Core Dump

Techdirt has a link to an article about a lawsuit in which the plaintiff sued a web site for referring to him as a "dumb ass" - and lost. The judgement, quoted in the article, appears to be a marvel of judicial common sense, not to mention some sly humour.

Documenting an API or SDK is something that gives most technical writers nightmares, myself included. There's a fairly long and interesting discussion thread about the topic on Slashdot, which should be required reading for any writer who has do write documentation for developers. (Reading Slashdot in general would be a good idea too).

The Russian Photography Collection 1917-1945 is an amazing collection. Russian cinematographers from this period were among the greatest and from this collection, some of their photographers were in the same league. There's a lof socialist realist propoganda here, as you'd expect, but there's a lot of superb historical and war photograhy here as well.

I feel like the guy in the laptop computer commercial, who shouts "It's alive! It's alive!" after discovering his computer works after he dropped it. I've just found out that ECCO PRO is available for free download.

About 10 years ago, when I was working at Dow Jones Markets, I used ECCO PRO to keep track of things I had to do for projects. ECCO was one of the earliest PIMs - personal information managers. Unlike programs that were built around contact databases or email, ECCO was built around an outliner - but it was an outliner on steroids. If you think of each item in an outline being a line in a spreadsheet, with the ability to add columns to items, and then filter on the columns, you begin to get an idea. I've never found anything that came close to it in its ability to organize and manage information.

But it diddn't do well in the marketplace and eventually the company that developed it went under, and I lost track of it after the version that I had stopped working after Windows 98 came out. However, it turns out that it was taken up by someone else and it's been maintained, at least to the point where it runs under Windows XP. Even better, it's a free download. (Though you do need to register to get it). There seems to be a fairly active community around it, including a Yahoo group.

ECCO PRO isn't as flashy as Microsoft OneNote, for example, and it's more complicated than TreePad Plus, which I've been using for years, but it's far more flexible and powerful than either of those. It's close to being an ideal solution for managing large documentation projects.

In the continuing battle to thwart the forces of the Dark Side who are continually trying to overwhelm my PCs with Bad Things, I've started using Microsoft AntiSpyware. I've also been using Norton AntiVirus, LavaSoft Ad-Aware, and Spybot Search and Destroy, but Microsoft's tool seems to be doing the best job of finding Nasty Things. I'm not too worried about my PC, as I'm pretty careful about what I do on it and where I surf, but keeping the kids' machine clean is somewhat more problematic, despite a continuing campaign conbining education and dire threats.

Microsoft AntiSpyware has so far found two trojans that the other programs have missed, as well as cleaning up a particularly persistent toolbar that had hijacked Internet Explorer. It also provides an excellent system browser that gives you detailed information on startup programs, running processes and the like. You can get similar information with programs like HijackFree, but the Microsoft tool is easier to use and provides more details about what's running on your system.

The only problem I've had with it so far is that the log file on one of my PCs keeps growing uncontrollably, forcing me to delete the file every day or two. It doesn't seem to care much about cookies - if you want to remove tracking cookies, use SpyBot Search and Destroy.

AntiSpyware is in beta right now. I've heard conflicting reports about whether Microsoft will keep it as a free tool or start charging for it after the beta expires - I suspect the latter. But it's a good enough tool that I'll consider paying for it.

David Byrne, formerly frontman for the Talking Heads, has set up an Internet radio station so he can share some of the music he likes to listen to.

Basically, whatever I'm listening to. I'll update it every couple of weeks. People sometimes ask me what I'm listening to, and I'll reel off a list of records. About halfway through the list, their eyes usually glaze over, and it's apparent they've never heard of the artists. So I thought -- well, let's make this easy. If people have any curiosity, let's make that stuff available, let people see for themselves what they think.

The playlist is about 40 songs long and will change every couple of weeks. I don't recognize many of the artists, but I'm sure it'll make for some interesting listening.

I didn't get to go the WritersUA conference last week in Las Vegas, but there's been a fair bit of traffic about it on the Yahoo HATT group. Now Michael Arnold Stern has a trip report posted on his web site. The big news from the conference was the sunsetting of RoboHelp and the announcement of MadCap's Flare, but his report talks about several other topics. Wish I could have been there.

BetaNews.com is reporting that Adobe is planning on releasing a new release of Photoshop next Monday. It'll be called Photoshop CS2 and will have several new features, including a new spot healing brush. It'll also offer improved sharing of images between other Adobe programs.

Into the Pixel is a juried exhibition of art from video games, and it has an online gallery. Some of these images are really quite beautiful and striking.

The 2005 Hugo nominees have been announed. The Hugos will be presented at Interaction, the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention, which will be held in Glasgow the first weekend in August.

For those who don't follow SF, the Hugos are one of the two major awards in the SF field. They're voted on by fans and presented at the annual WorldCon. The other major award, the Nebulas, are voted on by authors.

The short fiction nominees will probably be online soon and I'l post a link to them when they are. I haven't read any of the nominees for short fiction or novels, which is unusual - most years, I've read at least one or two of the novel contenders. My favourite book, Peter Hamilton's Pandora's Star isn't one of them.

I always think of Harlan Ellison as one of SF's angry young men, so it's hard to realize that he's 70 years old. SignOnSanDiego.com has a lengthy piece about Ellison and what he's up to these days.

The last time I saw him in person was at a public lecture at Ryerson, where he gave a 3-hour long talk that was by turns hilarious, profane, and thought-provoking. He doesn't seem to be doing a lot of writing these days, or maybe his books just aren't getting widely published, which is really sad, because he's probably the best short story writer ever to come out of the SF field. I'm handing on to all the books I have by him. I think this quote pretty much sums up his writing:

"Things often seem clearer," he has written, "in the silver light of the extraordinary."

If you want to read some extraordinary writing, find some of his books, any of his books. You won'r regret it.

Pictures of the Year International is an annual competition for the best photography from newspapers and magazines. The site has a gallery of this year's (the 62nd comptetion) winning pictures in the various categories. If you have any interest at all in photography, you want to check this out.

Howl's Moving Castle, the next animated feature by anime master Hiro Miyazaki, will get a fairly wide release - 800 theatres. So there's a chance that those of us in the outlying provinces might get to see it in a theatre after it shows in LA and New York. This page has some stills and pictures of artwork from the movie.

Kuro5hin has an entertaining article on bad and useless technology that (mostly) isn't around any more and good riddance to it: dot-matrix printers, the 8-track, automobile distributors and points, and several others. Here's the part on dot-matrix printers:

NOISY MACHINES, NOISY NOISY NOISY! They were expensive things that had, like the typewriters before them, a single typeface. Unlike the typewriters before them, this typeface was extremely crude, primitive looking, and ugly. Like a typewriter, it had a ribbon that often got tangled, could not be re-inked, and usually could not be replaced without getting your hands filthy.

You kids who grew up with inkjets and laser printers are lucky.

Dot-matirx printers are still around. I was in a medical office yesterday and had to endure about 20 minutes of the horrible rasping while one printed out a ream of multi-part forms. I pity the poor receptionist who has to put up with it as part of her job.

It's going to be an interesting time in the help aurhoring world. We have a new release of WebWorks Publisher coming out in a couple of months, MacroMedia has ended development of RoboHelp, and now a group of the former eHelp developers have founded a new company, MadCap Software, and announced a new tool, Flare. From their web site:

MadCap® Flare™ is a revolutionary new XML-based authoring tool that promises to be the new industry standard in Help authoring. Flare empowers technical writers, Help authors, and other documentation professionals to harness the power and benefits of XML without requiring any knowledge of the XML language or XML programming.

MadCap Flare features a unique, visual editor that allows you to write content just like you would in Microsoft® WordTM. Flare maintains content in pure XML for the ultimate in single-sourcing flexibility, allowing you to easily reuse and repurpose your content to virtually any format, standard, device, or platform.

You can sign up for their beta program or to get a preview version when it's released.

There's been quite a bit of discussion about this on the Yahoo HATT group since the news about RoboHelp came out of the Software User Assistance Conference yesterday, and I'm sure there'll be more. The news about RoboHelp appears to have been confirmed by MacroMedia. While it'll still be useful for current help techonologies, anyone looking for a tool to support Longhorn, for example, should start looking elsewhere.

I found, thanks to a bit of Google searching, how to do something in Excel that will save me a lot of time, namely how to transpose rows and columns. I'm have a document that is a template for a report that I want to turn into a data dictionary, listing the fields in alphabetical order. The easiest way to do this is to take the columns and turn them into rows, then sort.

I thought I was going to have to do this manuals, which given the size of the report, would have taken quite a while. But Excel has a way of doing this automatically. You select the row or rows you want to transpose and copy them. Then choose Edit > Paste Special and select Transpose from the options dialog. Very fast and easy. It's too bad Word doesn't have a similar feature.

The Winwriters/UA Software User Assistance 2005 conference is going on right now in Las Vegas, and I sure wish I was there. However, I guess the next best thing is the blog that organizer Chuck Martin has set up. There are some intersting posts, especially one concerning the future (or lack of it) of RoboHelp - the picture of an empty MacroMedia booth is quite telling.

Quadralay, the developers of WebWorks Publisher, have been releasing some information about the next release of WebWorks Publisher, code-named "Atlas". The following features list is from an email posted to the wwp-users mailing list:

• Totally re-engineered, XML-based processing


• Completely redesigned, easy-to-use interface for lightning-quick
  depoyments


• WYSIWYG interface for intuitive content architecture and design


• Project-based workflow makes management of multiple online formats a
  breeze


• Automated migration of legacy RoboHelp projects


• Easy, GUI-based customizations: breadcrumbs, TOC, related topics,
  topic aliases, drop-down text, table of contents and more


• Full-featured code editor interfaces for unlimited, advanced
  customizations


• Standards-based advanced customizations


• Dedicated table editor for intuitive customizations


• Multiple-document content merging


• Expanded functionality for inline MS Word content development

It sounds an awful lot like the late RoboHelp for FrameMaker, doesn't it? It looks like they've completely restructured the application rather than just spiffing up the interface. I hope they've replaced the macro language and all the confusing JavaScript redirection with something simpler.

I should note, just for the record, that I'm in the beta program for Atlas, and so far this is more information than I've received. Once I actually get the program, I'll be bound by an NDA and won't be able to say anything about it. However, they are giving demos of the product in April at STC meetings and the like, so there'll probably be more information available about it before the release, which is scheduled for May.

AdityaNag.org has an interview with some of the OpenOffice.org development team in which they discuss the upcoming 2.0 release and some of their plans for the future. If you are using Openoffice.org or plan to, it's worth reading.

The New York Times has an article about how US fundamentalists are pressuring IMAX theatres into not showing movies that mention topics like evolution or the Big Bang. The sad and scary part is that some of these theatres are in museums and science centres, and this type of pressure will keep producers from making more science films. I guess it's just another sign of the decline of the US as a scientific power.

Tim Bray has had an interesting career. He managed the project that computerized the Oxford English Dictionary, helped to develop XML, and founded OpenText Corporation, which marketed one of the first search engines. ACM Queue has a long and quite fascinating interview with him in which he discusses these and other topics.

On the day they brought me in to interview, they showed me some of the electronic versions of dictionary. It was what we would now call XML. It had little embedded tags saying entry, word, and then pronunciation, etymology, a brief quotation, and the date, source, text, and so on.

It was my Road to Damascus experience, really. I looked at it and I saw that the markup said what the information is, not what it looks like. Why isn’t everything this way? I still basically am asking that question.

This article from the revamped Publish.com site looks at Photoshop from the perspective of a professional photographer. He feels that Photoshop is great for doing prepress work, but not so great for the selective retouching that photographers often need to do.

Now, when I wish to make a model's lips look redder, I would greatly prefer to simply paint them over with a "saturation brush". I would like to be able to do the same for most filters that need to be selectively applied, such as, blur, or noise reduction.

In other words, the Photoshop concept of "select first, then filter" is exactly the opposite of what a retoucher wants to do. A retoucher wants to choose a type of filter first—like blur or saturate—and then apply it topically, dabbing it in at the right spots with a paint brush.

The Photoshop interface is going backwards compared with the way you want to work. As a result, every move you make has to be meticulously prepared, and you lose the ability to work intuitively. A lot of time gets wasted, and you get tired.

He makes some good points - if you use Photoshop a lot, it's worth reading, along with the several other articles in the Photoshop section.

Noted with sadness: SF author and SFWA Grand Master has died at the age of 93.

Andre Norton was one of the first SF authors I read when I started reading science fiction when I was in grade school. I devoured her novels, The Time Traders, Galactic Derelict, Star Guard, The Stars Are Ours, Sea Siege, and many others. Her later books tended to fantasy, and I didn't read many of them, but I'm sure they were as immensely readable as those early novels, many of which are still in print.

Here's a link to the CNN obituary.

I went to an interesting presentation last night at the Toronto STC Single Sourcing SIG meeting. It was about DITA, Darwin Information Typing Architecture, a new "architecture for creating topic-oriented, information-typed content that can be reused and single-sourced in a variety of ways". Basically, it's a set of XML tools and DTDs (or schemas) and transforms that lets you organize and output your information in different ways.

Unlike DocBook, which is organized around a book or article metaphor, DITA is organized around topics. In the core DITA, there are three different topic types, concept, task, and reference. Topics are organized into maps, which control the output.

I read about DITA a couple of years ago, when it was first introduced to the world, and attended a presentation given by Michael Priestly, one of the core DITA architects (who also gave last night's presentation). At the time, it pretty much went right over my head, but since then I've learned quite a bit more about structured authoring and information architecture, and DITA has become a full-fledged product, with a well-defined architecture (soon to become an OASIS standard, which puts it on the order of DocBook) and usable tools. DITA was originally developed at IBM and is now in wide use there and has become their standard tool for documenting new products.

If you want to find out more about DITA, there is a wealth of information on the OASIS site. The original DITA white paper is a good place to start, along with this presentation by Michael Priestly. There's also a Yahoo group for DITA users.

I've been looking at using structured authoring for a couple of projects at the TSX. So far,I've just investigated DocBook, but I am going to take a closer look at DITA. Although the tools aren't as mature as those available for DocBook, they are usable, and DITA looks like it offers more flexibility and might be better suited to the projects I have in mind. If anyone reading this is actually using DITA, I'd be interested in your comments.

RoboWizard is a tutorial and resource site for RoboHelp users, but which also has a lot of content that would be useful to help authors in general. I found the tips on using HTML Help particularly useful. If you are using RoboHelp, this is one site you'll want to bookmark.

This is for everyone sitting there in a cube farm or even worse, an office full of "pods". The Incredibles at Pixar is a report of a journalists tour of Pixar. The animators have just about the coolest working environment I've ever seen.

A lot of the animators decided early on that they didn’t want cubicles, so instead, Pixar found these groovy little cottages that they bought for them. Walking through the animation department is like walking through a neighborhood for dwarves. Lots of little houses laid out along “streets,” each one with an address on the door.

CNet has an interesting article speculating about where Google might be headed in the future - towards a web-based operating system/application server that would let you do almost everything you need to do on your computer over the Web. It does seem feasible, given the quality of some of Google's recent applications (GMail and Google Maps in particular), and maybe even plausible. And it might even be attractive, though there are some issues to resolve, like paranoid corporate sysadmins who block access to GMail.

PC Magazine has a lengthy review of desktop search tools. As well as reviewing the individual tools, the review discusses some issues with this type of tool, especially security, that you should be aware of before using one. Their Editor's Choice is Yahoo Desktop Search, although they give high marks to Copernic Desktop Search, which I've been using for some time. So far, I'm quite happy with CDS, though I am having trouble getting the 1.5 Beta to index my Thunderbird email. I've been corresponding with Copernic support about this, but so far they haven't found a solution. In fairness to Copernic, it seems to work for most people. If you aren't using one of these tools, you're missing a great opportunity to save a lot of time.

The Beagle 2, a joint British/ESA Mars lander, disappeared while trying to land on Mars in December 2003. The offical report on the cause of the mission's failure was released in January. The Space Review has an excellent article on the mission and the politics behind the release of the report, which are just as interesting as the mission itself.

The European Space Agency Multimedia Gallery is a colletion of over 300 images (and a few videos) from various ESA projects, satellites, and telescopes (including the Hubble). The pictures of Earth from orbit, in particular, are breathtaking. You'll have to click through a pop-up copyright notice to view the high-resolution pictures, but it's worth it.

I've been using Firefox for a few months now, and I'm quite happy with it. But anything good can usually be made better, and Kuro5hin.org has a good article on how to improve the default installation of Firefox, both by tweaking settings and adding extensions. If you use Firefox (and if you aren't, why aren't you?), you want to read this article.

Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, and Dan Simmons are three authors that I wouldn't think of as having a lot in common, other than being very good. But in Surprising Soul Brothers, an article by Gary Westfahl in Locus Magazine, he finds they have a lot in common. Quite an interesting article. Simmons is discussed more in passing; the article concentrates on Dick and Heinlein.

The Spirit rover has captured some pictures of dust devils on the Martian surface. There are links to the pictures in this MSNBC article. They're not very spectular and you have look hard to see them, but it does offer confirmation of the tracks that have been seen in other Spirit rover and satellite pictures.

The New York that might have been is a gallery of images of alternate New Yorks, including stills from some movies (AI, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow). Some nice images here, though a few more would have been nice.

The New York that might have been is a gallery of images of alternate New Yorks, including stills from some movies (AI, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow). Some nice images here, though a few more would have been nice.

There's been quite a bit of discussion on the net recently about software patents, especially about the situation in Europe, where the European Union appears to be on the verge of implementing US-style software patents, depsite opposition from a wide variety of sources. From Kuroshin.org, here's an interesting take on the subject - what if patents applied to literature?

Now imagine a literary world restricted by patents. A patent protects not just the work itself, but the idea behind the work.

Arthur Conan Doyle's patent on detective fiction would have expired long ago, but not before preventing Agatha Christie's career. C.S. Lewis' patent on the fantasy novel would have discouraged Tolkien's already reluctant publishers. Without this inspiration, the fantasy trilogies that fill an entire wall in every bookshop would never have been written.

Today we would have patents on smaller and smaller points of style or story. Every opening scene, every surprise ending, every combination of characters, every imaginative sex scene would be protected by a patent.

Just in case you're wondering, I don't think software should be patentable. Trademark and copyright law provide enough protection for developers; software patents just discourage innovation.

Microsoft has announced that it is acquiring Groove Networks, which was founded by Ray Ozzie, one of the creators of Lotus Notes. Ozzie will become their chief technical officer. This is an interesting development. Groove has been called the product that Lotus Notes should have been - presumably Microsoft will use it to enhance the collaboration features in their own software, especially MS Office.

For some time, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has been soliciting citations from science fiction fans and readers. SF has been a particularly rich source of words that have entered the common language (robot, cyberspace, to name just a few). Although the main OED isn't available on the web, they have made the science fiction citations available on a very nicely done web site. Citations are grouped into the categories science fiction, SF criticism, and SF fandom. Entries for each citation are quite detailed, as you'd expect from the OED. It's a fascinating site to browse through, if you are interested in SF or language in general. Now if they'd just put the whole OED online at a reasonable price.

I don't use RoboHelp, but if I did I'd bookmark Peter Grainge's site, which has a goodly amount of useful material for RoboHelp users. There's alos tips on help authoring in general and some tips and macros for Microsoft Word. All of it is nicely laid out and well organized. The site appears to have been produced with RoboHelp, and it's a very slick piece of work.

Mount St. Helens either erupted or burped yesterday, depending on which geologist you talk to, but the pictures are pretty neat. There are more on BoingBoing.
Update: It seems that the geologists are now calling it a real eruption - the ash column went up about 7 miles, that certainly qualifies as an eruption in my books.

The DigiBarn is a computer museum housed in " a ninety plus years old barn constructed of old growth redwood that is part of the original "Ancient Oaks Ranch", a 19th century farmstead nestled deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California." For those of us who can't get there in person, they have a great web site, full of pictures, documentation, and marketing material from old compter systems (the original Apple 1 manual, for example). I'm sitting here looking at pictures of the Osborne 1 - the computer that got me excited about computers when I saw WordStar in action. I could spend many hours of browsing here.

The SF Site has posted their readers' choices for the year's best SF of 2004. The list seems to have more fantasy than the critics list. I've only read one of the books, Peter F. Hamilton's Pandora's Star (which is my favourite book of the year), but there are a couple of others I do want to read. The number one pick is Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell, by Susanna Clarke, a fantasy that's been very popular in Britain.

John Heilemann has a long and detailed article about the history of Google and their recent IPO in, of all places, GQ. Not the place I'd expect for an article of this depth and calibre - I may have to revise my opinion of the magazine up a notch or two if they're publishing articles of this quality.

The beta of OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been out for a couple of weeks. I haven't tried using it yet-I'm still getting my system back together after reinstalling Windows, but I am quite curious to see what's in it. I've found a couple of good write-ups about it. Tectonic has a fairly detailed review of the beta. Bruce Byfield, who is a technical writer and regular contributor to the techwr-l mailing list, has a good, long review on NewsForge.

Technology Review has an article about what went wrong at HP, by one of the research engineers at HP Labs.

New technology typically has a five-year development cycle. The U.S. technology business stopped being serious about research in 2000 and the results are showing now.

People have a little more money but there's nothing they want to buy. There's nothing that makes you say, 'Wow." Ten years ago I was seeing something interesting every month, but now we're touting bloated software and cute case designs as innovation.

The damage to HP and the U.S. technology industry at large may already be irreversible. If we start investing today and let our engineers play we might have something exciting to show people in 2010. That's a long time to wait for the next big wow.

To me, this rabid fixation on short-term profits is a bigger threat than outsourcing -- it is killing our ability to make astonishing things.

From John Dvorak's blog, here'a look at what Canada could look like in the future if the cultures of Canada and parts of the U.S. continue to diverge.

Former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lloyd Axworthy, has torn a strip out of US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, in this letter published in the Winnipeg Free Press. Way to go, Lloyd! Here's a bit from the beginning of the letter:

Dear Condi, I'm glad you've decided to get over your fit of pique and venture north to visit your closest neighbour. It's a chance to learn a thing or two. Maybe more.

I know it seems improbable to your divinely guided master in the White House that mere mortals might disagree with participating in a missile-defence system that has failed in its last three tests, even though the tests themselves were carefully rigged to show results.

But, gosh, we folks above the 49th parallel are somewhat cautious types who can't quite see laying down billions of dollars in a three-dud poker game.

As our erstwhile Prairie-born and bred (and therefore prudent) finance minister pointed out in presenting his recent budget, we've had eight years of balanced or surplus financial accounts. If we're going to spend money, Mr. Goodale added, it will be on day-care and health programs, and even on more foreign aid and improved defence.

Sure, that doesn't match the gargantuan, multi-billion-dollar deficits that your government blithely runs up fighting a "liberation war" in Iraq, laying out more than half of all weapons expenditures in the world, and giving massive tax breaks to the top one per cent of your population while cutting food programs for poor children.

Just chalk that up to a different sense of priorities about what a national government's role should be when there isn't a prevailing mood of manifest destiny.

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

• Developing Quality Technical Documentation: A Handbook for Writers and Editors, 2nd edition, Gretchen Hargis and others, IBM Press, 2004, ISBN 0-13-147749-8, 444 pages, $57.99, hardcover



• Read Me First!: A Software Guide for the Computer Industry, Sun Technical Publications, Sun Microsystems Press, 2003, ISBN 0-13-142899-3, 356 pages, , $54.99, soft cover



• Word Hacks, Andrew Savikas, O’Reilly Media Inc, 2005, ISBN 0-596-00493-1, 372 pages, $36.95, soft cover



• Office 2003 XML, Evan Lenz, Mary McRae, and Simon St. Laurent, O’Reilly Media Inc., 2004, 567 pages, $57.95, soft cover

This month, I'm going to review some books that have ended up on my desk at work during the last year.

Developing Quality Technical Documentation: A Handbook for Writers and Editors is probably the best book I’ve read on technical communication since Karen Schriver’s Dynamics in Document Design was published in 1997. It gives you a step-by-step process to improve the quality of your writing and your documentation.

The book is divided into three main parts, describing the quality characteristics: easy to use, easy to understand, and easy to find. In each part, there are three chapters further subdividing the quality characteristics; for example “easy to use” has the chapters: Task Orientation, Accuracy, and Completeness. The chapters’ sections are task oriented, providing a list of tasks you can follow to apply the quality characteristics to your writing; for example: “Write for the intended audience” or “Focus on the meaning”. Within each section, there’s a discussion of the principles, along with numerous examples of applying the quality characteristics to improve writing. The fourth part of the book explains how to apply multiple quality characteristics and how to review information. A series of appendices provide checklists that would help any documentation group improve their writing and review process.

This is a book that would be suitable for almost any writer, from the rank beginner (it would make an ideal textbook for an introductory technical communication course), to the senior writer or documentation manager. There’s no substitute for working with a good editor, but Developing Quality Technical Documentation may be the next best thing. If you apply its principles to your writing, you will definitely become a better writer.

Read Me First!: A Software Guide for the Computer Industry started life as the style guide for Sun’s technical publication group. It ended up being published as a book and is now in its second edition. It’s particularly useful for software-industry technical writers, because there aren’t many other published style guides focusing on the computer industry. (Yes, there is the Microsoft Manual of Style, but it’s both dated and seriously flawed). As well as the usual advice on punctuation, grammar, and style, there are chapters on how to create links between documents (both print and online), writing about computer interfaces, and how to build a documentation department. If your company doesn’t already have its own style guide, you could do a lot worse than to follow this one.

O'Reilly has published Word Hacks, by Andrew Savikas, which collects 100 hacks that let you really get at the internals of the way Word works (or often doesn't). Some are fairly straightforward, like how to get Word to make PDF files without using Acrobat; others are seriously geeky, like how to run Perl from inside VBA. Most of these involve some macro programming; the text of the macros of included (and explained} in the book and to save typing, you can download the macros from the O’Reilly site. Although the title implies that it’s a power user’s book, if you’re new to macro programming in Word, it explains the basics of how to install the macros, most of which will run without any customization. Along the way, you’ll learn a lot about how Word works and how you can tweak its default settings to fit the way you want to work.

If you want to get a taste of what’s in the book, the O'Reilly site has an article called "Hacking Word" that excerpts five of the hacks from the book, including one that I immediately installed to remove the maddening "Char Char" style aliases from Word documents. It works too. This is the best book I’ve seen about Microsoft Word since Woody Leonhard's Word 97 Annoyances. If you have to use Word for more than the occasional letter or memo, this one is a must purchase.

XML has been on the horizon of technical communication for some time, but it looks like the horizon is finally getting a little closer. One big factor is the addition of XML support to Microsoft Office 2003. The O’Reilly book, Office 2003 XML, is a good introduction to this new aspect of Office. The XML features of Office, and more specifically Microsoft Word, are aimed at interchanging information between Office applications and other programs that are XML-enabled. This book gives a good overview of the XML features of Office and provides examples of some of the things that you can do with it. For those who are new to XML, there are appendices that explain the basics of XML and XSLT. However, if you’re looking for something to replace the somewhat dated approach to XML used in structured FrameMaker, you won’t find it in Office and this book won’t help you.

As befits a library of its size and importance, the New York Public Library has an extensive site of its online collections, including thousands of prints and photographs. There's hours and hours of browsing here, if you have the time. The New York Times has an article that describes the site in more detail.

The Visual Index of Science Fiction Cover Art is a large database and index of cover art and artists for science fiction magazines. The site lists the artist for virtually every artist science fiction magazine ever published. There are links to thumbnails and larger images of many covers - not nearly as many as I'd like to see, but more than enough to make the site worth looking at.

I just finished Bob Dylan's Chronicles Volume 1, what will presumably be the first volume of his autobiography. Like Dylan's songs, it's a challenging book, often interesting, sometimes infuriating. He opens in New York in 1961, then jumps ahead to 1969, then ahead to 1987, and finally back to New York and his earlier life in Minnesota. There's much of interest to Dylan fans here, especially the descriptions of his early life and the vivid descriptions of the Greenwich Village folk scene, and the 1987 section with a fascinating look at how he recorded his first album with Daniel Lanois as producer. On the other hand, some parts of the book are overly self-indulgent, and I found myself skipping some parts. It's a quick read; a few hours at most, and it left me wishing for more.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta is out and available for download. There's a feature guide that lists most of the changes from v1.1.

I'm still recoving my system after having to reinstall Windows on the weekend, so I'll hold off on installing this for now, but it's definitely on my list of programs I want to check out. I have been using Writer 1.1 for a while and generally prefer it to Word.

John Udell has a particularly interesting article in which he discusses the middle ground between full-text search (search and index everything) and structured search (tag everything and search the meta data). Because even unstructured HTML documents contain some inherent structure (links, for example), it's possible to do some interesting things with search routines and XML. He describes how he built a search tool to find information about the recent Demo conference:

But there are also implicit tags -- for example, links -- that identify items about the conference, and a new service I built this week is helping me find them. After Jason Hunter showed me Mark Logic's Content Interaction Server in a screencast, I set up an instance of it and began pumping in the RSS feeds of all the blogs I read. Then I wrote a query that combines free-text search for items containing the strings "Demo" or "Demo@15" with structured search for items that contain links to demo.com. It yielded a nice list of Demo-related items that I couldn't have built any other way.

I wonder if the same technique could be used to enhance the search functionality built into standard web-based help systems, such as RoboHelp's WebHelp and Quadralay's WebWorks Publisher Help? There are certainly lots of interesting applications for this technique.

If you think it's getting a little dangerous on the Internet, you're right. The Denver Post conducted a test in which siz computers using various Mac, Linux, and Windows operating systems were connected to the Internet. They were scanned over 45,000 times in one week and there were over 4000 direct attacks on the PCs. None of the attacks were successful on the latest vesions of the operating systems.

But if you haven't upgraded your Wiondows to SP2, it's time. A computer with SP1 installed was infected within 18 seconds. It's another good reason to get a router too.