Core Dump

Groklaw has a long and detailed article on open document formats, what they are, and why they matter. You might think that having all your files in a widely used format like Word would be good enough, but will you be able to read those files 10 or 20 years from now? 20-year-old text files are still readable as are HTML files from the early 90s. But if you have Word for DOS files from back then, you might be out of luck. Robert Bruce Thompson has some good comments on the issue on his DayNotes page today.

I was fascinated by codes and cryptanalysis when I was in high school. I never pursued it, though. If you're interested in this stuff, a US Army cryptanalysis manual, Basic Crytanalysis, is available online. It sppears to date from about 1990. The files are PDFs.

Locus, the newsmagazine of the science fiction and fantasy genre, has released its recommended reading list for 2004. There are a lot of books and stories on it, most of which I've never seen or read, but it certainly gives me a good starting point for a year or two worth of reading.

Steven Johnsaon has written a fascinating article about the way he uses a tool called DEVONthink to help him write books. Basically, DEVONthink is a search tool with smarts - it can analyze the semantic content of text and suggest other passages of text that might be associated. Johnson uses it as kind of a brainstorming tool to find connections to things he might not otherwise have thought of. His blog article explains the process in some detail -- the New York Times Book Review has a shorter essay that summaries his process.

This looks like it could be a very worthwhile approach for some types of writing. A standard search tool will give you links to URLs or documents, but something like DEVONthink works at a more granular level. What would be really interesting is to combine this type of search with a knowledge management system that already had documents with metadata about their content.

January 27th, 1967 - Apollo 1 fire
January 28th, 1986 - Loss of Challenger and her crew.
February 1st, 2003 - Loss of Columbia an her crew.

James Oberg has an excellent article on MSNBC about these disasters. He points out that all could have been prevented if proper safety procedures had been followed and more attention had been paid to the warning signs.

But the internal hazards -- what investigation boards have called the "flawed safety culture" -- have proven much more insidious. This is the realm of convenient assumptions, of complacency, of willfulness, of use of statistical superstitions, of a false familiarity with an unblinking foe. It is a culture made possible by an all-too-human aversion to facing unpleasantness.

MirrorMask, a film based on Neil Gaiman's fantasy graphic novel, is being previewed at Sundance and there's a reivw of it on HollywoodReporter.com. A very favourable review too. This is one I want to see.

According to a story in the LA Times, the configuration of the passenger train in yesterday's derailment may have contributed to the accident. The train was being pushed by a locomotive and the other end of the train struck the SUV. It's likely that if the locomotive had struck the SUV there would have been little damage to the train and it probably wouldn't have derailed.

GO Transit, which I ride every weekday to and from work, uses the same kind of configuration (and the same kind of double-decker cars). I've been aware of this as a safety issue for some time and I won't ride in one of the end cars.

PBS launched a new science show the other night, NOVA scienceNow, which is a newsmagazine type show about science. Unlike some similar shows I've seen on other networks, this one didn't make me cringe, and most of the articles were both interesting and had a reasonable amount of content. They're putting the show online too, so you can watch the individual segments online if you missed the show. I wish more TV shows would do this.

This is an updating of Abbott and Costello's classic comedy skit, "Who's on First". I don't know who wrote it, but it's absolutely hilarious.

…, their famous sketch, "Who's on first?" might have turned out something like this:
COSTELLO CALLS TO BUY A COMPUTER FROM ABBOTT
ABBOTT: Super Duper computer store. Can I help you?
COSTELLO: Thanks. I'm setting up an office in my den and I'm thinking about buying a computer.
ABBOTT: Mac?
COSTELLO: No, the name's Lou.
ABBOTT: Your computer?
COSTELLO: I don't own a computer. I want to buy one.
ABBOTT: Mac?
COSTELLO: I told you, my name's Lou.
ABBOTT: What about Windows?
COSTELLO: Why? Will it get stuffy in here?
ABBOTT: Do you want a computer with Windows?
COSTELLO: I don't know. What will I see when I look at the windows?
ABBOTT: Wallpaper.
COSTELLO: Never mind the windows. I need a computer and software.
ABBOTT: Software for Windows?
COSTELLO: No. On the computer! I need something I can use to write proposals, track expenses and run my business. What do you have?
ABBOTT: Office.
COSTELLO: Yeah, for my office. Can you recommend anything?
ABBOTT: I just did.
COSTELLO: You just did what?
ABBOTT: Recommend something.
COSTELLO: You recommended something?
ABBOTT: Yes.
COSTELLO: For my office?
ABBOTT: Yes.
COSTELLO: OK, what did you recommend for my office?
ABBOTT: Office.
COSTELLO: Yes, for my office!
ABBOTT: I recommend Office with Windows.
COSTELLO: I already have an office with windows! OK, let's just say I'm sitting at my computer and I want to type a proposal. What do I need?
ABBOTT: Word.
COSTELLO: What word?
ABBOTT: Word in Office.
COSTELLO: The only word in office is office.
ABBOTT: The Word in Office for Windows.
COSTELLO: Which word in office for windows?
ABBOTT: The Word you get when you click the blue "W".
COSTELLO: I'm going to click your blue "w" if you don't start with some straight answers. OK, forget that. Can I watch movies on the Internet?
ABBOTT: Yes, you want Real One.
COSTELLO: Maybe a real one, maybe a cartoon. What I watch is none of your business. Just tell me what I need!
ABBOTT: Real One.
COSTELLO: If it's a long movie, I also want to watch reels 2, 3 and 4. Can I watch them?
ABBOTT: Of course.
COSTELLO: Great! With what?
ABBOTT: Real One.
COSTELLO: OK, I'm at my computer and I want to watch a movie. What do I do?
ABBOTT: You click the blue "1".
COSTELLO: I click the blue one what?
ABBOTT: The blue "1".
COSTELLO: Is that different from the blue w?
ABBOTT: The blue "1" is Real One and the blue "W" is Word.
COSTELLO: What word?
ABBOTT: The Word in Office for Windows.
COSTELLO: But there are three words in "office for windows"!
ABBOTT: No, just one. But it's the most popular Word in the world.
COSTELLO: It is?
ABBOTT: Yes, but to be fair, there aren't many other Words left. It pretty much wiped out all the other Words out there.
COSTELLO: And that word is real one?
ABBOTT: Real One has nothing to do with Word. Real One isn't even part of Office.
COSTELLO: STOP! Don't start that again. What about financial bookkeeping? You have anything I can track my money with?
ABBOTT: Money.
COSTELLO: That's right. What do you have?
ABBOTT: Money.
COSTELLO: I need money to track my money?
ABBOTT: It comes bundled with your computer.
COSTELLO: What's bundled with my computer?
ABBOTT: Money.
COSTELLO: Money comes with my computer?
ABBOTT: Yes. No extra charge.
COSTELLO: I get a bundle of money with my computer? How much?
ABBOTT: One copy.
COSTELLO: Isn't it illegal to copy money?
ABBOTT: Microsoft gave us a license to copy Money.
COSTELLO: They can give you a license to copy money?
ABBOTT: Why not? THEY OWN IT!
(A few days later)
ABBOTT: Super Duper computer store. Can I help you?
COSTELLO: How do I turn my computer off?
ABBOTT: Click on "START".

Arand Tech has a long review of the new Mac mini, including the software (which includes several pages on iPages, the new word-processing application). It sounds like a really intriguing machine - my wife needs to replace her aging laptop and the Mac mini might be just the thing. Yhough I think a low-end white-box PC might be more cost-effective, the Mac definitely has the edge on usability and space saving, and OS/X beats Windows XP hands down.

NASA has a web page with some unusual photos of the Indian Ocean tsunami-the waves were big enough that they could be seen from orbit. Other pictures show before and after views of the Thai coast and Sri Lanka, digitally enhanced to show the inundated areas.

The University of Southern California Tsunami Research Center has a page with pictures of Indonesia taken a few days after the tsunami by one of their researchers. They clearly show how extensive the inundation was and how much damage the waves did to the coast - the wave height appears to have been as much as 50 feet in some places.

Michael Crichton's latest novel, State of Fear, is a an anti-global warming tract. SF author and astrophysicist Greg Benford has some harsh words to say about the book and its possible impact on the global-warming debate. I think I'm with Benford on this one.

The Register has an interesting article on the law of unintended consequences - which boils down to "you can't think of everything". Case in point: In the 1970s, the US sold ultra-high quality printing equipment to it's ally, Iran, so it could print high-quality Rials. But in the 1990s, the same presses were used to flood the Mid-East with high-quality counterfiet US dollars, forcing the US mint to change the design of its money in the mid-90s. The article cites several other examples, which make for some interesting reading.

Slate magazine has an article about the resurgence of net radio stations, some of which are using the AACPlus codec developed by satellite radio broadcasters. The sound quality of some of these stations is quite amazing, considing the low bandwidth - 48k connections give excellent sound quality - much better than RealAudio or Windows Media Player for the same bandwidth. The article contains links to some stations you can check out. You'll need the latest version of WinAmp.

I was helping my son with his math over the weekend and needed to look up a formula (surface area of a cone). I found the WebCalc Calculator site, which didn't have the formula, but did have a form for calculating it and just about any other formula you could want to find a result for. As well as math, there are financial formulas, programming tools (MD5 hash, for example), and converters, among the topics. Definitely a handy site - though I wish they'd included the formulas on the pages.

Emerald City, the excellent review fanzine, has published a list of the best SF and fantasy novels of 2004. I'm embarrassed to admit that I haven't read any of them - though I do have one of them (the Paul McAuley book) on reserve at the library, and there are two or three others that I will get to eventually (probably when the paperbacks come out). Looks like it was a good year for SF; some of the books sound quite intriguing.

Google has released Picasa 2.0, a very slick photo cataloguing and editing application. It will build catalogs of all the graphic files on your hard drive (or whatever folders you tell it to search), and let you edit and manipulate those files. The editing controls work in real time, giving you an instant preview of the results. PC Magazine has a review. It's small (3 MB), fast, and it's free. What more could you want?

Although NASA engineers think they have eliminated the risk of large chunks of foam breaking off the external tank, they can't completely keep small pieces from breaking off and hittting the shuttle. This is bad news, as studies have revealed that even small pieces (popcorn size) can cause enough damage to the wing's leading edge that the shuttle could be lost on reentry. Although the Shuttle will likely again fly as planned later this year, I suspect that this will kill any remaining chances of a Shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.

XML.com has published a very interesting article on using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to print XM documents instead of XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language). Printing XML documents has always been something of a problem, partially due to the complexity of XSL, and using CSS looks to be a simpler approach, at least for documents that don't require the structure transformation features of XSL.

I was watching the Discover channel the other night and they showed European scientists piecing together images from the Huygens lander to create a panorama of Titan's landscape. However, amateurs have beat them to it, by downloading the images off the web and using various pieces of software to create their own views. The image created with Terragen, although not a true photograph, is particularly impressive.

This Washington Post story is a must read if you do any online shopping or banking. It shows how widespread phishing (fraudulent emails or websites designed to steal personal information) has become and how easy it is to set up a phishing operation. Apparently, there are now phishing toolkits, to go along with the virus toolkits that have been available for some time. It looks like this problem is only going to get worse.

MacCentral has a comparison of the new Mac Mini vs. the lowest-cost Dell system. Although the Mac Mini is more expensive out of the box (and doesn't include a keyboard, mouse, or monitor), by the time you add the things that are included in the Mac (Firewire, wireless, better video), the Mac looks pretty good. Incidentally, you can upgrade the Mac Mini (more RAM, bigger hard drive) without voiding Apples warranty, as long as you don't break it opening the case. There's an article on how to do it here.

Document and content-management systems are big things these days, but when planning for them, people sometimes neglect to consider how they are going to manage their printed documents. This article (part 1 and part 2) takes an extensive look at integrating a print-based workflow into a content-management system. This should be a particularly interesting article if you haven't implemented content management yet, and are trying to figure out how to handle your legacy documentation processes. Some of the tools discussed include InDesign, FrameMaker, Arbortext, and Documentum.

Leximation has some FrameMaker plug-ins that look quite interesting. Of particular interest, is MarkerTools, which enhances the native FrameMaker marker dialog and lets you expand markers inline in your text so you can see and edit them. This is something that should have been added to Frame a long time ago; considering that IxGen can do it too, it's surprising (and a sign of Adobe's neglect of Frame) that they haven't added the capability by now. Other plug-ins let you manage variables at the book level, customize the help menu, provide additional commands for the File menu, and add functionality to the Save as MIF command. Prices are reasonable and you can download trial versions.

The Associated Press has a good article on high-tech marketing and the use of buzzwords - words, like enterprise, scalable, and solution. If you've ever had to write a product description for a manual, based on copy from marketing, you'll enjoy this article.

Other overused buzzwords include "viral marketing" - meaning a marketing campaign that spreads at lightning speed and "stickiness" - which refers to something that keeps a person interested in a Web page. While these words are intended to convey something positive, some think they conjure up an unsightly plague.

Even blog, a fusing of "Web" and "log" that refers to online diaries, made Lake Superior State University's annual list of words that should be banished.

"Many who nominated it were unsure of the meaning," the list's authors noted. "Sounds like something your mother would slap you for saying."

I grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, a steel mill town, home to Algoma Steel, one of Canada's biggest steel producers. My grandparents house was literally a stone's throw from the giant coal piles that fed the blast furnaces. At night the lights and flares of the plant lit up the sky in an eerily beautiful dance of light.

Kevin Scanlan is a photography who specializes in pictures of industrial sites and his steel mill photos are some of his best. In his own words:

Standing near an operating blast furnace is like becoming that child again watching a robot monster movie on Saturday afternoon. The mill looms above. The men working around the bottom move cautiously and wear protective clothing. There is a constant roar from the blast stoves, the unique smell of hot metal—and there is the light. Molten iron emits a glowing light that is mesmerizing. You want to reach down and scoop up a handful of this flowing strand of light.

In the excellent, new O'Reilly book, Word Hacks, there are a couple of macros that let you search Google from within Word. However, there's an easier way to do this. Microsoft MVP Ron de Bruin has put together a series of add-ins for MS Office programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) that let you search Google from within those programs. All youi have to do is install a global template. The add-in offers more than the basic Google search; for example, you can search Google Groups or restrict your search to a specific site. If you use Word a lot and find yourself jumping to Google a lot, then this one should be useful.

A British web site has a pretty favourable write-up on the new Battlestar Galactica series (it's been showing in Britain for a while). I liked the pilot (much to my surprise, because I really detested the original series), so I'm looking forward to the new episodes. The article doesn't contain any real spoilers, if you're worried about that sort of thing./

Babes in Space is an archive of pulp science fiction covers featuring women in scanty costumes in various types of distress. It'd be interesting to see a comparison of these with some of the covers from the detective pulps, some of which were pretty strong, even by today's standards.

Spencer Dryden, the drummer for the Jefferson Airplane during their best years, passed away yesterday at the age of 64. He'd been in ill health (cancer, I think) for some time. Dryden never gained the fame that flashier drummers, like Ginger Baker, acquired but he could play rings around just about anyone.

At their peak (1968-1969) there was noboby who came close to matching the intensity and beauty of the Airplane's live performances - if you want proof, check out The House at Pooneil Corners on the new Fly Jefferson Airplane DVD. And Dryden's polyrhythmic style was a key part of the Airplane's sound. He will be missed.

This web site contains an archive of several CDs of pictures published by the United States Geological Survey (USGS). All the pictures are in the public domain. You can browse the site or search by category or search caption text. Some interesting pictures here, particularly in the Earthquake category.

According to this article, hackers have found a way to exploit the Digital Rights Management(DRM) "feature" of Windows Media Player to install malicious software on your PC. Basically, when you try to play a DRM-restricted file in Windows Media Player, it checks to see if it can find the license, and will attempt to download it. However the license could be a malicious piece of software (a backdoor trojan or keylogger, for example). If you use WMP, you need to set the option to automatically download licenses to OFF and avoid downloading ANY licenses. That means you won't be able to play unrestricted media, but maybe if enough people start avoiding it, content providers will realize that it's a lousy idea in the first place.

The Windows XP Tweaking Companion is an almost 200-page long PDF book that covers most aspects of installing and configuring Windows XP for top performance. I like this one because it does get into things like how to set up a firewall and other topics that some XP tweak guides don't handle. On the other hand, it doesn't go into a lot of detail on how to remove unnencessary services. Still, it's one of the best guides on XP that I've seen online, and the price is right - free. If you're into gaming, he also has several guides on tweaking popular games - I'm going to have to check out his guide to Half-Life 2.

A picture taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, appears to confirm the first direct observation of an extrasolar planet by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. The planet circles a brown dwarf star about 225 light years from Earth and is about 5 times the mass of Jupiter.

The People Who Owned the Bible is a short story by science fiction writer Will Shetterly, which takes the absurbities of current copyright law to their extreme. It's quite hilarious, but pointed too, like all good satire. He's released it under the Creative Commons License, so you can read it and pass it along to your friends without feeling guilty.

Not long ago Google announced that it was partnering with several major university libraries to digitize their holdings. Why not do the same for all Canadian books?That's the proposal from Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa. Based on an estimated cost of $10/book, the project would cost about $100 million and could be done in 5 years, giving Canada a national digital library. I like the idea a lot.

Of possible interest to IP -- my weekly Toronto Star Law Bytes column
returns with a new year's resolution -- Canada should become the
first country in the world to to create a comprehensive national
digital library. The library, which would be fully accessible online,
would contain a digitally scanned copy of every book, government
report, and legal decision ever published in Canada. The column
argues that the most significant barriers to a national digital
library do not arise from fiscal challenges but rather from two
potential copyright reforms -- an extended licensing system and an
extension on the term of copyright -- currently winding their way
through the system.

Phil Lesh, bass player for the Dead (formerly the Grateful Dead) is a generous guy. The Dead have allowed taping of their shows for many years - it's one of the factors that lead to the growth of the Deadhead scene. But Phil goes one step farther - periodically he makes crisp digital soundboards of his shows available for free download. And he even provides beatiful, commerical-quality CD covers. Defintely a class act.

Phil Lesh and Friends completed a three-night run in December at the Warfield in San Francisco, and two of the three nights are now available for download. The shows are in FLAC format, which is a compressed lossless file format widely used for music sharing over the Net. (You can get a decoder from www.etree.org.) These are big downloads, over a gigabyte per show, so you'll need a broadband connection.

But it's worth it. The December Warfield shows featured a band with Jimmy Herring from the Dead and Barry Sless on guitar and pedal steel, Chris Robinson formerly of the Black Crowes on vocals, and several other musicians. The shows were a musical tour, not only through the Dead's vast repertoire, but some of the best rock, folk, bluegrass, and blues of the last few decades, played by a rock solid band who were clearly there for their love of the music. Highly recommended.

If you ever have to dig into the internals of the Rich Text Format (RTF) that's used by Word and many other programs, then you want to bookmark About RTF. With the advent of HTML and XML, there's not as much interest in RTF as there used to be, but anyone still working with WinHelp, for example, will probably need to know something about it.

The DesignGeek site has been updated - the reference section now has a good, logically orgainzed series of articles and link to the major design programs like Illustrator, Quark, InDesign, PhotoShop and so on. Definitely worth a look if you use any of these.

The January 3rd issue Science Fiction Weekly has a review of the game Half Life 2, looking at it from the perspective the underlying science fiction story. It's a different view of the game from the standard gameboy fan reviews, which seem to concentrate on weapons and framerate.

I got the game for Christmas and have played a couple of hours so far. It's certainly the best looking game I've ever played and is playable on my 3-year old 1.7 GHz P4 system (although I only have a 64 MB video card and am experiencing some glitches with texture display, but these don't really affect the gameplay much). It really is an eerie, extremely immersive game and a worthy sequel to the original, which is my favourite computer game up to this point anyway.

Wired has an interesting article about the Perimeter Institute, a physics research think tank in Waterloo, Ontario. It was endowed by Mike Lazaridis, founder of RIM, with a $66 million donation from the money he made developing the hugely successful Blackberry.

Slate Magazine has a review comparing several desktop search tools. Their pick for the best is the one that I've been using for a few months now, Copernic Desktop Search. I may take a look at the Yahoo tool when it's released, as it's based on X1, which handles a larger number of file types than any of the other tools, but for now I'm quite happy with Copernic (alhtough I'm hoping they'll upgrade it to index Thunderbird email).

The University of Wisconsin at EauClaire web site has a very good series of tutorials for Microsoft Word, other MS Office applications and some other software, including some Adobe titles. These are quite detailed, nicely task oriented, and make a good replacement for the online help in Word (which I've found less and less useful with each release). I know Word a lot better than the other Office applications, and this site will be very helpful the next time I need to do a PowerPoint presentation.

ResearchBuzz! has pointed out a nifty dictionary site that uses the same technology as Google Suggest to provide suggestions as you type. It also gives the definitions. You can select from a regular dictionry or the FOLDOC dictionary of computing.

It may sound gimmicky, but it's actually very practical, and much faster than entering a number of possible words into a search from when you're not sure about the word you're searching for. Another one for my bookmark list. The site also includes technical information about how it works.

NASA's Spirit Mars rover is one year old today-or to be more precise, it's the first anniversary of Spirit's landing. Not bad, for a mission that was only expected to last 90 days. And it's still going strong, despite some minor glitches.

I missed the 60 Minutes piece about Google last night - I got my days mixed up and forgot it was Sunday (that's what happens when you've been off work for more than a week). But there's a good summary of the piece on the 60 Minutes site. It sounds like it'd be a wonderful place to work at, assuming you can pass their screening and interview process. I'll have to keep an eye out for a BitTorrent of the show.

Frank Kelly Freas, dean of science fiction illustrators, died yesterday. I met Kelly a few times at science fiction conventions and have several signed prints (unfortunately Kelly Freas originals have been out of my price range since about 1955, sigh) and a couple of his books. I did manage to get Jim Lorimer to use one of his illustrations as a cover for a book when I was bookkeeping at James Lorimer Publishers - it was kind of funny as the picture (one of Kelly's wonderful Apollo launch series) had absolutely no relation to the subject of the book, which was an anti-missile-defence tract. He was one of the friendliest professionals I've ever met, a true gentleman, and I'm sure there are a lot of sad faces in fandom today. Jerry Pournelle has a heartfelt appreciation on his site.

Each year, Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan publishes a list a banished words. These are words that either never should have been coined or used in the first place or have now reached the status of cliche. This years list includes such horrors as "improvised explosive device" (what happenned to bomb?) and "sale event".