Core Dump

This post was my Wandering Eye column in the September 2004 issue of Communication Times, the newsletter of the Toronto chapter of the STC.

For most technical writers, having to write documentation for developers is probably the most difficult task that they'll be given. Developer documentation could include documenting an API (application programming interface) reference, writing a programmer's guide, or assembling a software development kit (SDK). Unfortunately, most technical writers can't program or know only a little about writing code. In this article, I'll provide some resources that will help you to write documentation for developers, but first let me say this. If you have to work on developer documentation, there's no substitute for being able to program at least a little. Take a course; even an introductory community college course in C++ or Java will help a lot.

There aren't many books about how to document code or an API, certainly not as many books as there are on how to write code. (And most programming books give short shrift to code documentation activities). Most of the resources that I'll cite here are articles from various sources.If you have the opportunity, Gordon and Gordon offer courses on writing developer documentation, including DVDs of the course sessions, and workbooks. To get a good perspective on documentation from a developer's point of view, read Analyze This by James Gosling. Gosling is the author of the Java programming language, and he has some interesting things to say about the role of technical writers. Sun produces excellent documentation for both Java and the Javadoc tool, and you should look at it for an example of what developers expect.

Other articles of interest are Susan Gallagher's Yesterday API was just another acronym; today I have to document one! and Creating an SDK: Writing on the Edge

If you ever have to document an API, it's almost certain that you'll have to work with an "autodoc" tool that generates documentation from the structure of the code itself and the comments that your developers have hopefully embedded. Developers are used to using this type of documentation and some development environments have the autodoc function built-in. The Table of Autodoc Tools is a lengthy list of autodoc tools, with liberal annotations. Language-specific tools include Javadoc for Java, CppDoc> for C++, and TeeGofer and NDoc, both for Microsoft's .NET. Tools that can work with more than one language include Doxygen and Document X. Typically, you'll use these tools to produce HTML, although some of them can also produce printed documents.

A new report by European scientists, to be released next week, states that global warming will have major, and mostly devastating, effects on the ecology of the Arctic. The release of the report was delayed from September until after the US election in November, possibly because of pressure from the Bush administration. This New York Times article has more details (free registration required).

Sandra Miesel has a published an article in which she demolishes Dan Brown's bestseller The DaVinci Code. I haven't read The DaVinci Code yet, though it's on the list of books I might read if I have the time. It looks interesting, but I've never thought that there was much to the mythology that Brown bases his book on. Well, according to Miesel there isn't. Here's a sample:

Brown's revisionist interpretations of da Vinci are as distorted as
the rest of his information. He claims to have first run across these
views "while I was studying art history in Seville," but they
correspond point for point to material in The Templar Revelation. A
writer who sees a pointed finger as a throat-cutting gesture, who says
the Madonna of the Rocks was painted for nuns instead of a lay
confraternity of men, who claims that da Vinci received "hundreds of
lucrative Vatican commissions" (actually, it was just one...and it
was never executed) is simply unreliable.

I may still read the book, but I'll treat it as fantasy and not the historical thriller that it's been marketed as.

I spent a lot of time reading Dr. Suess to my kids when I was youger. Some of his later books were pretty political, so it doesn't surprise me that he did a lot of political cartooning, especially during WW II. PBS has a TV program about this aspect of his career and a companion web site. Wonder what he'd make of Bush and Kerry. I suspect he wouldn't be impressed by either of them.

No, I don't have one. (I sure would like one, though!) This article has first impressions of the new iPod Photo. Sounds like a cool little toy, though maybe not as good for pictures as you might think. But the idea of 60 GB of MP3 in a box I can wear on my belt is pretty darn appealing! Let's see-at 192 KBs encoding, that's about 10 hours of music per GB, so about 600 hours. That's a LOT of music.

Just in case you think that you're safe from earthquakes because you live in central North America, you should read this article about the great New Madrid earthquakes in 1811 and 1812. These were a series of magnitude 8 quakes in Missouri that rocked much of the central and east coast (they rang church bells in Boston!) and changed the course of the Mississippi river. If you want something a bit more dramatic around the same theme, look for the novels The Rift and 8.4.

Researchers have found the remains of what appears to be a new human species on an Indonesian island. The interesting thing is that they were small, only a metre high, and survived as long as 18,000 years ago. If confirmed, this will probably be the most significant anthropological discovery of the last few decades. This Wired article has more details. There was also a clip on it on last night's CTV news. (I could have done without the Hobbit comparisons.)

Sometimes a technical writer has to be a bit of a detective. Yesterday I was working on an Operations Guide for a new product. In the section on networking, one of the network engineers had given me a list of hardware, inluding "SAN with redundant JNI connecdtions".

I ususally expand acronyms, especially if they're unfamiliar, but I wasn't sure what JNI was. I looked it up in the ever-expanding glossary that I keep and found JNI = Java Native Interface. That didn't make sense in context, so I emailed the network engineer, and asked him if he knew what it was. Got the reply back: "Nope. Nobody here knows what it stands for."

OK. Back to the Tech Encyclopedia. Look up the definition of JNI and send it back to the the network engineer. "This is all I've been able to find for it, but it's obviously not it. Any suggestions?" A few minutes later, I get a reply. "It's the name on the cards. They're made by a company that got bought by somebody else, but nobody knows what it stands for."

OK, now we're getting somewhere. I typed in "www.jni.com' into my browser and a company web page for JNI Corporation. They'd been bought by AMCC and the page redirected me the AMCC web site, where I found the page for the JNI cards. They turn out to be host-bus adapters, which connect a fibre-optic data connection from the SAN (storage area network) to the servers. Mystery solved.

Sometimes, it's fun. I probably should have been a research librarian, but that's another story.

A belated birthday greeting to Core Dump. I began publishing this blog on October 24, 2003.

The Cassini probe has begun sending back the best images of Titan ever seen. They're not as spectacular as the pictures of Saturn's rings but they're still pretty awe-inspiring.

From Boing Boing: " Kids at Richland Center High School in Richland Center, WI got a chance to meet George W Bush during an official visit. However, any student who turned up wearing a pro-Kerry pin, hat or shirt was threatened with expulsion."

This is a really good way to teach students about democracy and freedom of expression.

If you have Word 2003 Professional, you may have noticed a new Save As XML option. You can save a document in WordML, which is a Microsoft-developed variant of XML that will completely preserve your document's formatting and all of the other "wordiness" - things like styles, bookmarks, and list templates. What it won't preserve is the corruption that sometimes occurs with Word's horrendously complex binary file format.

Technical writers have been using the technique of saving to RTF (rich text format) for years as a way of eliminating (at least some forms of) document corruption. But RTF doesn't give as good a conversion as Word's new XML format. Thanks to Rob Little, of Microsoft, for posting this tip on the word-pc mailing list.

I've been using Bloglines as my feed reader for a while now and I'm quite happy with it. Now there's a free alternative. Newsgator Online, by the people who make the NewsGator feed-reader add-in for Outlook, is now free. I haven't subscribed to it, but at a quick glance it looks like Bloglines might have more features. Still, alternatives, especially free ones, are good. I'll probably sign up and see if I can import my feedlist from Bloglines, just in case I have somewhere else to go if Bloglines is down.

Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Irag in pursuit of a neo-con utopia by Naomi Klein was origianlly published in the September 2004 issue of Harpers, and is probably the best single piece I've seen yet about what's happened and is happening in Iraq. It's also very long (about 18 pages printed) and goes into great detail about the Bush administration's thwarted plans to turn Iraq into a US client state. Well worth reading.

There will be a total Lunar eclipse this Wednesday evening and it will be visible at a convenient time for most North Americans. Sky and Telescope has a good article about it. The weather forecast says it'll be cloudy though, so I may not get to see it.

Cecil, this one is for you. Boing-Boing has a link to a quick-time movie of a cat being tossed in zero-g, on one of the "Vomit Comet" flights. It's a very small movie with no sound, but it's cleat that the cat is not happy. It did, however, land on it's feet.

According to this ZDNet article, Microsoft will probably release their desktop search tool, at least in beta, by the end of the year, along with a beta of a new MSN web search. Yahoo are also said to be releasing a desktop search tool, hard on the heels of Google and Copernic. As for myself, I'm quite happy with Copernic Desktop Search, which has just released a version 1.1 update. Still no Mozilla mail search though, unfortunately.

The Globe and Mail, arguably Canada's best newspaper, devoted most of it's Saturday issue to China and how it's development into a true superpower is going to affect our lives. I haven't read all of it yet, but I'm pretty impressed by what I've read so far. Much of the issue is available on the web though if you're lucky, you might find a newsstand copy or two left over the weekend. The Globe editors say that this is the most important issue they've published, and I agree with that assessment. Defintely worth the time to read.

The BBC has a fascinating article about how Lowry Digital applied digital processing to clean up the original Star Wars films, whose negatives had been degraded and dirtied by years of handling. Each frame was scanned to a 70 MB image. What I found especially interesting is that they were able to remove the film's grain from the digital image, creating a new image that was better than original film. Just in case you're curious, they needed 400 terabytes of disk storage and 1,200 Macintosh G5s to process the film.

This is from Techstuff.ca (which is a site I haven't seen before and will have to keep an eye on).

Top 10 ways the Canadian version of Halo 2 differs from the U.S. version:

1. The guns are registered (but not very well).
2. Injured players get publicly funded health care.
3. Computer players apologize when you shoot them.
4. "Cuba" level is unlocked.
5. Tim Hortons product placement.
6. Two clans named "Roughriders."
7. Annoying players can be kicked "oot" of multi-player mode.
8. "Melting Pot" level renamed "Cultural Mosaic."
9. Officially refuses invitations to join U.S.-led multi-player campaigns,
then quietly helps behind the scenes without telling anyone.
10. Price tag: $59.99.

The recent invasion of Iraq was touted as, in some circles at least, as the first modern, networked war. Information technology and smart weapons were supposed to revolutionize the way war was fought. But anyone who works with high technology knows that it's hard enough to get things to work properly, even in the sterile confines of a corporate server room. Technology Review has a long article about what really happened with the Army's new information technology systems when the war began.

Once the invasion began, breakdowns quickly became the norm. For the movement of lots of data—such as satellite or spy-plane images—between high-level commanders and units in the field, the military employed a microwave-based communications system originally envisioned for war in Europe. This system relied on antenna relays carried by certain units in the advancing convoy. Critically, these relays—sometimes called “Ma Bell for the army”—needed to be stationary to function. Units had to be within a line of sight to pass information to one another. But in practice, the convoys were moving too fast, and too far, for the system to work. Perversely, in three cases, U.S. vehicles were actually attacked while they stopped to receive intelligence data on enemy positions. “A lot of the guys said, ‘Enough of this shit,’ and turned it off,” says Perry, flicking his wrist as if clicking off a radio. “‘We can’t afford to wait for this.’”

It wasn't all that bad, of course, but things did not go smoothly, something to keep in mind the next time you see one of those Pentagon-sponsored, war-porn specials on the Discover or History channel. It might be a good article to keep in mind too, for the next time somebody at work proposes the next great thing that's going to magically solve all your company's problems. When it comes to new technology, the most important law isn't Moore's law -- it's Murphy's.

James Oberg has written the best article I've seen yet about the Genesis probe disaster, it's causes, and it's aftermath at NASA. The Genesis probe crashed to Earth because acceleration sensors were installed backwards and didn't open the probe's parachute. Design drawings were at fault, as well as failure to design the sensors so that they could only be installed in the proper position. NASA has suffered much from similar mistakes, as Oberg points out.

In the longer term, space engineers need to remember the lessons of the past — and remind their management, often too narrowly focused on schedules and costs. For half a century, Murphy and his legions of successors have paid a high price in time, treasure and even lives to map out the line between prudent and careless space design and operation. Each new generation, and each new project team, can't afford the same tuition over and over again. Some more respect for the past may be the only practical formula for a safe future.

However, the issues discussed in the article are broader than aerospace engineering, and anyone involved in a large software development project would do well to read this article.

Neil Gaiman's blog has a hilariously funny but quite pointed post about what not to send a writer. It's written by his literary assistant, the Fabulous Lorraine, who no doubt has written it from a depth of bitter experience. Here's a sample:

10. Food

Unless you are a proper Food Company, what you send will not arrive in anything like the condition you sent it out in. Writers, or anyone else for that matter, tend to become rather dubious upon viewing the crumpled remains of what once was no doubt (or a lot of doubt) cookies. Also, somewhere deep in our darkest recess of our past, all of us remember our Mother's Don't Take Candy From Strangers , I mean, sure, it's a million to one odds, that this is the final crazed fan who has coated the little goodies with arsenic, but hey, who wants to take chances?

Send wine. Or scotch. Single Malt. Old Single Malt.

I suppose you could apply most of the advice she gives to artists, musicians, politicians. or any other celebrity.

Jerry Muelver has written ten rules for technical communication. They're oriented to contractors but could certainly be applied by anyone in a full-time job. And they all make sense.

Slashdot has published an interview with author Neal Stephenson (Snowcrash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle) consisting of answers to questions posted by readers. It's quite long and quite fascinating; his response to a question about why genre writers get no respect from "literary" authors is several pages long. I've just started Quicksilver, the first novel in the Baroque Cycle, and will probably post more on it later when I finish it (say in about 3 months - it's a long book.)

I've been having a lot of trouble with Blogger today. I had written the post about Mitchell Smith at lunch hour and tried to post it at work but it timed out. I tried again after I got home and had a similar problem. I finally got it posted after switching to IE after failing with Mozilla (though I don't think it was a browser issue). If anyone else who reads this has been having similar troubles, please leave me a comment or email me about it.

I posted here last year about the novels Snowfall and Kingdom River, by Mitchell Smith. I've just finished the third book in the trilogy, Moonrise, and it's every bit as good as the first two. I'm not a big reader of fantasy, (which these stories technically are, though they bear little resemblance to the glut of neo-Tolkein trilogies choking the bookstore shelves) but when it's this good, I'll bite. Smith is an elegant prose stylist with a knack for creating real, believable characters who live with you long after you've finished the book. In that, and in his post-apocalyptic setting, he reminds me of Edgar Pangborn, a writer whose books are sadly out of print, but well worth tracking down. Smith has published several other mystery and thriller novels and I am going to have to try those. He's a writer not to be missed.

I've came across mentions of Craiglist before, but until today never bothered to look at the site. For some reason, I thought it was a political blog. It's not. It's a site of lists, of many different types of lists, including jobs, apartments for rent, things for sale, services, community events, and personals. It's oraganized by city; the link here is for Toronto. This looks to be useful and will go in my bookmark list.

There's been quite a bit of concern about the effects on the global climate (not to mention the local air quality) of the increasing industrialisation in China. One solution is nuclear power, and the Chinese are pursuing it with an innovative new, safe reactor design. The pebble-bed reactors they're planning are inherently safe, remove the coolant and the reaction shuts down, just the opposite of the high-pressure water or CANDU reactors used in the US and Canada. Of course there are other issues to worry about, such as waste disposal, but at least they won't have to worry about the China syndrome.

I don't know if the author of this page is a technical writer, but if he isn't, he should be. Simple steps to protect your computer is one of the best summaries of computer security procedures for home users that I've seen anywhere. It's concise, clearly written, and complete. This is one you can give to your mom or your Aunt Minnie and hope that they might be able to follow some of the instructions. And of course, you will too.

If you've read a lot of SF, some things get overly familiar pretty fast: eccentric scientists, beings of pure energy, an immortal being that wants to die, and so on and on and on. The Grand List of Over-used SF cliches is a list of cliches in science fiction books and movies compiled by John VanSickle and a team of volunteers. There are about 320 in the page, grouped by category with icons indicating their degree of awfulness (I particularly like the piggy icon for sexism). It would be nice if they showed sources so we could avoid the stories.

Places that viruses and trojans hide on start up is a good summary of places to look if you think you might have malware (virus, trojan, spy-ware) on your PC. Of course, you're probably already running Ad-Aware or Spybot and anti-virus software, but they don't always catch everything. Sometimes you have to dive in under the hood and this article is a good place to start.

Wired is now reporting that there are substantial doubts about the CherryOS OS/X emulator software. From their article and reports on Slashdot, it sounds like it may be a repackaged version of the PearPC emulator. It sounded like it was too good to be true, and maybe it was.

Corel has bought Jasc Software, the makers of PaintShop Pro, a product that I've been happily using for a decade or so. The Register article doesn't mention the fact that Corel already has a pretty powerful graphics editor (Photopaint) in their graphics suite. It seems likely that they're trying to expand more into the consumer graphics market, which will probably get hotter as more and more people get digital cameras.

The Ad Graveyard is a collection of ads that never made it to print, mostly because the client got cold feet. Some are intentionally risque, some are just plain hilarious. Caution: a few are not worksafe.

Peter F. Hamilton just keeps getting better and better. Each of his books has been better than the last, from the Mindstar Rising trilogy to the Night's Dawn trilogy, to Fallen Angel, to his latest book, Pandora's Star. Hamilton writes what some people have (disparagingly) called space opera, but it's exciting, detailed, very intelligent space opera. There's no way I can summarize the plot line of this novel, rather than trying I'll point to this review on the Science Fiction Weekly site. Pandora's Star is a large book, almost 800 pages, and it's only the first half of the complete novel. The second half, Judas Ascending, will be published next August, and I'm going to be counting the days until I can get my hands on it.

Locus Magazine online has published a career retrospective of Robert Silverberg. I first encountered Silverberg's work in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he was already a major, established author. Dying Inside (1972) was, I think, his best novel and is certainly one of the very best novels ever written on the theme of telepathy. His best known later books are the Majipoor Chronicles, an epic series starting with Lord Valentine's Castle. The Locus article mentions quite a few other books and story collections that I haven't seen and will have to check out.

There's an interesting thread on the Yahoo HATT (Help Authoring Tools and Techniques) group about the rumoured demise of RoboHelp. According to the original post, Macromedia have laid off most of the RoboHelp development team and are moving further development, if any, to India. There is a followup from a Macromedia executive confirming that some development will be outsourced and stating that they still plan to develop RoboHelp. Then again, that's what they said about RoboHelp for FrameMaker, until they dropped it.

I think the truth of this hinges on the layoffs. If they did lay off most of the RoboHelp developers, then RoboHelp is essentially dead. It's exactly the same situation as with Adobe and FrameMaker. There's no way that a new development team (whether they're in India or the US is immaterial), will be able to do anything more than maintenance programming on a product as complex and established as RoboHelp.

The New York Times has put a small portion of its 7 million picture photo archive online. You can browse or search in a number of categories, including New York, sports, and politics. There are some great images here; it's too bad that the "larger image" size is so small. Still fun to browse though.

The Russians are boldly going where NASA fears to tread and building a new 6-person shuttle. It seems to be primarily a crew transfer vehicle because the article states that the payload is only about 700 kg. First launch could be in 4 years.

Seymour Hersh is the New York report who has broken major stories like the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib prison abues. He gave a talk in Berkeley last Friday night and had some pretty strong things to say about George Bush and the war in Iraq.

"I've been doing an alternate history of the war, from inside, because people, right after 9/11, because people inside — and there are a lot of good people inside — are scared, as scared as anybody watching this tonight I think should be, because [Bush], if he's re-elected, has only one thing to do, he's going to bomb the hell out of that place. He's been bombing the hell of that place — and here's what really irritates me again, about the press — since he set up this Potemkin Village government with Allawi on June 28 — the bombing, the daily bombing rates inside Iraq, have gone up exponentially. There's no public accounting of how many missions are flown, how much ordnance is dropped, we have no accounting and no demand to know. The only sense you get is we're basically in a full-scale air war against invisible people that we can't find, that we have no intelligence about, so we bomb what we can see."

And:

"It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell out of me. What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can't speak out, in the military, in the intelligence community. They know in ways that none of us know, the incredible gap between what is and what [Bush] thinks."

Given Hersh's track record, I'd take this article seriously.

Google have finally released their desktop search tool, Google Desktop Search. This will index text, document, and email files (Outlook/Outlook Express only, sigh) on your hard drive. It also caches web pages you've viewed so those are searchable as well, and can integrate its search results of your PC with a web search. There is a detailed write-up about it on the O'Reilly site, as well as Google's own About page, if you want more details.

I will probably put this on one of my home PCs and give it a workout. For the last month or so, I've been using Copernic Desktop Search, which I'm finding extremely useful. What I like about Copernic is its speed -- it's faster for me to use it to find and open a file than it is to browse to and open it using Explorer or its native application.

At this point, I'd give the edge to the Copernic product. It indexes more file types, including PDF, and makes it easier to find graphics and multimedia files. But some people may find Google's integration with web searching more useful. In any case, if you aren't using a desktop search tool, try one of these out. After a month of using Copernic Desktop Search, I can't imagine using my PC without it.

Wired is reporting that Maul X-Stream have released CherryOS, an emulator that lets you run the Macintosh OS-X operating system and Mac software on a PC. It creates a virtual Mac G4 that runs about 80 percent of the speed of the native PC.

I have no idea how well this works in reality, though the screen shots are pretty impressive. However, if you are really interested in this, I'd grab it fast, because Apple's legal department is probably working overtime to shut them down.

The forthcoming special edition DVD of Spider-Man 2 will have new material, according to the director. It sounds like there'll be more action scenes, or additions to existing scenes (6 seconds on the train, for example). According to Raimi, it's things he wanted to have in the movie but didn't have the money to do at the time.

XML is a markup language, not a programming language, but it is possible to manipulate XML data with standard programming languages. That task seems to have gotten a lot easier with E4X, which is an XML-aware version of ECMAScript, otherwise known as JavaScript. John Udell has an introductory article about it on his weblog. I can see some interesting things you could do with this to extract data from RSS feeds, for example. If you are working with XML, you want to check this out.

The Editing Process is a good, succint article about how to improve your writing by making it clearer and more direct. The article outlines a dozen or so rules for trimming exccess wording from your writing. I don't necessarily agree with all of them (the rule on eliminating "that", for example), but the article is defintely worth a read.

Microsoft's HTML Help format, which uses a compiled HTML file with an extension of .chm, is commonly assumed to be a Windows-only format. That may be true for producing HTML Help, but it's not true for viewing it. You can view HTML Help files on UNIX and Linux systems, including Mac OX X, by using an open source tool called xCHM.

I have no idea how well this works in reality. There are some screen shots on the site showing various CHM files under various flavours of UNIX. The Technical Limitations section lists some things that could cause problems, so you'll probably want to test this pretty thoroughly if your CHM files are more than plain vanilla.

The New York Times (free registration required) Science section has a lengthy lead article about the efforts to fight avian flu. If you want something to make you really paranoid, this should do it.

The Guardian is reporting that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen sharply in the last two years. Some scientists believe that this could signal the beginning of a runaway greenhouse effect, if it means that the Earth's capacity to absorb CO2 has finally been exceeded. Other scientists don't think the trend has gone on long enough to be significant. Still, it's certainly something to be concerned about, especially if it goes on.

TechAuthorsBB is a web-based technical writers' forum, started by author Carla Schroder. Since it's new, posts are a little sparse, so sign up and post something.

Business Week (of all places) has an article listing 15 great SF novels. The list was picked by an English professor, so it's not what most SF readers would probably expect. Worth looking at though.

John Lennon would have been 64 today.

Arandtech, one of the better hardware review sites, has posted a lengthy and detailed review of the new Mac G5 and OS/X. This is the best comparison of Windows and Mac that I've seen; if you're contemplating switching to a Mac or are simply just curious, you want to read this.

Now THESE are speakers. Won't fit in my rec room though, sigh.

If like me, you work in an office with harsh overhead flourescent lighting, you might find this tip useful. Set your window background colour to a very light shade of colour. It's much easier on the eyes when you're working in Word or FrameMaker.

To change the window background, go to your Desktop and right click. Choose Properties, select the Appearance tab, and click Advanced. Select Window from the Item list and change the colour. I use R 255, G255, B238, which gives me very light yellow that's easy on the eyes. Not all applications will accept this setting (Lotus Notes, for example), but it works well with Word and Frame, which is where I spend most of my time at work.

For all you technical writers with delusions of grandeur, here's a site to impress your bosses and co-workers: The Information Architecture Library.

"The Information Architecture Library is a public service of the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture. The Library is intended to provide access to an international collection of the best articles, books, blogs, guides, reports, and other resources related to the field of information architecture."

All kidding aside, this looks like a useful site, especially if you have to do any research in the areas of usability, indexing, knowledge management, and so on.

Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web, arguably the most significant development in the history of the Internet. Technology Review has an interview with him in which he explains his vision of the future of the Web, something he calls the "semanitic web". If you want an idea of where the future of the Web might lie, you want to read this.

Google has introduced a new service, Google Print, which will show you the full text of a book when the book contains your search term. It's similar to the service that amazon has been offering for a while now. In their words:

" To use Google Print, just do searches on Google as you normally would. Whenever a book contains content that matches your search terms, we'll show links to that book in your search results. Click on the book title and you'll go to a "content page," where you can see the page containing your search terms and other information about the book. You can also search for other topics within the book. Click on the "Buy this Book" link and you'll go straight to a bookstore selling the book online."

It sounds neat, and potentially quite useful, but so far none of the searches I've tried have hit any books. Presumably it'll get more useful over time as they add more books to their system.

Philip Roth has written a science fiction novel, or more accurately an alternate history novel, in which Charles Lindberg, a notorious pro-Nazi, wins the 1940 election against Roosevelt. CNN has a lengthy and mostly favourable review of The Plot Against America. I've seen a couple of other reviews of this as well. I'm going to have to put it on reserve at our library, assuming they get it.

Woody's Office Watch newsletter pointed me to an interesting article which uses Microsoft Word to analyse the speaking and writing styles of George Bush and John Kerry. As you'd expect, Bush has a simpler, more direct style than Kerry (though he was quite a bit more direct in last week's debate than in the past).

NewsForge has published a fairly long and detailed comparison of FrameMaker and OpenOffice Writer, written by Bruce Byfield. OO Writer comes out petty well in the comparison.

"As I proceeded, I found Writer was a much stronger contender than I had expected. At the end of the comparison, I had to conclude that the two products compare quite closely, depending on what features are more important to a given user. FrameMaker's superiority for sideheads, for instance, may sway some users, or Writer's in indexes and tables of contents. Nor are the advantages listed here equally decisive; Writer's victory in styles, for example, is narrower than FrameMaker's in cross-references and sideheads."

After reading the article, I still think FrameMaker has the edge, but I would certainlay take a good hard look at OO Writer as an alternative to MS Word, or if you can't afford FrameMaker. You might also want to check out Jean Weber's article about using OpenOffice for technical communication; I posted about it in August.

As for myself, I haven't used OO much recently, but I think I'll try using it at home in place or Word and see how it shakes out.

Although Wired isn't anywhere near as interesting a magazine as it was a decade ago, it occasionally manages to hit it dead on and The Long Tail is a case in point. The basic thrust of the article is that in a world of electronic publishing, if you put your backlist online someone, somewhere, will want it. In other words, you're not constrained to selling just the hits and in fact, your backlist may outsell the hits. While the article concentrates on music publishing, there are some examples from the book world, which are pretty interesting.

It's a pet peeve of mine that science fiction backlist novels are just about impossible to find, even in the big bookstores. (I've been looking for a copy of John Barne's Candle for several months now.) So I guess I'll order it from Amazon, or a dealer listed on Abe Books. In the pre-Internet world, I'd probably never find it, unless I was lucky enough to find a used copy or went to a specialty dealer. Now the potential is there for pretty much everything to be available.

One point the article doesn't much touch on is the issue of payment and rights, at least for niches outside of the music world (which is covered in detail). I'd love to have a complete facsimile edition of the complete run of Astounding/Analog or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The issue here isn't the cost of scanning and production of an electronic edition, so much as the cost of paying the authors, and tracking down the estates of authors who might have died 20 or 30 years ago. The present, insanely extended copyright terms make such a project impossible, even if it could be done at a reasonable cost.

But I think the author of the Wired article is pretty much right and in the future we'll see a lot more of omusic, movies, and literature niches available. The trick will be figuring out what's good.

Why anyone would want to drink this, I can't imagine, but "Anheuser-Busch says it will introduce a caffeinated, sweet-flavored beer for twentysomething club goers to compete with the flavored rums and vodkas gaining ground on the dance floor. ... B(E) infuses beer with caffeine, guarana and ginseng, along with berry aromas for a sweeter, yet more tart taste at 6.6 percent alcohol by volume, said company brewmaster Nathaniel Davis." I'll stick to the real thing, thanks.

Andrew Brooke has written a very satirical and funny article about the war on confusion in the latest issue of Communication Times, the newsletter of the Toronto STC chapter. Here's the intro to The Info-Terrorist War.

There is an informational war waging throughout the world. It is nothing less than a battle between good and evil. Between the forces of confusion and clarity. And only one side can be victorious.

The enemies of clarity have committed an act of war against us. We are a profession awakened to confusion and called to defend clarity and completeness. Our frustration has turned to anger, and anger to resolution.

Communicators have many questions. We are asking: Who is attacking our profession? The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated info-terrorist organizations known as Al-Quanfusja ("I'll confuse you".)

I've been looking at tools for doing simple demos of software and some small training aids, but the major tools, such as RoboDemo and Viewlet Builder are expensive and I don't want to pay for something I might not end up using very much. However, there is a free alternative, Wink. From a brief look at the features and the sample posted by Johan Heimstra (who posted to techwr-l with information about this tool), it looks like it might fit my relatively limited needs.

Today is the 47th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1, the first satellite. I can still remember the impact that had on people; it was during the Cold War, and the thought that the Soviet Union had real technological superiority really scared people. It was also the start of the space race, a very exciting time.

Also, today if all goes well, Bert Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites will win the X-Prize, an event that in the long run could be as significant as the launch of Sputnik.

Update: The second X-Prize flight of SpaceShipOne was successful, it reached a height of about 368,000 feet. Bert Rutan has won the X-Prize. If all goes well, three years from now, Virgin Galactic will begin flying paying customers into space.

George Soros has a blog. Soros is a socially-committed billionnaire who has funded drug refeorm efforts, the Open Society Institute, and is a major opponent of George Bush. Could be some interesting reading over the next month.

During a commerical for the movie, The Alamo: "From the studio who brought you Pearl Harbour".

Funny, I thought it was the Japanese ...

The Only Song of God is a tribute to Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, written by Steve Silberman, who writes on music, culture, and technology; often for Wired. He captures better than just about anyone I've read the special essence of the Dead, something that you'd never understand unless you'd experienced it happen live -a magical moment when the band and the audience became the instrument of some higher power.

"Yet I'm confident that the Grateful Dead were truly great, by which I mean, were able to abide some portion of mystery, and allow it to come through them without naming it or taking too much pride in it, or appropriating its surface aspects as a pose or strategy."

I've experienced that moment with a few other bands and musicians, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, McCoy Tyner, and Pharoah Sanders come to mind, but never with the intensity of the Dead on a good night.

A reader emailed me that he couldn't post comments. I thought they were working but it's hard for me to tell. I'd appreciate it if someone would post a comment or two here so I can check. If it doesn't work email me at keith AT soltys.ca

Still on the subject of Windows XP, if you want to make your copy of XP look different, check out this Windows XP icon site. You can even make it look like a Mac.

Microsoft has recently posted a series of patches to fix the vulnerability in their JPEG viewer that would allow vulnerable systems to be exploited simply by viewing a web page with a hacked image file. Needless to say, this is a dangerous vulnerability and is already being exploited.

Microsoft's patch procedure is, to put it kindly, byzantine. For a more detailed explanation, see John Udell's weblog. And after you run it, you may still have vulnerable files on your PC. There is now a third-party tool that will scan your system for vulnerable DLLs from third-party products-Microsoft's scan covers only Windows files. I ran it on my system and the results were revealing and pretty disturbing; as well as some Windows files that still appear to be vulnerable, I have vulnerable files in DreamWeaver, SnagIt, and PaintShop Pro. Presumably the vendors will release patches to fix this problem in due course; in the meantime, be very careful about viewing JPEG files in any of the applications I mentioned and keep an eye out for updates.

I am really beginning to think that it's time to take a serious look at Linux - it'd handle most of the things I do on my home PC and I could use something like Virtual PC for anything that really required Windows.