anybody use floppies any more?), but it's not true that a magnet will wipe your camera's flash memory card. I'd still like a definitive answer, though, to whether I should leave my computer on or turn it off at night (I leave it on, but turn the monitor off).

The New York Times has a good article about the complexiities of modern technology and how users are having trouble dealing with it. I could have been a test case for the article a few weeks ago, when I tried to figure out how to set up the surround sound on my home theatre receiver, a task make considerably more complex by my having misplaced the (thick and reasonably coherent) manual.

Here's a good quote from the article:

We're very sensitive to the notion that software today does more than it ever has, and we have put a big effort on making everything usable," said Greg Sullivan, the lead product manager of Windows at Microsoft. "We also make sure the capability that's there is relevant and easy to access and discover."

"If it's a feature you can't find," he added, "it might as well not be a feature."

This last sentence is so true, especially when in the case of Microsoft Word. I spent some time last week trying to find information about a feature that I knew Word had, the ability to have a heading and another paragraph on the same line. It's called a style separator, and I finally found the information about it by doing a Google search. But, as far as I can tell, it's not anywhere in Word's own help.

The Space Review "is a new online publication devoted to in-depth articles, commentary, and reviews regarding all aspects of space exploration: science, technology, policy, business, and more". This one's a keeper - lots of interesting, well written, and well researched articles. Unfortunately they don't seem to have an RSS feed, but you can sign up for email notification when new articles are published.

Although modern games are incredibly realistic, I've found that I'm not playing as much as I used to. The newer games are getting too complex and require too much time and effort. The interface for Diablo II, for example, is more complicated than the software I'm documenting at work. I've found that when I want a quick game fix, I often go back to early, vintage games from the 1980s, like Galaxian or Breakout.

It looks like I'm not alone. Rocky Mountain News has an article that goes into detail about this trend. The big winner seems to be Jakks Pacific, whose one-piece controller/joystick containing 10 classic Atari games has been incredibly successful. (I want one, you reading this Nancy?) Nintendo is getting in the act with classic game packs for the GameBoy Advance.

Oddly, the article doesn't mention MAME, which is a software emulator for classic arcade games that lets you play thousands of classic games on a PC. Note that MAME is just the emulator; you'll need to find the ROMS elsewhere.

The Dead, the post-Jerry Garcia incarnation of the Grateful Dead, are on tour. They're not coming to Toronto this time, unfortunately, but I've been able to salve the pain by downloading the free songs that they're making available from the tour. Each night a different band member picks one song from the show to put up on dead.net. The songs are available in both MP3 and lossless (AIFF or FLAC) formats and sound great. If I had to pick a favourite, it would be the delicate version of Cassidy from June 19th.

So far I've made up one disk with the first seven songs and a couple from the tour rehearsal sessions to fill out the disk. And as an aside, I was able to burn an 81 minute 36 second disk onto a Memorex 80 minute CD.

Too bad Phish aren't giving away any freebies from their final tour, although some MP3s have shown up on Kazaa. And you can download entire shows from LivePhish.com at a reasonable price. (The Dead's shows are also available for purchase, but they're taking a lower-tech approach; you have to order the shows, which are later mailed to you.)

I've been spending an inordinate amount of time fighting spyware and adware that gets installed on our home machines. At this point, all of my machines are running Norton Anti-Virus, Ad-Aware, and Spybot Search and Destroy, and I think I've got things reasonably under control.

Wired has an article about fighting spyware in which they compare the effectiveness of several products. SpyBot Search and Destroy seems to be the best, although I've found that Ad-Aware catches some things that it misses.

Business Week has an article about the business of adware which mentions some of the larger companies behind some of it. While adware may be more "benign" than spyware (as the article puts it), I sure as heck don't want any of it on my computers, and I'm going to do everything I can to keep it that way.

I first remember coming across the term FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) in connecetion with Microsoft's marketing practices of the early 1990s. If this article is accurate, Microsoft is still at it, throwing it's money around to get people worried about Linux. The article also shows how the tobacco companies were paying to get publicity that smoking really wasn't that bad for your health.

The latest issue of Discover Magazine has a thought-provoking cover article about space elevators. The web site has a brief snippet from the article - you'll need to be a Discover subscriber to read it online. This is one case where the article is worth buying the magazine for.

Space elevators aren't a new concept - I first remember reading about the idea in Arthur Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise and Charles Sheffield's first novel, The Web Between the Worlds in the late 1970s. The concept has always seemed really science fictional, but recent NASA studies have shown that it's not that far-fetched; in fact, it's actually feasible and sooner than you might think, perhaps as soon as 2020. The limiting factor is the material needed to form the core of the elevator. So far the best candidate (maybe the only candidate), seems to be a ribbon made up of carbon nanotubes. We can't make a strong enough ribbon right now, but researchers are working on it, and it's likely that something strong enough will be developed within the next decade or so. After that, it's just an engineering issue.

A space elevator could reduce the cost of lifting people or goods into space from the currnet $10,0000 per pound down to $100 per pound. The cost of the elevator would be about $6 billion for the first one and lower after that. Considering that the new airport terminal in Toronto cost $4 billion, that's not a lot of money to pay for cheap access to space.

As much as I like the idea of the X-Prize and taking a rocket into space, rockets are never going to be cheap or safe. If I were Bill Gates, I know where I'd be putting my money.

It's tough to be blind; it's even tougher when you have to wade through a bunch of spam messages to get to your email. According to this Wired article, blind computer users are being hit particularly hard by the spam onslaught.

At home, I use a proxy/filter called K9, which assigns a spam probability to each email message. It's pretty accurate, and false positives are rare, but I still have to scan headers before deleting the junk. It's much harder for someone who's blind to do this, so they're faced with the unpalatable choice of wading through a bunch of crap to make sure they're not missing anything important, or possibly deleting a real message by mistake.

The June 4 issue of InfoWorld has an interesting article on using software tools to make capture the results of usability testing. One of the tools discussed is Morae, from TechSmith Software, the makers of the excellent screen capture tool, SnagIt. I liked the beginning of the article:

If you want to make software developers squirm, force them to watch people using their software.

At the Eighth International Python Conference, HCI (human/computer interaction) expert Dr. Randy Pausch talked about doing just that for his educational software project, Alice. Patrick Phalen, a developer who attended Pausch’s talk, recalls: “I vividly remember laughing out loud when Randy described the extreme methods they used to get their users to adopt beginner’s mind. They required developers to sit on their hands in chairs behind newbies to observe them gaining familiarity with Alice. They were not allowed to reach over and commandeer the mouse or keyboard.”

If you're doing any usability testing, this article is well worth your time.

Cory Doctorow, SF author and spokesman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, recently gave a talk at Microsoft about copyright and the evils of Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Here's what I'm here to convince you of:

1. That DRM systems don't work
2. That DRM systems are bad for society
3. That DRM systems are bad for business
4. That DRM systems are bad for artists
5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

It's a big brief, this talk. Microsoft has sunk a lot of capital into DRM systems, and spent a lot of time sending folks like Martha and Brian and Peter around to various smoke-filled rooms to make sure that Microsoft DRM finds a hospitable home in the future world. Companies like Microsoft steer like old Buicks, and this issue has a lot of forward momentum that will be hard to soak up without driving the engine block back into the driver's compartment. At best I think that Microsoft might convert some of that momentum on DRM into angular momentum, and in so doing, save all our asses.

It's a long talk, but well worth reading. On the whole, I agree with most of his arguements, though I doubt that he's going to have much of an effect on Microsoft's business practices.

In my first technical writing job, I had intense arguments with my boss about the copy protection software we were using on the software we sold. Our customers hated it and I hated it because I was the guy who had to field the support calls when it broke. I still hate copy protection; right now I can't play my legally purchased copy of Virtual Pool because I can't find my original CD and the game won't load without it. Treating your customer's like they are automatically thieves doesn't strike me as a good business model.

Update-June 23: There's an interesting discussion abuout this on Jerry Pournelle's website, Chaos Manor Musings. Pournelle and Doctorow were both guest at a science fiction convention in Florida recently and I'd like to have heard the conversations they had. This summarizes Pournelle's position:

So: in contrast to Doctorow, I think:

1. DRM may or may not be impossible; a lot of smart people think it is feasible.

2. It is not at all a settled issue whether DRM is bad for society. That certainly needs more discussion.

3. We don't really need to know if DRM is good or bad for business, since the market will almost certainly settle that: those who choose to employ DRM will find out soon enough whether their business model is correct or if the "give it away and they will find a way to pay me back" model is better, or if some other model is better.

4. There is no consensus of artists on whether DRM is good or bad for artists, and there needs to be a lot more discussion. In any event, deciding for them isn't obviously the morally superior position.

5. Microsoft will decide whether DRM is good or bad for Microsoft. My guess is that the answer to the first four questions will decide that matter.

Read more on Pournelle's Current View and Current Mail pages.

According to New Scientist, yesterday's flight of Bert Rutan's SpaceShip One was not quite perfect. The pilot had to use the backup control system when the primary system failed and a section of the nozzle fairing crumpled due to aerodynamic stress. This means that Rutan will delay the two qualifying flights needed to win the X Prize until they can determine what caused the problems and make the necessary fixes.

I had an interesting experience yesterday with this blog. At lunch hour, I looked at my site stats and found I'd had almost 300 hits for the day. Now, Core Dump is not what I'd call a high-traffic site; it garners about 35 discerning readers each day. (Possibly more, because I'm not sure if the stats show people using RSS feed readers). So 300 hits was a huge anomaly.

I finally figured out what had happenned after I had a look at the traffic stats. The extra hits had Google URLs. As far as I can figure, Google had a bunch of people searching for the webcast of Bert Rutan's spaceflight and my page, which mentioned the BoingBoing article on the webcast, must have been high in Google's results. So I had about 250 plus hits in an hour or so.

Lord help me if I ever write something that gets picked up on SlashDot!

The New York Times has a fascinating article about how tools like the Web and Google are affecting libraries and how research is conducted. I haven't had much occasion to do serious reseach for quite a while, but I've helped my kids a lot, and the tendency is to go straight to Google. This might not always be the best thing to do. But it's a heck of a lot easier than tramping through snowdrifts to get to your local library to finish a school project.

As the article points out, there are a couple of serious problems with online research: the quality of what's online is very inconsistent, and the depth of material is often shallow. This will change over time as serious research collections and the contents of more library holdings get digitized.

Bert Rutan's SpaceShip One flew to an altitude of more than 62 miles this morning, making it the first private manned spacecraft, and making its pilot Mike Melvill an astronaut, and making it almost certain that Bert Rutan will win the X Prize later this year.

I tried to listen to the radio webcast on several different sites this morning, but they were all full or inaccessible, so I had to make do with periodic updates from Space.com and MSNBC, which seemed to have the most up-to-date coverage.

I'm hoping that the interest around this flight and the other X Prize contenders means that we really are beginning to see the development of a private industry space program. If we leave it to NASA and other government-funded programs, we'll never see large-scale space travel.

Uncle Bear is a site collecting typefaces that are mostly based on TV shows and movies, for example "Buffied" and "Conan". You can get even more at Type Now. These are free (or at least the sites claim they're free) and quality may vary. I wouldn't use any of these in a manual but they might be fun for a newsletter or web site.

If all goes well, tomorrow morning, Bert Rutan's SpaceShip One will become the first private manned spacecraft to launch into space. BoingBoing has a list of links to live radio coverage of the event, which begins at 6 a.m. Pacific time or 9 a.m. Eastern. I'll be listening (unless our firewall at work blocks me).

My son went to see The Chronicles of Riddick the other night and liked it. His uncle thought it had "great special effects" but not much else to recommend it. I haven't seen the movie myself, though I vaguely remember the prequel, Pitch Dark as being reasonably entertaining, but here's a review from TruFen.net.

Author Gerry McGovern has an interesting article on how readers who are looking for information use web sites, and by extension, help systems. He refers to it as "tunnel reading", a term that makes sense, though I've not encountered it before. I'm stuggling with updating a legacy help system right now and I'm going to keep this article in mind as I do it.

J. K. Rowling, the billionaire author of the Harry Potter series, now has a slick and comprehensive web site. Lots of neat stuff for child and adult fans of the books (yes, I'm one of them). You will need a Flash-compatible browser for this one though.

Philipdick.com has an early report by Philip Dick's daughters on the upcoming film adaptation of A Scanner Darkly. Several of Dick's stories and novels have been made into movies with variable results (from the wonderful Bladerunner to the awful Paycheck), but the advance buzz on this one is that it might finally do justice to Dick's fractured version of reality.

BoingBoing, the wonderful blog started by Cory Doctorow, is featuring daily reports from Mojave airport, where Bert Rutan's SpaceShip One is scheduled to make the first private-venture manned flight into space on Monday. Here are the reports from yesterday and today.

Beyond Bullets is a blog devoted to PowerPoint. Now you might think that PowerPoint isn't that interesting, but in some respects it's the most interesting application in the MS Office suite. Beyond Bullets is devoted to exploring the creative potential of PowerPoint.

I've recently seen people using PowerPoint in interesting ways that go far beyond the standard bullet list slide shows that corporate presentations seem to have devolved into. One was a presentation done by a friend who was pitching an idea for a TV show, the other a set of trading cards done by one of my son's friends at school. It shames me to say this, but my son and his Grade 8 friends are far more skilled with PowerPoint, and more creative, than I will ever be. I like to think that I'm comfortable with digital media, but these kids have got me beat hands down.

The imaging team for the Cassini mission to Saturn has one of the neater site acronyms - CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations. They've posted pictures from Cassini's close approach to Phoebe, one of Saturn's moons. I think we can look forward to a lot more from this mission in the next four years.

That was the error message that greeted me when I turned on my computer this morning. I normally leave it on 24/7, but we had a thunderstorm in the middle of the night and Nancy shut it down at 2 a.m. Shutdown was normal, but Windows XP obviously had a major meltdown and wouldn't boot.

I fiddled with it a bit before I had to get ready for work, but really didn't want to start reinstalling Windows. So when I got to work, I did a Google on the error message and found several helpful articles, including Microsoft's KB article 307545, "How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting". The procedure (about 4 pages of it) involves booting to the Recovery console (hope you have your Windows XP CD handy), and copying, deleting, and renaming a bunch of hidden system files.

I realized after I'd done the first part that I could have booted the machine into Windows 98 (my machine is set up to dual boot) and saved myself a lot of time and typing. So I will keep my Windows 98 install, just in case this happens again. And do a backup, tonight, if I can get it done before we get hit with another thunderstorm.

As for the cause, who knows? I did install a Windows Update patch to fix a DirectX 9 vulnerability and it's possible that something went wrong there and didn't manifest itself until Nancy shut the machine down. It's been pretty stable overall, so this was a bit of a surprise.

The New York Times has a short article on Bert Rutan and his upcoming X-prize test flight next week. They confirm that Paul Allen is one of Rutan's backers and that he's put about $20 million into the effort. The article also implies that Allen will go up on a flight eventually. Must be nice.

Presumably there will be a market for space tourists, even if it's just for a short sub-orbital hop. I wonder what the cost per flight would work out to, if you don't have to worry about amortizing your development costs. There must be a lot of people who would pay $100,000 or so for a flight like that. Heck, if I had the money (I don't, sigh), I'd go.

The real reason you should care about web standards is a long and well-thought out piece by Andrei Herasimchuk. I like this one a lot; as well as making a lot of sense, he uses Isaac Asimov's Foundation as a framework for his argument. Here's a brief excerpt:

There’s a great bit in the first book where a single planet in the universe, known as the Foundation, becomes the sole source of all the technology used in the entire Galactic Empire. Everything is fine, until one day the Galactic Empire decides it wants total control over the Foundation. So while the Galactic Empire sends ships to attack the tiny little planet on the edge of the universe to gain that control, all of the gadgets, appliances and computer systems throughout the Galactic Empire conveniently fail at the same time. The Foundation wins by creating sole reliance on its technology, forcing the Galactic Empire to leave it alone.

Now, in the book, the Galactic Empire is evil and corrupt, on a collision course to sink the universe into the equivalent of the Dark Ages all over again. We’ll have to worry about that aspect of the analogy some other time. What is clear is that we should consider a company like Microsoft to potentially be able to wield the same kind of power as the Foundation.

Definitely worth reading.

In a fit of temporary insanity, I rented and watched Starship Troopers 2 last night. The first movie was a travesty of everything that made Robert Heinlein's novel great. The second movie was worse. No redeeming factors whatsoever; bad acting, dumb plot, so-so digital effects. About the only good thing about it was it was short.

Mystic River, on the other hand, was excellent. This may be Clint Eastwood's best effort as a director, a perfectly focused morality play about three friends and how they are haunted by their past. I really enjoyed this one.

If you like to watch things blowing up, Implosion World is for you. This site has an extensive collection of pictures and videos of explosive demolitions. As well as the usual old apartment and office towers, there's bridges, piers, airplane hangars, cranes, and smokestacks. This one definitely gets the Cool Site of Week award.

If you can't afford one of those nifty Mac G5s, you can at least make your Windows PC look like a Mac. You'll need to download and install a whole bunch of software to do it, but it should end up looking pretty much like the gorgeous Macintosh Aqua interface. This article explains how. I have no intention of trying this, incidentally, but it is cool.

However, if Apple ever releases the rumoured PC version of OS/X, I'd buy it in an instant.

There's an interesting post on Robert Bruce Thompson's Daynotes Journal today about how smart border collies are. The post is a repsonse to an article on AP News that describes some research done on border collies that indicates they could understand a vocabulary as large as a small child.

My mother-in-law has a border collie, and based on what I've seen Topsy do over the last few years, I'd have to say that everything that Thompson says about border collies is true. They are very smart dogs and definitely have a personality. There's no doubt in my mind that Topsy is a self-aware, distinct individual; something more than just a conditioned pattern of responses to situations.

I love the brash, vivid art of the old pulp magazines. You can now view many covers from early 20th century pulps at the Vintage Magazine Cover Gallery. Among the most interesting are the covers from Hugo Gernsback's The Experimenter and Practical Electronics, although it's unfortunate that they don't have covers from Amazing Stories, the first science fiction magazine.

Wired Magazine has an interesting column by Bruce Sterling about the Bush administration and how they could be ruining American science. He compares what's happening to the US scientific community to the Lysenko era in Stalinist Russia. Scary stuff if you think of the impact of science and technology in our daily lives.

This post was contributed by Michael Bryans.

Once, as a land survey crew chief, I was sent to a construction site in Scarberia near Kingston Rd & Military Trail to layout the foundation for a single-lot luxury home. The small subdivision (maybe 50-75 lots) was an infill site on the edge of a ravine/valley. More than half of it was already finished (homes occuppied). I'd already layed out about two dozen houses at the location; the rest were done by other (land surveying) colleagues. The site construction superintendent was frequently absent (allegedly, he had numerous other sites to supervise). He, or his employers, would call the office to arrange a survey crew to stake out the foundation for excavation; the architectural plans and a copy of the city-approved layout plan were left either on a desk or in a drawer in the (unlocked) construction trailer. Sometimes, I had to snoop around to find where the friggin' things were hiding.

I went to the trailer, recovered a layout plan, and went about calculating offsets and setbacks (it was an irregular lot: no two lot lines parallel, or at right angles), and then drew up my field notes. I staked the foundation for excavation, and set the cut level (for bottom of footing) for the excavator; a few days later, I layed out the foundation corners in the excavation. A week goes by and one day my boss calls me into his office to ream me out about a costly layout error attributed to me. Apparently, the house style was no quite the right one. There was an amended FINAL plan that called for a variation in one foundation wall, differing only in that way from the original. The forming crews had to tear down the already dried-cured foundation wall and footings, and reform it in the right location.

The builder-developer tried to "back-charged" my company $10,000! This was a common tactic with suppliers or trades where the builder-developer charges against future billing for services. My boss was ballistic. I vehemently denied doing anything wrong and pointed out the irresponsible practices of the absentee superintendent: no one checked whether the plan left out 'holis bolis' was the right one (I have no way of knowing) and the super' didn't ensure the amended plan was in plain view and accessible, and never showed up to check. I defended the accidental error by emphasizing that the super' was rarely present, so how does one verify anything. In a construction trailer full of plans and paperwork, and no one around, how do you know which information is correct? And the usual absentee habit was to leave the plan visible or in a particular desk drawer. I was under pressure to get the work done quickly so excavation/construction can get underway. I also pointed out that the forming-footing & excavating crews had ample opportunity to note that the building layout didn't conform with their (correct) copy of structural, architectural, and layout plans. They went ahead according to a cookie-cutter house layout they were already used to, not the one with the subtle amendment. The building, according to the plan in hand that day, was layed out correctly. My defense: there should not be outdated, superceded building plans lying around, and all measures should be taken by the super' to ensure I get the right information. Other crew chiefs present in the office for the dressing-down by the boss lept to the rescue, and claimed they too had problems communicating with the site super'. The boss finally bought my hardy defense, and decided to tell the developer to blow it out his ear.

So, in a way, it was my mistake in a literal or physical sense: it was not the correct house layout. It was really an abyss created by others into which I fell. Alas, the lame procedure of obtaining layout plans from a vacant trailer ... plans that were constantly changing ... was not properly administered. Random, single lot stakeout of structures for excavation are highly inefficient. Changing plans suddenly risks errors. Leaving critical drawings available without human contact or verification is riskier still. Anyone could've switched plans even accidentally. It wasn't MY construction office.

It's not the first time those to whom I report, motivated by irate 3rd parties, have attempted to hang me out to dry for mistakes not mine. That and other incidents with employers, supervisors, or management have left me slightly paranoid, careful, and methodical in most of my work practices. A basic 'cover yer butt' defensive strategy. If necessary, mount a ferocious offense as an effective defense against the incompetence and witch-hunting tactics of others.

I can see it applies well to technical communications too.

Or as Keith says "... this is a lot like software development. Trade site plan for functional specification, layout for design, foundation for code ..."

As pointed out by Bill Lawrence on the techwr-l mailing list, Microsoft is making the graphics program Creature House Expression available for free download. Expression is a vector-based drawing tool that lets you immitate natural media, and if the gallery on the web site is any indication, it's quite powerful, and similar to the wonderful Fractal Design Painter (now distributed by Corel, I think).

Although the site says the download is for users of previous versions of the software, which Microsoft acquired in 2003, according to messages on the program's forum, anyone can download and use it. There's a review of the program here. This is something that might be a lot of fun to play with, and the price is right.

Ontario's Ministry of Education has signed a deal with Sun Microsystems to use its StarOffice suite on all PCs in Ontario schools. Up until now, they've been using Corel's office suite, including WordPerfect.

Guess I'll have to download the latest version of OpenOffice and get serious about learning it. From what I've read, it and StarOffice are pretty similar, so it shouldn't cause too much difficulty for us.

The New York Times has a lengthy interview with Bill Joy. If you're not familiar with him, he was one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, wrote a lot of the core code for the Unix operationg system in the 1970s, and most recently he published a cautionary article in Wired about the perils of nanotechnology and biotechnology research.

An intersting quote from the first page of the interview: "Markets are extremely good at go,' Joy says. 'They're not very good at stop. And I think we need a little bit of stop right now. Or else we're not going to like the outcome."

The transit of Venus starts in about 18 hours as I type this. It's not a spectacular sight, but it is pretty rare. There'll be a live webcast, which is probably the best way of viewing it as watching the sun can be dangerous to your sight unless you know what you're doing.

It's been a while since I've looked at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. This is a huge site now. It describes itself as an "attempt to catalog Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. It links together various types of bibliographic data: author bibliographies, publication bibliographies, award listings, magazine content listings, anthology and collection content listings, yearly fiction indexes, and forthcoming books."

The site is database driven and extensively hyperlinked. Click on an author and you get hyperlinks to all of the authors books on the major book sites. All the SF magazines are indexed. There are lists of forthcoming books that go ahead a couple of months. One very nice feature is that author's pages include lists of any series they may have written. It's not a pretty site, but if you need to find an SF book or author, this is the place to start.

About a decade ago I worked for Sykes Enterprises (SEI), a technical writing job shop whose main customer (pretty much its only customer) was IBM. SEI's Canadian office went under when IBM hit bad times in the early 90s, but I got a year and a half of working with and at the IBM Lab in Toronto. I'd probably have seriously tried to get into IBM if they hadn't moved the lab out to Markham, a location that might as well be the other side of the moon for someone who has to use public transit to get to work.

Fortune magazine has a long and fascinating article about IBM and its current prospects. I t makes a good counterpoint to the article about Microsoft that I posted a link to yesterday. If I had to put my money into one of the companies, I think I'd pick IBM.

More Friday funnies. The Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness has been updated. Some of these are pretty hilarious; you have to wonder how they ever got out the door.

Megaflicks or ?

The Seattle Weekly has published a long article about the future of Microsoft. "Microsoft's Sacred Cash Cow" by Jeff Reifman looks at Microsoft's business model and how it's threatenned by open source software, Apple, and Google. This is one of the better articles I've seen about Microsoft.

Rocketcams are cameras mounted on a rocket, looking backward, so you can see the Earth recede on launch. Ecliptic Enterprises has put together a gallery of rocketcam images, and it is seriously neat. I've never been to a real launch, and seeing these movies makes me even more determined to get to one some day.

A funny cartoon about the subject.

For what it's worth this is what the online Merriam Webster's style guide has to say about the subject.

"The traditional view is that less is used for matters of degree, value, or amount, and that it modifies nouns that refer to uncountable things ("less hostility," "less clothing") while fewer modifies numbers and plural nouns ("fewer students," "fewer than eight trees"). However, less has been used to modify plural nouns for centuries. Today less is actually more likely than fewer to modify plural nouns when distances, sums of money, and certain common phrases are involved ("less than 100 miles," "less than $2000," "in 25 words or less") and just as likely to modify periods of time ("in less [fewer] than four hours"). But phrases such as "less bills," "less vacation days," and "less computers" should be avoided."

This is considerably condensed from the two-page discussion in the Merriam Webster Dictionary of English Usage, one of my favourite language books, and now available in a slightly abridged "Concise" edition, should you not be able to find the 1994 hardcover. I do wish it was available in CD-ROM though, so I could search it electronically. Unfortunately it's not yet on the Merriam Webster web site - I subscribe to the Unabridged Dictionary, which includes a very condensed style guide.

There has been a lengthy discussion on the techwr-l and word-pc mailing lists about how to get a vertical ellipsis in Microsoft Word. Some of the proposed solutions have been pretty arcane. The simplest, contributed by Dan Wiltshire, is elegantly simple.

Type a capital letter M. Format it with the MT Extra font.

I was reading an article on the New York Times web site about the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on tougher emission controls for snowmobiles and I saw this: "The snowmobile industry has about $1 billion in annual sales in the United States, where nearly all snowmobiles are from four manufacturers. Ed Klim, executive director of the International Snowmobile Manufacturers Association, said about 110,000 were sold last year, bringing the nation's total to about 1.7 million. And most of them, he said, are used in rural areas, making them little threat to the environment."

So according to the snowmobile industry, rural areas aren't part of the environtment.

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

Last month I wrote about software tools that technical writers would find useful; this month I'm going to continue with software, specifically text and code editors. It's possible to get good tools free or for a very small investment.

A good text editor is almost certainly a necessity if you work with help files, web pages, or API documentation. Sure, in a pinch, you can use Notepad, if you don't mind being limited to working on files smaller than 64K and not having syntax highlighting or search and replace. TextPad and UltraEdit are two shareware editors that offer all these features and more. Of the two, UltraEdit is the more powerful, but TextPad has a clip-library feature that makes it easy to enter boilerplate text and code fragments. I find it's really handy for writing FrameScript scripts-select the code snippet from the list, double-click and it's pasted into my script.

If you don't want to spend about $50 on a shareware editor, there are many freeware and open source editors. Among the best of these is PSPad, which incorporates spell checking, differencing of files, a hex editor, syntax highlighting, and many more features. And it's free. If you're looking for something simpler, NoteTab provides multiple file editing in a tabbed interface and can be used as a Notepad replacement. It has both free and shareware versions, with the shareware having more features. Veterans of the UNIX world may want to stick to Emacs, which is available for most computing platforms, making it handy if you work in a heterogeneous environment.

You can spend a lot of money on an HTML editor, Dreamweaver will set you back $400 US, for example. But you can get a lot for free. HTML-Kit is one of the best freeware HTML editors. Like most of this breed, it's code-based with a non-editable preview window. (Personally, I prefer this to WYSIWYG HTML editors anyway). It has extensive toolbars for quick insertion of tags, syntax highlighting, and will work with most scripting languages. There's a large user community and many plug-ins are available to add features. Arachnophilia is another good, free editor. It has a keystroke recording feature that can really help on tasks like cleaning up code generated by other applications. 1stPage 2000 is another free HTML editor, with different modes (easy, expert, hardcore), so you can tailor the interface to your degree of skill with HTML.

XML editors are relatively new. While some of the commercial tools (Arbortext Epic, XMetal) are now mature and stable products, there are few good, easy-to-use freeware or shareware XML editors. About the best I've found so far is XMLMind, which is a commercial tool that has a "feature-limited" free version. The feature limitation is that you have to work with the schemas included with the editor, but since it includes DocBook, that isn't much of a problem if you want to use it for documentation and not data manipulation. If you want to learn XML or DocBook, this is a good place to start. Morphon is another free XML editor. Note that I haven't tried this one yet, but from looking over their web site, it looks to be quite powerful (WYSIWYG and tag modes, support for tables, a separate CSS editor) and is cross-platform. Having pretty much given up on structured authoring in FrameMaker, I'm going to give this one a closer look.

Colossus MK2 has been rebuilt. It was one of the first programmable electronic computers and was used to break German codes prior to the D-Day invasion. The machine could read messages at 5,000 characters per second and carry out about 100 Boolean operations per second. It had about 1,500 vacuum tube valves and occupied several large racks. Lest you think that modern computers are much more sophisticated, according to one of the engineers who rebuilt the machine, modern computers would not solve the German codes any faster.

When I was a kid I always thought of the 21st century as some far future, exotic time. Then I grew up, and guess what. It's now the 21st century and from my perspective, it still looks a lot like the 20th. Tales of the Future Past is a site that looks at past visions of the future, from early science ficiton, the pulp magazines, and the popular science press. It's interesting to see just how far off base some of the predictions were. It's a cool site even for browsing the illustrations alone.