Core Dump

Wired reviews the new movie version of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Mild disapointment would be a good summary, I think.

But director Garth Jennings misses the opportunity to send his movie into a deeper space. This Hitchhiker's Guide is spoofy, not scientific, big on effects and light on metaphysical musings.

Personally, I think it would be hard to top the original BBC radio production (which is floating around the 'net in MP3 format). Or the new Dr. Who series, which I really like, much to my surprise (I was never a fan of the original shows).

Ars Technica has published a very, very, extensive review of Mac OS X 10.4, Tiger, which has just been released to the public. If you use a Mac, you'll want to read this, and even if you don't, it's interesting to see all the nifty stuff that Windows Longhorn will be trying to copy.

Life After Darth is a long and very interesting profile of George Lucas, running as the cover article in the May issue of Wired. Even if you're not a big Star Wars fan, Lucas is arguably the most influential director of the past 30 or 40 years, both because he pretty much invented the genre of effects laden SF blockbusters with Star Wars and Indiana Jones, and he revolutionized the way films are made with innovations in digital effects, audio, and editing. It 'll be interesting to see what he does after the final Star Wars movie comes out.

Anyone remember Mr. Fusion in Back to the Future? Scientists at UCLA have succeeded in creating fusion in a device that can easily fit on a desktop. The energy released is orders of magnitude below that needed to generate power, but the device could be used to generate concentrated beams of ions, which have other applications, including spacecraft thrusters.

The Hubble Space Telescope recently celebrated its 15th anniversary and to celebrate, the Space Telescope Science Institute released two spectacular new images and updated their gallery site with more pictures. The new pictures of thw Whirlpool galaxy and the Eagle nebula are truly spectacular. I do hope NASA changes its mind about a Shuttle service mission - the Hubble should be kept going.

Comments Are More Important Than Code is an article by Jeff Raskin in the latest issue of ACM Queue in which he takes "what might seem a paradoxical position. I endorse the techniques that some programmers claim make code self-documenting and encourage the development of programs that do “automatic documentation.” Yet I also contend that these methods cannot provide the documentation necessary for reliable and maintainable code. They are only a rough aid, and even then help with only one or two aspects of documentation—not including the most important ones."

Having had to build and Javadoc for APIs and occasionally add comments to code myself, I found this an interesting article. He makes another good point about auto-documentation tools later in the essay:

Automatic documentation generators create flow charts, inheritance diagrams, tables of contents, indexes, topic lists, cross-references, and context-sensitive help entries. One advertised itself as being able “to automatically and continuously update all aspects of the source code documentation, so that the entire team has all the necessary information at their fingertips. Using the information stored in the dictionary and the source files [it] can automatically generate source code documentation.”

The obvious problem is that they do it quite badly. As anybody who has done good documentation knows, generating even an index is not a straightforward, automatic task. The less obvious problem is that many coders feel that once they’ve run the documentation builder over their code, they have documented it. This is the same as the common syndrome of assuming that a document is spelled correctly once the spelling checker no longer flags any words. If you get such “documentation” with a program and find it far from adequate, remember that “eye tolled ewe sew.”

His conclusion is one that few technical writers will argue with:

Prior, clear, and extensive documentation is a key element in creating software that can survive and adapt. Documenting to high standards will decrease development time, result in better work, and improve the bottom line. It’s hard to ask for more than that from any technique."

The article has generated a long and interesting discussion thread on Slashdot.

Minimize, don't volumize, is the theme of a new article on the techwr-l site. (The article is in PDF, for some odd reason). It gives some good arguments for shrinking the size of documentation, but doesn't offer much help on the nitty-gritty of how to do it.

According to this post on Slashdot, George Lucas has confirmned that there will be two Star Wars TV series. One is a 3D computer-animated cartoon, the other live action.

Last week, I posted a couple of links to tutorials on XSLT. I meant to post a link to DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide, but couldn't find it at the time. DocBook is probably the schema most widely used by technical communicators doing structured authoring, and you pretty much have to use XSL with it to get any kind of output. The book "is for people who want publish DocBook XML files using the DocBook XSL stylesheets. It is a 'how to' guide that gets you up and running quickly, and then provides the details you need to gain access to the full power of DocBook. The book covers:

• Obtaining and setting up XSL tools and the DocBook XSL stylesheets.


• Using the built-in options to control the XSL stylesheets.


• Customizing the XSL stylesheets to match your design needs.

The full text of the book is available online in HTML format or you can purchase a PDF version.

Richard Morgan is a relatively new author; his first two novels, Altered Carbon and Broken Angels generated some pretty favourable notices. Both of those were hard-edged, gritty, military SF with some really interesting ideas. His latest novel, Market Forces, is a near-future dystopia reminiscent of Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants, but darker and grimmer, much grimmer. Morgan is a compulsively readable author, and I had a hard time putting the book down, but it left me a bit disappointed - there are no happy endings in this book for anyone. I thought it was going to be a novel of redemption for at least the central character, but he ends up as one of the most unlikeable protaganists I've come across in a long time.

It appears that the next release of WebWorks Pubisher is going to be based on XML and XSLT, and likely the RoboHelp replacement (Flare) being developed by MadCap will be too. XML is fairly straightforward, and I don't think too many technical writers, at least the more technical ones, will have many problems picking up XML, if they haven't already. But XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is much harder.

There's been a discussion about this on the WWP mailing list recently. Some of the resources that have been recommended for learning XSLT include Tutorial: Getting Started with XSLT on Microsoft's site and the XSLT Tutorial on the w3schools site.

The O'Reilly book, Office 2003 XML includes a tutorial chapter on XSLT. The book, XSLT, by Doug Tidwell (yet another O'Reilly book) has also been highly recommended.

Amazon has thoughtfully put together a page listing free MP3s that are available for download from their site (about 200 of them). (You'll have to be registered with Amazon to download, but who isn't?) There's a pretty good mix of well-known and lesser known artists and musical genres here.

Choosing an XML Editor is an academic paper offering an overview of the XML editor market and some suggestions on criteria to use when choosing an editor. I wish they'd provided details on all the products they describe in the paper, but even with that quibble, it's a useful resource for anyone looking at these tools.

Long-time computer commentator John Dvorak has a lengthy screed on Abobe's recent purchase of Macromedia. It mirrors many of the comments that have been made recently on the HATT group.

This attitude accounts for the company's failure to do what almost every software company does routinely: milk the cash cow by coasting on the hit product. Photoshop epitomizes the never-coast philosophy. Year after year Adobe transforms the product as if some invisible competitor were breathing down its neck. Its changes are sometimes so radical that it risks losing business by fixing what is not broken. But, in fact, there is nobody to lose business to except its own older versions of the same program.

Too bad Adobe doesn't have the same attitude about FrameMaker.

The Shuttle was rolled out to the pad a few days ago. It's now scheduled for launch on May 22. DPReview has a gallery of pictures of the rollout. They give you a pretty good impression of just how big and complicated a machine the shuttle is.

As an aside, the site is a digital camera review site and the picture were posted to illustrate the image quality of Nikon's D2X digital camera (which looks to be pretty good). BoingBoing points out that Nikon has encrypted some of the picture information, so the raw images can't be used with PhotoShop, for no apparent reason.

The latest issue of Asimov's has a long and quite fascinating interview with AI pioneer Ray Kurzweil. (The interview was conducted by SF writer Cory Doctorow).

Ray Kurzweil is one such pundit-futurist-scientist. He’s a serial entrepreneur who founded successful businesses that advanced the fields of optical character recognition (machine-reading) software, text-to-speech synthesis, synthetic musical instrument simulation, computer-based speech recognition, and stock-market analysis. He cured his own Type-II diabetes through a careful review of the literature and the judicious application of first principles and reason. To a casual observer, Kurzweil appears to be the star of some kind of Heinlein novel, stealing fire from the gods and embarking on a quest to bring his maverick ideas to the public despite the dismissals of the establishment, getting rich in the process.

The interview touches on AI, the singularity, the nature of consciousness, the evolution of human and machine intelligence, and lots of other bleeding edge topics.

We can have confidence of reverse-engineering the brain in twenty years or so. The reason that brain reverse engineering has not contributed much to artificial intelligence is that up until recently we didn’t have the right tools. If I gave you a computer and a few magnetic sensors and asked you to reverse-engineer it, you might figure out that there’s a magnetic device spinning when a file is saved, but you’d never get at the instruction set. Once you reverse-engineer the computer fully, however, you can express its principles of operation in just a few dozen pages.

Now there are new tools that let us see the interneuronal connections and their signaling, in vivo, and in real-time. We’re just now getting these tools and there’s very rapid application of the tools to obtain the data.

Twenty years from now we will have realistic simulations and models of all the regions of the brain and [we will] understand how they work. We won’t blindly or mindlessly copy those methods, we will understand them and use them to improve our AI toolkit. So we’ll learn how the brain works and then apply the sophisticated tools that we will obtain, as we discover how the brain works.

Definitely a lot of food for thought here.

SF writer David Brin has a blog, Contrary Brin. Brin is the author of some excellent SF, the Uplift War series in particular, as well as some interesting non-fiction. He's articulate and opinionated, a good combination for a blogger.

Joel Welinske, the president of WritersUA, has written a long and thoughtful article about the future of RoboHelp, or as the article makes clear, the lack of a future for RoboHelp. The article is current enough to mention yesterday's sale of Macromedia to Adobe.

During the opening segment of the WritersUA Conference for Software User Assistance, I made a prediction regarding the future of RoboHelp. The gist of that has been reported in a number of venues to varying degrees of accuracy. To set the record straight, here is a detailed presentation of my information and conclusions about the current and future status of RoboHelp.

As an aside, in the HATT Yahoo group today, Mike Hamilton, who was product manager for RoboHelp at eHelp and later Macromedia and now MadCap, said that he liked the article and that he was negotiating with Macromedia to ensure that his new product, Flare, would offer a good migration path for RoboHelp users.

Word's highligher is quite useful sometimes, but it's limited by the number of colours - only 15, and several of those don't work well with black text. I've always expected each new release of Word to fix this, but to no avail. But there is a workaround.

As mentioned in today's WordTips newsletter, you can use the Shading tab of the Format > Borders and Shading command to highlight text. (I've been using this for years to format table headings and the like, and it never occurred to me to use it for text highlighting-go figure.) The advantage of this, is that you have access to a full colour palette, which means you can use nice, easy on the eyes, pastels instead of the lurid colours that the normal highlighting command uses. More information on this is in the WordTips newsletter - a resource I recommend highly for Word users.

Abobe is buying Macromedia. According to the press release on the Adobe site: "Through the combination of our powerful development, authoring and collaboration tools – and the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash – we have the opportunity to drive an industry-defining technology platform that delivers compelling, rich content and applications across a wide range of devices and operating systems."

No mention is made of other MacroMedia products, like Dreamweaver or RoboHelp. From earlier news, it appears that RoboHelp development is pretty much on hold - it's possible that Adobe could revive it, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that one. Given that Adobe already has it's own web development product (GoLive), the acquisition might not bode well for the future of Dreamweaver, which would be unfortunate.

Apollo 13 - We Have a Solution is a long, detailed, and extremely interesting article in IEEE Spectrum about the Apollo 13 mission. It's been 35 years to the day since they splashed down and the article describes how the efforts of the flight controllers and crew brought them home from what could have easily been a fatal accident. It's a good article that really emphasizes the need for careful planning and teamwork, and it mentions a few things that I haven't seen elsewhere, like the difficulty in powering up the Lunar Excursion Module, which the crew used aa a lifeboat on the way home.

Phil Lesh, the bass player for the Grateful Dead (now The Dead) has written a memior called Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead. I'm going to have to look for this one. Lesh is stil making wonderful music, both with his own band(s) and the Dead - it'll be interesting to see what he has to say. There's a good, long, and favourable review of the book on sfgate.com.

Although I prefer and use FrameMaker for user guides and other long documents, I still have to do a lot of work in Microsoft Word. I also have to work with documents written by other peoplem, and I've come to the conclusion that only a small percentage of people, probably less than 10 percent, know how to use Word properly - in other words, like a word processor, not a typewriter.

Using Word is a good introduction to using Word properly. It starts out with an introduction to paragraph styles, one of the key features in Word that most users either don't use or don't understand, then continues on to explain how to create a table of contents and set up page numbers. It's not complete-headers and footers and some other topics are yet to be added, but even then it's a good tutorial for novice Word users or anyone who wants to become more proficient in Word.

This site, published by Chris Waltrip, looks to be a pretty complete compilation of everything Bruce Sterling has published online, both fiction and non-fiction. Sterling is one of the best writers around and there's a lot of good stuff here.

Somebody finally found a good use for a garden gnome. A woman in England used one to fight off a burglar.

Now this is one I'm going to bookmark. The GUI Glossary is a glossary of mostly (graphical) interface terms. Did you know that a theme mechanism is "A feature that allows a developer to specify alternative fonts and colors across a Java look and feel application." I didn't. I have no idea who Classic System Solutions are, but they deserve kudos for putting this together.
Update: I've included the link - sorry for the oops.

Cory Doctorow, science fiction writer and spokesman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has an interview in the latest issue of Information Highways, a magazine about content management published by the eContent Institute. The interview is about copyright and similar information property issues. The web version is quite a bit longer than the version published in the paper magazine. There'a s lot of interesting stuff here. Here's one example of something that could happen if some current proposals are accepted:

So one of the consequences might be that if your son is taking his first steps through your living room and you've got your digital camera and you're watching him as he goes and he walks in front of the television where there's a cartoon playing as soon as your camera comes in contact with a watermark on the television it switches itself off. Or as soon as somebody drives by with copyrighted music coming out of the speakers of their car, your camera switches itself off; your phone switches itself off. All the technologies that convert the real world into zeroes and ones will be governed by this. So there's an element in the European negotiation that mirrors this American stuff, some of this analogue work, and certainly the people who are pushing for it are the same people at the motion picture studios.

Some measures like this are already built into devices - try to scan a $20 bill into Photoshop and see what happens. I'm on Cory's side on this one - the pendulum has gone way to far in favour of the big media companies, and it could go even farther if we aren't vigilant.

Managing XML Data is the first in a series of articles on how to work with XML data. This article is just an overview: future articles in the series "explore both the theory and the practice of managing collections of XML documents. Planned installments of this column will cover how to analyze needs, how to configure existing systems for better performance and maintainability, and reviews of new technology that you might want to consider in the future. I'll look at old issues, such as backups and version control, with a particular focus on the changes that new XML style data require in these systems. I'll be looking at new issues that may not have arisen in the past, such as making sure that an organization keeps all its schemas in sync across multiple, independent computers in branches located around the world."

Definitely worth bookmarking if you have any interest in XML.

This is a slightly extrapolated look at what could happen one of these days when you order a pizza. It's funny but more than a little scary. You'll need sound for this (and Flash, I think).

The Software Documentation Weblog reports that David Flanagan has released version 0.99 of his Java documentation browser, Jude. This looks like an interesting tool - it provides more powerful search and indexing features than JavaDoc. You can download an evaluation copy - it'll be (reasonably priced) commercial software when it's released. If you want to find out more, the user manual is online.

Bruce Eckle's books on object-oriented programming are some of the best resources available on the subject, and they're available both as printed books and free downloads. I used Thinking in Java when I had to work on API documentation a few years ago; I wish I'd remembered to look at Thinking in C++ when I had to document a C++ API last year - it would have helped a lot. If you want to keep up with his current writing, check out his web log. Any technical writer who works on API or SDK documentation will benefit from these books and articles.

Today is the 44th anniversary of the first manned spaceflight. On April 12, 1961 Yuri Gagarin completed one orbit around the Earth, taking mankind's first, tentative step out of the cradle. And 44 years later, we're still toddling, sigh.

Here's an article from Wired about problems with Blogger, the service I use for Core Dump. It's been fairly reliable recently, at least for me, with only the occasional glitch, but last fall I was considering either switching to another service or changing blogging software because of the problems.

If you ever have to test "What's This" help - the tooltip help that appears in small popup windows, the HTML Help Popup Tester might come in handy. It's a small and free tool developed by the Help Technology Center.

Some of the most popular sites on the web are search sites and desktop search tools have been becoming more popular. Searchtools.com site "provides information, news and advice about web site searching technology." It's a very comprehensive site, with links to articles, reviews, and technical information. As well, the site's search page is searchable by several different search engines, allowing you to see the differences in the results they produce.

William Safire has a long article in today's New York Times in which he discusses threats to privacy and reviews two new books about the subject. If you have any interest in what happens to your personal information (and you should), read this article.

From sales brochures that ChoicePoint distributed to its corporate and government customers -- as well as from interviews with its C.E.O., Derek V. Smith, the doyen of dossiers, who claims ''this incredible passion to make a safer world'' -- The Post's privacy reporter has assembled a coherent narrative that provides a profile of a profiler. As if to lend a news peg to the book, ChoicePoint has just thrust itself into the nation's consciousness as a conglomerate hoist by its own petard. The outfit that sells the ability to anticipate suspicious activity; that provides security to the nation's security services; that claims it protects people from identity theft -- has been easily penetrated by a gang that stole its dossiers on at least 145,000 people across the country.

The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), Canada's national broadcaster, has always been one of the best news organizations in the world, and has an extensive archive going back to the beginnings of radio and television. They've put together an archive site with some of the highlights from their archives, providing background for stories that are in the news now (Canada's tsunamis and earthquakes, April fools jokes, Sue Rodriquez and the right to die debate), historic moments, (September 11, 2001, the moon landing), and many other topics. There's a LOT of material here-the science and technology page has about 50 stories (most of which have several radio and television clips), including one of my all-time favourites, the demolition of Ripple Rock. A truly wonderful site, and not just for Canadians.

If you ever have to copy formatted text into another application as unformatted, ASCII text, then you might want to check out PureText, which is a small, freeware utility that will convert and paste unformatted text. This is one of several free utilities by Steve Miller (not the musician), including a very nice set of command-line utilities for those of us who grew up before GUIs.

I've mentioned Google Maps a couple of times - it really is one of the coolest things on the Web, and quite possibly the slickest web application ever, especially since they've added the ability to view satellite photos. Google Sightseeing is a blog that collects intersting pictures of sites gathered from Google Maps, with links to the pictures. I particularly like the picture of Alcatraz Island.

John Magnik, an Australian typographer and compositor, has put together an excellent tutorial site about the principles of typography and layout, covering such topics as principles of design, margins, layout, type faces, classification of type, and so on. This is one of the best tutorials I've seen on the web. (Thanks to the Editorium Update for the link.)

The Software Documentation weblog has a link to an interesting extension for Mozilla - an outliner for DocBook files that lets you view DocBook files directly in your browser without having to convert them to HTML. This could be a useful tool for debugging problems with DocBook projects.

There's good news for fans of Martian exploration. NASA has approved an extension of the Mars rover program for another 18 months. That's pretty amazing, considering that the rovers were orginally expected to last for only three months - and they've now been going for more than 15. They're having some problems, but are basically still sound after more than a year on the Martian surface.

The already excellent Google Maps is now even better - as well as maps, you can display satellite images and toggle between the two. Like the maps, you can scroll and zoom in on the satellite images. It's very cool to see your house from space. Now if I could just figure out to turn off the little balloons that show our lcoal businesses ....

CBC Toronto's Metro Morning show had an interesting piece this morning, one that got me a bit pissed off.

Over the last few years, the TTC has been retrofitting its older subway stations withe elevators. I'd naiively assumed that most of the stations had elevators by now; this is not the case. Only about 1/3 of subway stations have elevators - the rest won't have them until - are you ready for this - 2020!

So imagine this. You are in a wheelchair on the platform at Main station, which you've reached from one of the other accessible stations. The elevator is broken. What do you do? Well, due to the lack of elevators in the system, this is the procedure (which is documented on a sign by the elevator). And no, I'm not making this up.

Take the subway east to Warden station. Cross the platorm, take a westbound train to Bloor-Yonge (12 stops). Transfer to the Yonge line and go north to Eglinton. Take a wheelchair accessible bus to Broadview station on the Bloor line (which you passed earlier). Transfer to another bus, and take it back to Main station. This will take you, if you are lucky, about an hour and a half -- to travel a distance of about 20 feet, had the elevator been working. If all the stations had elevtors it would be a simple matter to go one stop further and come back the other way.

It's crazy that this has been allowed to happen in this day and age. It would never have happened in the US, which has better funding for transit systems and stricter laws about access for the disabled.

For those of you who don't know me, no, I don't need a wheelchair. One of my friends earlier in life, was, and I spent a lot of time pushing him around, and got pretty aware of some of the obstacles someone in a wheelchair can face. Things are better than they were thirty years ago - most new buildings have ramps, and street corner curbs are ramped now as a matter of course, more washrooms are accessible, but we still have a long way to go.

Bill Joy is the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who gained quite a bit of notoriety a few years ago by publishing a very cautionary article about the perils of technology. CNet has an interview with him in which he talks about what he sees the future of technology as being and explains why he recently joined a venture capitalism firm.

I went to a presentation on DITA - Darwin Information Typing Architecture - last month. One of the questions that kept coming up was how realistic would it be to use DITA now - are the tools mature enough to use it in the real world. The answer appears to be yes - if you don't mind working on the bleeding edge of documentation technology. DITA - the mechanics of a single-sourcing project is a paper by Montreal documentation architect France Baril, that describes the how she implemented a single-sourcing project using DITA and what some of the issues were (and there were issues). However, the implentation was successful and she felt that using DITA contributed to the success of the project. If you are considering implementing a structured-authoring workflow, this is worth reading.

Astronomers have photographed an extrasolar planet for the first time. There have been previous detections of planets via infrared emissions and a previous sighting that hasn't been confirmed, but this seems to be the most definite sighting.

Cory Doctorow has a longish and very favourable review of a The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens. This is one I'm going to look for; I've been trying to interest my kids in SF and fantasy, without a lot of luck so far - like most kids these days, they like it, but they get at it from the media side - TV, movies, and games, instead of books or stories. A lot of the classic SF that I grew up on is now too dated to appeal to current teen tastes. So it looks like this book will fill a valuable niche.

Wired is calling Battlestar Galactica the best SF TV series ever. At this point, with the season finale due tomorrow night, I'm pretty much in agreement with their assessment - when the series started, I felt that Babylon 5 was the standard by which all TV SF had to be measured - but Battlestar Galactica has been at least as good and more consistently good than B5. I'm looking forward to the reruns and the second season.

Given the current political climate in the US, it had to happen. From the April editorial in Scientific American.

In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.

Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details.