Core Dump

I don't normally read movie novelizations, but I did make an exception for the T2 series, written by S.M. (Steve) Stirling. I've read and enjoyed most of Steve's novel's (particularly the Draka series and the Island in the Sea of Time trilogy, and I'm really looking forward to Dies the Fire, which explores what happens in our time, when Nantucket gets sent back into the past (and based on the first few sample chapters, it's not going to be pretty).

The three books in the Terminator series are T2: Infiltrator, T2: The Rising Storm, and T2: The Future War.  Of the three, I liked the middle on the best. The first one spends a little too much time setting up the story and third one lost some of it's focus by spending a lot of time on minor characters, rather than on John and Sarah Connor.

But all three are tightly written with enough action to keep you going from page to page, even if you know the story line from the movies. And Steve fills in a lot more interesting background than you'll get from the films. Steve is a good writer, with a solid career writing miltary-oriented SF and alternate history novels, and he hasn't knocked these off; they're every bit as well-written and exciting as his other books. If you're looking for some good summer reading, you could do a lot worse (the last couple of Michael Crichton novels, for example, or anything by Clive Cussler).

I subscribe to several email newsletters. Now it looks like I'll be adding another one to my list. DesignGeek "is a free e-mail newsletter written by Anne-Marie
'HerGeekness' Concepcion, president of Seneca Design & Training. Coming
at you every couple weeks or so, each issue contains about a page's
worth of her newest finds: advanced tips, techniques, links, and
late-breaking news for Mac and PC designers who use the world's coolest
software: InDesign, QuarkXPress, Photoshop, Acrobat, Illustrator,
GoLive, Dreamweaver and more."

I don't do a lot of design, but it's useful to know something about it, and this newsletter covers a lot of ground. You can browse back issues on the web site if you want to find out more. Thanks to the Editiorium Update for the tip.

I like computer games, but I don't have a lot of time to play them. So I tend to play arcade games or 3d shooters that aren't too complicated (Serious Sam). I've looked at role playing games like Diablo II, which my son plays a lot, and simulators, but they take too much effort to learn for the amount of time that I have and are too hard to get back into between sessions, which could easily be a month apart. And I absolutely refuse to play any game that won't let me save whenever I want; Halo being a prime example of a game I'd like to play but can't endure being killed and having to repeat my path several times on the way to a save point.

GameDev.net has a lengthy and quite excellent article called "Designing Games for the Wage Slave" that I hope more game developers will read and take to heart. Maybe then I'll find a few more games that I can enjoy. My current games are Half-Life (though I could seriously do without the jumping puzzles), Serious Sam and Serious Sam: The Second Encounter (too many monsters, but that's what God mode is for), Medal of Honour (haven't got very far so far, but I like it a lot), and Virtual Pool (the snooker game is excellent).

The recent wave of vulnerabilities in Microsoft Internet Explorer has prompted many people to switch browsers (i've been using Mozilla as my default for over a year now), but that still may leave you vulnerable as IE is still installed on your system. This article provides instructions for completely removing IE from your system. Fair warning: I have not tried this and can offer no help if you try it and it doesn't work or screws up something else.

Wired has an interesting article on people who are reformatting the 9/11 Commission report, which was originally published as plain-vanilla PDF. So far, it's been republished several different formats, including text and HTML. You have to wonder why the Commission, who presumably have the resources, couldn't have done that in the first place.

It seems that one of the niftier perks of being an intern at Microsoft is having dinner with Bill Gates at his house. Jeff Maurone has written this report of his experience.

Microsoft has finally released the first Service Pack for Office 2003. According to this Register Article, the big changes are improvements to InfoPath and OneNote. This is the official MS press release and this is the download site.

According to this article from the San Francisco Chronicle, that's what you'd be paying if you filled your car's gas tank with inkjet printer ink. That doesn't surprise me, having just shelled out close to $60 to refill our Canon inkjet.  I'm not refilling cartridges for this one; I've done that in the past and the results haven't been great. I might consider 3rd-party cartridges if the quality were good enough, but the only way to find out is to try them.

I don't have a problem with using refilled laser printer cartridges, though I haven't seen anyone offering ones for my Samsung printer.

Back around the time I started this blog, I attended a presentation by Rascal Software about Veredus, a very interesting XML-based authoring tool. Rascal have now released Veredus 2, and Sean Brierley has written a fairly detailed review of it.

If I was starting from scratch in help authoring, I'd definitely be looking at Veredus. Right now, I've made too much of an investment in FrameMaker and WebWorks to consider switching, and I need to be able to do print output as well, which I think Frame still handles better. But Veredus is definitely going on my shortlist of tools that I need to look at (along with AuthorIt).

British actor Sir Laurence Olivier has been "resurected" for the upcoming film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Olivier will appear as a holographic villain, using footage from some of his earlier films. His voice is dubbed by another actor.

I've seen the trailers for this flick and it looks impressive, like a  1930s SF pulp brought to life.

For the past few months, I've been using Bloglines pretty much exclusively as my feed reader. Bloglines is a web-based feed reader, which means I can access it anywhere, including work, without having to install a client. There's a more detailed post about Bloglines today on Jon's Radio.

During the past few weeks they've added several neat new features, including the ability to create a blog from your saved items, making probably the easiest way to create a link blog.

Bloglines is now an indispensable part of my Internet usage. Check it out if you haven't already.

The title of the next Star Wars movie has been announced: Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. There will also be a whole bunch of Star Wars DVDs coming out; as well as the original trilogy, the Ewoks cartoon series, Ewoks movies (which I've never seen) and the Clone Wars cartoon series will all be coming out on DVD.

When I was a kid, it was a truism that photographs didn't lie. Photographs were acceptable as evidence in court and Stalin was rumoured to have doctored official photos to remove "nonpersons". But things changed with the advent of digital technology, as it became easy to manipulate pictures in a manner that could fool the eye, at least. Now we take it for granted that what you see isn't necessarily real.

However, it turns out that digitial image manipulation can be detected. Altering a digital photo changes the statistical relationships between the pixels in the photo and algorithms can detect this. This could have big implications for news and court photographers, for example.

Tuesday was the 35th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, so it seems appropriate to post a link to the Project Apollo Image Gallery. This wonderful site has thousands of pictures from the Apollo project, organized by mission, many of which have probably never been seen outside of NASA. Each picture has a brief description, thumbnail, and links to low- and high-res versions. I could spend hours here.

Note that the site was Slashdotted so it might be slow to access for a while.

Wired has a piece on users who are revolting against sites that demand logins. This is an all too common practice with news sites, like the New York Times and the Washington Post. I've had a Times login for years, but I refuse to sign up for any of the others.

If this practice pisses you off too, you can use BugMeNot, which will generate a login name and password.

I saw I Robot this weekend and enjoyed it, although it bore only a passing resemblance to anything that Isaac Asimov wrote. The movie credits state that the movie was "suggested by" Asimov's book and that's about as far as it goes. Still, it's a decent Hollywood action flick; big, visually striking, and fast moving.

Wired Magazine has a review that pretty much mirrors my thoughts.

Dan Bricklin, the author of Visicalc, the first spreadsheet program, has a very interesting essay called Software That Lasts 200 Years. In it, he says that software development should be treated more like civil engineering projects, especially software for "infrastructure".

We need to start thinking about software in a way more like how we think about building bridges, dams, and sewers. What we build must last for generations without total rebuilding. This requires new thinking and new ways of organizing development. This is especially important for governments of all sizes as well as for established, ongoing businesses and institutions.

He makes a lot of sense. The essay also reminds me of some things postulated by Vernor Vinge in his novels A Fire Upon the Deep, and A Deepness on the Sky, in which software has been around so long that study of it is treated as archeology, in which developers dig through layers and layers added by generations of developers.

Michael Moore has put his fact checking notes for Fahrenheit 9/11 up on the net. It'd be interesting to compare this to the page that lists 59 deciets the movie (sorry, I do not have the time!).

I'm on holidays for the next two weeks. Posts may be infrequent or non-existent depending on what I'm doing and how lazy I feel.

Nancy and I had an all too infrequent night out Saturday; we went to Hugh's Room in Toronto to see Garnet Rogers. Garnet is the brother of the late and much lamented Stan Rogers, and has been performing on his own since 1984 or thereabouts. He shares Stan's wonderful voice and is an even better musician. During his set he played four different guitars, two acoustic and two electric.

If you haven't heard any of Garnet's CDs, your best bet is probably the compilation All That Is, which has 10 of his songs. I'm partial to his earlier disks and Sparrow's Wing from his more recent material. He's recording a new disk to be called Shining Thing which will be out in October. It should be a good one, if the new songs he performed Saturday night were any indication.

I should add a plug for Hugh's Room. This is probably the best club in Toronto for music right now, certainly for roots and folk music. I wish it'd been there when I was living just half a block away.

UI and UA Changes on the Road to Longhorn is a long and very informative article about how Microsoft's new interface guidelines and technology for Longhorn, the forthcoming version of Windows, are going to affect both user interface design and writing online help.

This may be a difficult time of adjustment for tech writers, who typically spend months meticulously documenting every nuance of an application. Wake up, folks! Nobody reads it.

But it gets worse. Authoring in MAML XML is very different from authoring in Word or HTML (which have presentation elements). Some authors find it difficult to adjust to the transition.

But many authors do fine. This quote sums up UI/UA design for me. "The goal of the UI designer is to put the Help author out of a job". This from a Microsoft Help author and team leader who I highly respect. You don't need to document everything.

You might not agree with the author's statements, but if you are documenting Windows-based software, you need to read this article.

I remember as a child, watching the Walt Disney Hour and my favourite parts were always the Tomorrowland segments. BoingBoing has a post pointing out that Disney released these on a DVD called Tomorrowland Today. The shows about space exploration and trips to Mars were high-quality stuff, with explanations of space travel by experts like Wernher Von Braun. I'm going to have to track this down; I really want it.

Last weekend's New York Times Magazine had a lengthy and extremely interesting cover story called The Chinese Century about the impact that the economic development of China is having on the rest of the world. It's a sobering read; we may be in for some real economic competition. Side note: I was installing some software yesterday at work on a new Dell laptop and I looked at the product information printed and stamped on the back. The laptop was made in China. The external drivers were made in Malaysia. This from a company that started out in Texas.

And just in case you were wondering how big Wal-Mart really is:

Even something as all-American as Pekin's new Wal-Mart Supercenter spreads China's influence around town. Because 12 percent of China's exports to the U.S. end up on Wal-Mart's shelves, and because Wal-Mart's trade with China accounts for 1 percent of that country's gross domestic product, the company exerts tremendous downward pressure on prices. Its buying power enables it to dictate, in effect, what a Chinese manufacturer will get for producing goods that American consumers want.

IEEE Spectrum has an excerpt from Vernor Vinge's next novel, Rainbows End, online. The story is called Synthetic Serendipity. It's a near-future tale about teenagers in a world of ubiquitous computing and shared consensual reality.

This is major news, if you're an SF fan. Vinge wrote the two best SF novels of the 1990s, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness In the Sky. He's not very prolific, so a new novel is a big event. His story Cookie Monster, was nominated for a Hugo award and is also available online, I think on Asimovs.com.

IEEE Spectrum is running a special report called Sensor Nation about the issues involved in ubiquitous computing and analysis of data. Much there worth reading and thinking about.

SF author Peter Watts' latest novel Behemoth is now out in hardcover, or at least the first half of it (Behemoth ß-Max) has been published by TOR. As explained in his preface to the book (and published on his web site), his publisher was forced to split the book into two parts by the buying policies of the large bookselling chains.

This is one that I'm looking forward to reading, though given my backlog of reading material I'll probably wait until the paperback comes out to buy it. If you haven't read his earlier novels, Starfish and Maelstrom, I highly recommend them; they're some of the grittiest and most compelling near-future SF to be published in the last decade.

You might also want to check out his blog, No Moods, Ads, or Cutesey Fucking Icons. The rest of the web site has some interesting material that I'll have to check out when I have more time, including some short fiction. Finally, Rick Kleffel has an interview with Watts on his excellent Agony Column site.

There's a new support site for users of Quadralay's WebWorks Publisher. WWP-Support has been set up by Michael Müller-Hillebrand, who is a German WWP and FrameScript consultant and a frequent contributor to the WWP and FrameScript mailing lists. Content is a bit sparse at this point, but there are some useful articles and it looks like more will be forthcoming. If you use WebWorks Publisher, the site is definitely worth a look - other than Quadralay's site, there's not a lot else out there.

On Sunday, on the CBC, I heard the first program in a series called American Mavericks. Hosted by Suzanne Vega and produced by the US National Public Radio and the San Francisco Symphony, it's an in-depth exploration of the wilder side of American classical music of the last century or so.

Here's the blurb from their "About" page:

"American Mavericks is a groundbreaking new radio and Internet series produced by American Public Media in association with the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director, with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The radio program was released in April 2003. Inspired by the adventurous programming of the San Francisco Symphony and its concert festival of the same name, American Mavericks features the iconoclastic, tradition-breaking composers who shaped the development of American music-from Charles Ives, Henry Brant, Harry Partch, Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich and more.

The 13-week radio series tells the story of the distinctly American music that grew along with the country. Interviews with composers and performers and discussion with San Francisco Symphony Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas highlight this celebration of musical inspiration and creativity. In tandem with the radio series, the program incorporates a rich Web component that contains extensive streaming audio, extended interviews, and opportunities to participate in the creativity of the maverick composers."

I really enjoyed it. My tastes in classical music run to the modern, and there was a lot of music in the first episode that I'd never heard before. I've heard (and like) some of Charles Ives, Harry Partch, and Steve Reich (who I like a lot), but never heard of people like Henry Covell or Carl Ruggles, for example.

There are 13 episodes of the show and all are available for listening over the Internet. The web site is a prime example of how it should be done. Not only are the individual shows available, but you can listen to most of the complete works they excerpt, in reasonably high-bandwidth and stereo Real Audio. They also provide complete interviews with composers and musicians and extensive biographies and bibliographies.

I am seriously blown away by the program and even more so by how they've integrated it with the web site. It's going to take the summer to listen to all of this. Highly recommended.

PBS has a forthcoming program called "1421: The Year China Discovered America? ", based on the book of the same name, that looks really interesting:
"The documentary examines the mystery surrounding China's legendary Zheng He and the spectacular Ming fleet of treasure junks he commanded in the early 15th century. The special provides a history of the known journeys of Zheng He's fleet and an account of new information uncovered by Gavin Menzies, a former British submarine commander who has spent nine years trying to prove that Zheng He reached America decades before Columbus. Menzies, author of the best-selling book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, has assembled evidence that he believes substantiates his theory."
Kim Stanley Robinson used this era extensively in his excellent alternate history novel, The Year of Rice and Salt, and I found his description absolutely fascinating. I'm going to keep an eye out for this when it comes on.

Most technical writers tend to be logical, rational people, sometimes to a fault. But I guess there must be a conservation of rationality law in effect, because Michael Menkin is obviously at the other end of the spectrum. From the Toronto Sun:

"Menkin, a 61-year-old technical manual writer in Seattle, is on a space mission of his own. To outfit the human race with his "thought screen helmets" -- to block telepathic communications between aliens and limp-willed Earthlings. He believes it's not the invasion of Iraq the world should fear, but rather an ongoing telepathic war, launched from outer space."

Thanks to Tom Eagles for passing this along.

These are the best pictures I've seen yet of the flight of SpaceShipOne. Wish I could have been there.

CIO Insight magazine has a longish interview with Jakob Nielsen focusing on web site design and the perils you face in redesigning sites. Well worth reading if you do any web site work. (I should talk, I haven't touched my personal site in a year).

Hollywoods Missing Movies from resaononline.com, is a lengthy but quite interesting analysis of how Hollywood has treated (and mostly ignored) life under Communism. Now that the cold war is over, there should be a lot of stories ripe for the big Hollywood treatment, but it hasn't been happening. I guess Steven Segal movies don't count.

Show Me the Money is a fascinating article by an ex-Microsoft developer who worked on Microsoft Money for a few years. It explains why Money, which is a decent personal finance manager (I've been using it for more than a decade), got filled up with glitzy features that no one ever uses. I used the 16-bit Windows 3.1 version of Money 2.0 until I upgraded to Windows XP and will probably use Money 2002 for another decade. If I needed all the fancy income and stock tracking features built into the program, I'd be able to afford to hire an accountant to do it for me. All I want to do is reconcile my bank account.

One of the fundamental disconnects in the design was the desire to increase the amount of time that users spent using the program, when users consider updating their banking information to be a task on a par with having a root canal. Anyway, it's a good insight into what happens to software development when you lose track of what your users really want.

The following post was originally published in the June issue of Communication Times, the newsletter of the Toronto STC chapter.

Technical writers sometimes play the role of a user, and they often end up providing advice on usability or accessibility. Even if they don't become full-time usability experts, most writers garner quite a bit of knowledge about usability as part of their work. This month, I'll focus on resources that can help you with usability and accessibility, both in your writing and in software or web development.

The Usability for Technical Communicators page on the Information and Design site provides an overview of the relationship between technical communication and usability and discusses both the skills that writers can use and the skills they might want to develop

The Usable Web is a meta site that contains many links about human factors, user interface issues, and usable design specific to the World Wide Web. Craig Marion's Software Design Smorgasbord, contains information and an extensive series of annotated links to sites about human-computer interaction, usability engineering, visualization, multimedia, and similar topics. Each topic area has an introductory article followed by a list of resources.

User Interface Engineering was founded by Jared Spool in the 1980s and the web site contains many of his articles and white papers. Jacob Neilsen is another well-known usability expert. His website, useit.com, contains links to his regular AlertBox column, which is always worth reading. Note that much of the content on these two sites is not free. William Horton is well known to Toronto technical writers and his web site has handouts from most of his presentations. Simple Things Still Work is worth looking at, as are most of the other presentations.

Designing web sites or software that is accessible to users with disabilities is becoming more important, and is mandated by legislation in some jurisdictions. 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 be easily readable and also 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.

Finally, if you're lucky enough to have input into the design of the software you're documenting, you should read Eric Raymond's articles of software usability. Raymond is well known in the open source software movement. In March, he wrote an article based on his experiences trying to configure a printer under Linux, and wrote a follow-up in April, including some of the many comments he received. And after you've read the articles, pass them along to your developers.

These are the best pictures of seen yet of last week's flight of SpaceShipOne, from launch to landing.

Update: MSNBC has a long and thoughtful article on the business model behind projects like SpaceShipOne. Perhaps space tourism isn't the way to go?

Cassini is in orbit around Saturn, surviving two passes through the rings and a 96-minutes rocket burn to place it into orbit. I watched some of the NASA TV coverage last night over the Internet. It's been a good year for JPL, with two successful Mars landings and now Cassini at Saturn. It's too bad it'll be at least a decade before we see any more deep space (past Mars) missions.