Core Dump

The New York Times (free registration required) has an interesting article about search technologies being developed by IBM. They are working on systems to extract meaning out of unstructured text; the article gives several examples of new applications for this type of technology. If they keep at it, it's pretty clear that Google will have to keep innovating to avoid being overtaken in the search market.

Science fiction writer and futurist, Arthur C. Clarke, survived the tsunami that hit Sri Lanka on Sunday. Clarke has been living there for many years. However his diving company and beach house were destroyed. There's a message from him on his web site.

SF newsmagazine Locus has a long and thoughtful article by Lucas Cook about science fiction video games. The current blockbuster seems to be Halo 2, which has elements of many SF stories, most notably Larry Niven's Ringworld. And of course there's the alien invasion of Half Life and Half Life 2. But I think the classic science fiction game has yet to be written.

This page has two DocBook XML projects, one using FrameMaker 7 and DocBook 4.2 XML and the other using DocBook XML 4.3 XML and XSLT. The comments about Structured Frame 7 are not very complimentary. However, if you want to experiment with DocBook, this would be a good place to start. Thanks are due to Steve Whitlatch for making these available.

The Boeing Delta 4 Heavy booster had a successful test flight today. This is a new heavy-lift booster, with about 2 million pounds of thrust. (It can be scaled up quite a bit past that). It'll replace the aging Titan 4 and to some extent, the shuttle. Very impressive launch, wish I could have seen it live and in person. MSNBC has a good article and a video of it.

The Inquirer has a review of the OpenOffice 2.0 preview release. There are hyperlinks to the offical Open Office site and reviewer's guides and the like. There may be some sleepless nights in Redmond when the official release happens - the preview looks pretty good.

PC Magazine has an article that lists their picks for the 10 worst products of the year. Fortunately, there's nothing on it that I've bought or comtemplated buying, but if you're still shopping for a digital camera, MP3 player, or PDA, reading this article might save you some grief.

This post was written by Australian Word guru Steve Hudson and originally published on the word-pc mailing list. I'm republishing it here with Steve's kind permission.

Introducing the must-have Christmas present for technical writers everywhere - the only game every to target the technical writing audience: Word Warcraft from Blister.

Take control of a run away documentation department, collect resources and build essential infrastructure to overcome your enemy. Buildings include:

* Head Office - every centre of ops needs a HO. Your HO is where you send all your gathered resources to. The HO produces Minions, your basic worker unit. The HO can be upgraded to include Quality Assurance, which allows you to build technical writers and the highly dangerous Quality Control Freaks as well.

* Server farm - increases the rate of production of all other buildings and has several vital technology upgrades for increasing the attack and
defence capability of your units, including Zombie Programming to upgrade your programmers into lethal long-range attack units.

* Branches - the more staff you have, the more branches you need to build to control them. The further from a branch a staff member is, the higher
their daily expense account.

* Sweatshop - increases the daily profits and has several upgrades through to skunk works, which enable the creation of SMEs and Programmers, who are able to dodge attacks of all kinds with the Teflon Armour upgrade.

* Printing press: Produces Subversive literature which is slowly able to convert enemy units to your side. Increases the effectiveness of technical
writers attacking buildings. Produces documents that are your main weapon of attack, dependant on your team.

AND MORE!!!

Choose from several teams:

Wordpad: Tutorial mode only. Limited building capabilities, but builds really fast. Attacks with RTF documents.

Word: Create the evil empire. Produces quickly, has limited document upgrade capability so relies on weight of numbers in all battles. Attacks using the Corrupt Document.

Flamemaker: Has completely different units than the other teams, has the most powerful documents, but has limited unit types, upgrades and branch
count. Attacks using the Graphical Document.

WordPerfect: Similar to Word, but has better upgrades, more powerful documents but is only allowed a limited number of branches and thus staff. Attacks using the Structured Document and has special stealth capabilities - it can mimic Word troops so long as there are no technical writers nearby and the WordPerfect Structure Documents do not use their special Stabilise List attack (converts the Word team's Corrupt Documents into Structure Documents belonging to the WordPerfect team).

Supports multiplayer, internet, custom maps, single player and campaign modes. Campaign mode is based on the heady days of the 70-90s. Play the
first 15 years as Flamemaker, racing to dominance with its full range of features available from the start. Crush the fledgling Evil Empire still
struggling without its full feature set or massive weight of numbers. Then play the next 15 years as the Evil Empire, now starting to slowly develop
competing technologies.

Watch as your troops annihilate the previously undefeatable Flamemaker empire as it fails to match upgrades and technologies. Tremble with power
as you build thousands of branches across the map, forcing fleeing enemy agents into smaller and smaller regions. Hear the scream of tortured grammar. Feel the documents shredding under your fingertips (with the Rumble-Pack Keyboard TM INC expansion).

Cheap at half the price! Don't buy just one, buy a copy for all your friends as well. Buy 50 and get one free! Does not include batteries.

Steve Hudson - Blister Entertainment
Please note: Factual content in this email has been filtered out. Use only
as directed and see your doctor if pain persists.

Yesterday, a panel of judges from the British House of Lords ruled that detention of terrorist suspects without trial was illegal. I hope that the governments of the United States and Canada will learn from their words:

This is a nation which has been tested in adversity, which has survived physical destruction and catastrophic loss of life. I do not underestimate the ability of fanatical groups of terrorists to kill and destroy, but they do not threaten the life of the nation. Whether we would survive Hitler hung in the balance, but there is no doubt that we shall survive Al-Qaeda. The Spanish people have not said that what happened in Madrid, hideous crime as it was, threatened the life of their nation. Their legendary pride would not allow it. Terrorist violence, serious as it is, does not threaten our institutions of government or our existence as a civil community….

Such a power in any form is not compatible with our constitution. The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these. That is the true measure of what terrorism may achieve. It is for Parliament to decide whether to give the terrorists such a victory.

It's Friday, so it's time for something funny. Here's the annual Bad Sex winners. This is a competition, sponsored by the Literary Review, for the worst written sex scenes of the year. Tom Wolfe wins this year, for a truly amazing passage from his latest novel, I am Charlotte Simpson.

That might be a good question to ask some members of the Bush administration, who seem intent on ignoring reality, or thinking that because they believe something to be true, it is. There's a number of words for this type of thinking pattern, ranging from childishness to insanity. Unfortunately, as the article points out, the rest of us have to live with the consequences of their delusions.

When I made the post about Sherlock Holmes MP3s I was thinking that I wished some of the old, classic SF radio shows were available. Well, some of them are, including X-1, which was a precursor to the Twilight Zone. I'm pretty sure I heard some of these when I was a kid. The list also includes Buck Rogers, Batman, and Journey Into Space.

If you're into Sherlock Holmes or radio plays, you'll want to check out this page from the Sherlock Holmes Society, which has links to hundreds of MP3s of radio broadcasts of Sherlock Holmes stories.

The Sherlock Holmes Society has put together a web page with links to MP3 of many early broadcasts of Sherlock Holmes radio shows and radio plays, some from the 1930s up to later shows (including some from the CBC) in the 1970s and 1980s. If you are into Sherlock Holmes or old radio broadcasts, this is worth checking out.

I used to listen to CBD Mystery Theatre and other radio plays when I was a kid; I wish some of the science fiction plays I heard broadast were available.

The Plot Against America is a an alternate-history (what some snooty academics have taken to calling counterfactual) novel about what happens to the US, and more specifically Jews in the US, when Charles Lindbergh becomes president in 1940. In the novel, Lindbergh keeps the US out of the European war and begins a campaign of anti-semitic activities at the behest of the German government. Roth tells the story from the point of view of a young Jewish boy living in Newark. The story works better as a historical novel, the 1940s Newark is extremely well realized, than it does as alternate history, due to the way Roth decides to end the novel. Still, it's a very readable novel, and thought provoking. Anyone worried about the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the present US will probably feel quite a bit more worried after reading it.

According to Searchblog (and several other sites) Google will be starting a project to index the contents of Harvard's university library, followed by other major research libraries. Public domain material will be completely available; copyrighted material will be excerpted with a pointer to where it can be found. This is exciting news and is a big step along the way to making all human knowledge available over the Internet.

Update, December 15: The New York Times (free registration required) has a good article about the project.

If I ever can find the time to redesign my web site, I'm going to use CSS as much as possible, for example, to replace the table-based layout and to create flyout menus. There are a couple of sites I'll be looking at for ideas and tips. One is the CSS page on A List Apart. There are over 50 articles on topics from simple to advanced. The Noodle Incident has a links page with links to many CSS resources, as well as some articles. Both sites will be very useful if you are using or plan to use CSS in your web layouts.

There's another entry in the desktop search market. The Register reports that Yahoo has announced that it will license the X1 desktop search program. It'll be freely available in January.

I've been using Copernic Desktop Search for a while and am quite happy with it - I'd be perfectly happy if it indexed Thunderbird email they way it does for Outlook. X1 supports Netscape email, so perhaps it will be more easily extended to support Mozilla/Thunderbird. If so, I might switch over to the Yahoo tool.

I downloaded the Open CD yesterday, as mentioned in the previous post, and figured that as long as I had the latest versions at hand, I might as well install Firefox and Thunderbird. I've been using Mozilla for quite a while now, but held off switching to Firefox and Thunderbird until the 1.0 versions were released and they had a good import routine for importing my Mozilla profiles.

The installation of Firefox was completely painless. I ran the installer from the Open CD. The first time I opened Firefox, it asked me if I wanted to import my Mozilla profile settings; I said yes, and that was it. All my settings and bookmarks came across into Firefox. So far my impressions are on a par with what most people have written about Firefox - very positive. It's an incremental upgrade from Mozilla but a major one from IE; if you are still using IE, you should switch - now.

Thunderbird was similar in ease of installation, though I did encounter a problem with one of my mail accounts. I seem to have forgotten my Rogers' email password and had to call them to reset it. After that, I could send email but not receive it. That may have been due to a lag in the mail server accepting the password update that I entered (which according to the web page could happen, though they gave no indication of how long the update could take). I ended up setting my Rogers mail to forward all messages to soltys.ca, which I should have done ages ago anyway.

As for Thunderbird, it's defintely a better mail client than Mozilla, though there are a couple of features I wish it had. A fast, indexed search would be nice. Also I really miss the ability to "Send and File" a message into a folder. I can save a copy into a folder, but then I have to remember to delete the original (and did I remebmer to save the copy before setting?). But I'd still rather use Thunderbird than Outlook, for its increased security if nothing else.

It's too bad there isn't an open source email/calendar/PIM as good as Outlook's, which I use at work just to manage my task list. I'm quite interested in seeing what Mitch Kapor's Chandler project comes up with.

The OpenCD 2.0 has been released. This is a freely downloadable CD of the best open source software with a slick interface for selecting and installing the software. The software on the disk includes the latest version of standards, such as Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, and The GIMP, and quite a few others as well. I'm going to grab this (once the Slashdot effect wears off) as it'll be a lot easier than scrounging around on the net. Makes a nice stocking stuffer for your tech-saavy friends too.

FindForward is a search portal produced by German developer Philipp Lenssen. He's used the Google API and added a few nifty features to it, like the ability to search Amazon, to search blogs only, or to exclude blogs. You can find out more about it on his About page and on this review.

Test is a new and glitzy hardware guide, published by Wired, out just in time for the Christmas buying spree. It's also available for free download, as an 8 MB PDF file. I took a quick skim through it and it's worth downloading, but I don't know if I'd spend the money on the newsstand version -- lots of flash and not much depth. The reviews are knowledgable but kind of short.

There is good news for fans of the science fiction TV series, Babylon 5. A movie based on the film begins shooting next April. It's to be called The Memory of Shadows and is written by series creator J. Michael Stracyznski. It looks like it's set in the same universe, but the plot and characters will spin off from the original story, though Galen will be one of the characters.

Monospaced/Fixed Width Programmer's Fonts is a review of several monospaced fonts, suitable for programming. Normal text fonts are not monospaced - the letters have different widths, which makes them unsuitable for code listings, where you want to maintain indentation.

Windows comes with Courier New, which is too light and too wide for my taste. It's a particular problem when you have to include code samples in documentation, because if you use Courier, you can't get very much on a line. Most other fonts are more compact. Many of the fonts discussed in the article are available for free download. If you program or have to work with code listings, this article is well worth a look.

The following item was posted to comp.text.frame by Shlomo Perets of Microtype and I'm repeating it verbatim here.

The list of FrameMaker bugs & issues at
http://www.microtype.com/FM_bugs.html has been updated significantly in
recent weeks.

The list covers FrameMaker versions 5.0-7.1. Many of the bugs/issues listed
under older versions also apply to later versions; specific items known to
have been fixed in later versions are marked as such.
The following was posted to comp.text.frame by Shlomo Perets of Microtype.


One of the issues that has been addressed in the update is old links
pointing to Adobe's Support Knowledgebase which are no longer functional,
since Adobe has removed the target documents. I decided nonetheless to leave
these items in the list as unlinked text entries, so that there is a trace
of the bug/issue.

If you find that there are items you use from time to time, I suggest that
you consider creating a PDF web capture of the current list with its linked
documents, as described in the introduction to list. You will then have your
own reference document (~7MB), regardless of whether the original files are
available at adobe.com.

Please report inaccuracies or missing items. Your input and comments will
help make this list more useful and keep it updated.

Pierre Berton, the great Canadian historian, died earlier this week. It's hard to believe there won't be another Berton book celebrating some aspect of Canadian history - I think I read my first book by him when I was in high school and that was a long time ago - and I've read a few more since.

Here's a tribute to him. It concentrates on another aspect of his career, as a panelist on the best TV quiz show ever, Front Page Challenge.

News.com has a funny/sad article about companies that are hiring consultants to help employees learn to write emails that other people can understand. Here's a before example:

"I updated the Status report for the four discrepancies Lennie forward us via e-mail (they in Barry file).. to make sure my logic was correct It seems we provide Murray with incorrect information ... However after verifying controls on JBL - JBL has the indicator as B ???? - I wanted to make sure with the recent changes - I processed today - before Murray make the changes again on the mainframe to 'C'."

After more than fifteen years as a technical writer, I've been exposed to enough developer speak that I can almost understand that. The scary thing is that I've seen user documentation that's comparably bad.

The following article was published in the November issue of Commmunication Times, the newsletter of the Toronto chapter of the Society for Technical Communication.

Technical writers often have to develop the search skills of a research librarian. Knowing which search tools to use and how to them effectively can make you much more productive.

The Internet is now the first place most people turn to for reference, and Google is the most popular search site. Hidden under the small Advanced Search link is a page of very useful customization options. One of the more useful is the site search field, which lets you restrict your search to a specific domain. Some popular topic-specfic searches are are linked at the bottom of the page, including Apple- and Microsoft-specific searches. Google has recently added a local search function, which lets you restrict your searches to a particular area; for example, used bookstores in Scarborough.

Google has more to offer than just Web search, including an API that people have used to create pages or tools that use Google in new and innovative ways. You can find out more about some of these projects at Google Hacks or O'Reilly's Google Hacks page. Google's Groups search and its Groups 2 beta search allow you to search UseNet, which can be a good source for technical information that you might not find on the web. Recently Google has added a print funtion that will let you view text of books when your search results include text from a book that Google has indexed. (Amazon has a similar function).

There are alternatives to Google. MSN is probably Google's main competitor, and Microsoft has recently improved the search engine. My favourite has been Visimo, which categorizes its search results. This can help you to quickly narrow down a search. Now Vivismo has introduced Clusty, a more advanced version of its clustering search engine. Snap is a new search engine that also does clustering, and goes beyond Google's page rank algorithm by displaying rankings across various categories, which may help you judge the quality and relevance of a site.
A9 is a new search portal started by Amazon, which combines web and image searches (via Google), search inside book text (via Amazon), reference (via GuruNet), and movies (via the Internet Movie database). It's highly customizable and can remember information it's found for you before and lets you add notes to search results.

If you have a large hard drive, you know how hard it can be to find a file buried somewhere in a directory. Window's own search facility is slow and a resource hog. But there are now some good (and free!) alternatives that will index text and other files on your hard drive and email (at least if you use Outlook), giving you almost instant access to your most important data. Google Desktop Search, just introduced as I write this, indexes your hard drive, and will also integrate results with a web search. Copernic Desktop Search, which I've been using for more than a month and really like, restricts itself to your hard drive, but offers a quick view option that's generally much faster than opening the file in its native application. It also indexes PDF files, which Google Desktop Search ignores. HotBot Desktop Search searches your PC and also integrates RSS feeds, useful if you browse a lot of weblogs. Once you've used one of these tools, you'll wonder how you ever managed without it.

Most companies rely on commercial tools to search their intranets, but as with most things Internet, there are free alternatives. HT/Dig is a free, open source search engine that is easy to install and highly customizable. It's a good choice for a small intranet or web site, and a technical writer and requires only a moderate degree of technical skill to install and maintain. (I know, because I've done it).

If you want to find out more about search tools and keep on top of this rapidly developing field, have a look at John Batelle's Searchblog and Search Tools for Web Sites and Intranets.

In the early 1990s, I published a science fiction fanzine called Torus. It was a lot of fun, but the demands of parenthood and the expense of printing and mailing 200 fanzines every few months put an end to the project. (One of these days, I may resurect some of the author interviews online.) If I was publishing a fanzine now, it would be online, and it would be a lot like (though probably not as good as) Emerald City, which won this year's Hugo Award for best fanzine.

The current issue has some very interesting book reviews (the Geoff Ryman and Gary Gibson books sound particularly interesting), and a good mix of interviews, articles and shorter pieces. Back issues are online and there's an index of book reviews, which would be very useful if I had more time to read. If you have any interest in science fiction or fantasy, do take a look at Emerald City; you will probably come back for more.

The webzine User Instinct has a good article called Usable Design: A Quick Guide for F/OSS Developers. It's written for developers who are working on free or open source software, many of whom don't have any formal training in UI design. Then again, from what I've seen, neither do a lot of corporate developers. If you have any influence on UI design, this is worth reading.

ZDNet Australia has an interesting article about Google and what makes it tick, based on an interview with Google's vice-president of engineering. Fascinating stuff. 40 TB of storage and they get sub-second response times with off-the-shelf, no-name hardware. There's a lesson here, somewhere.

Bruce Tognazzini, former human interface evangelist at Apple, has put together a list of the top ten computing design flaws. Actually, there are only seven, with three more to be filled out. Number one is the inability of operating systems and software to gracefully survive crashes and power failures - have you even wondered why an application can't save everything you type, as you type it?

Boris Vallejo is a European artist who was somewhat notorious for his erotic fantasy paintings, many featuring busty women in various states of undress being rescued from peril by heros with big muscles and bigger swords. There's a large gallery of his paintings on the net, spanning several decades of his career. There's a lot of kitsch here, but buried in it are some really good paintings. Warning: Some of these are most definitely not work safe.

From StrangeCosmos, here's a take on what the Nativity would be like if it happenned now.

And Joseph went up from Galilee to Bethlehem with Mary, his espoused wife, who was great with child. And she brought forth a son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn. And the angel of the Lord spoke to the shepherds and said, "I bring you tidings of great joy. Unto you is born a Savior, which is Christ the Lord."

"There's a problem with the angel," said a Pharisee who happened to be strolling by. As he explained to Joseph, angels are widely regarded as religious symbols, and the stable was on public property where such symbols were not allowed to land or even hover. ...

This is another one of those "I'm not sure if this is funny or scary items".