Core Dump

Microsoft has been putting more emphasis on digital photography, and they have some new web sites for phototographers. Professional Photography for Windows XP has articles on things like improving your Photoshop skills and improving your workflow. The default digital photography page is oriented more to home and amateur users. Both sites are worth looking at.

Google just keeps rolling out more neat stuff. A while back they bought a commercial satellite image-viewing service called Keyhole. They've now rebranded it as Google Earth and made it freely available as a 10 MB download. Basically, this is Google Maps on steroids and it is extremely neat.

You can zoom in on any point on Earth and if there's a high-resolution satellite image of that spot available, you can zoom in on it, tilt and pan, and fly over it. You can add layers to the image showing roads or things like hotels or other businesses. You can link to business details and get directions and distances. Like most other Google offerings, the interface is uncluttered and dead simple to use. And it's fun - I showed it to my kids and they went ga ga over it.

Google is offering Plus and Pro versions with enhanced features, but the basic free program will probably be more than enough for most users. Have I already said that it's one of the neatest things I've ever seen on a computer?

I should add here that there is an alternative program called World Wind, developed by NASA. It's a much bigger download (~200 MB) but offers access to things like weather and geophysical data. When I tried it out a few months ago, the servers were overloaded so downloading image data was slow enough to make the program almost unusable, but I expect they've worked around that issue by now.

Update: I installed World Wind last night and had a look at it. Version 1.3 is quite a bit slicker and faster than the first version that I looked at. I had no trouble getting pulling image data from their servers, though the image resolution doesn't go as deep as Google Earth. You have access to more and different types of data, including topographic maps and scientific databases. As for Google Earth, I wasn't able to add it to my kids' machine as they'd limited the beta, presumably to keep their servers from being overwhelmed. Wired has a good writeup on some of the things you can do with it.

Parliament passed the gay marriage bill last night.

A report from an independent committee identifies three areas of concern for the Shuttle, but NASA will likely proceed with a return to flight in July, according to a story in the Orlando Sentinel.

Although embarrassing to NASA, the findings by the Stafford-Covey Task Group are not expected to postpone Discovery's planned launch in July. Members of the panel who spoke Monday after their final public meeting in Washington lauded NASA's efforts to improve the shuttle and said Monday's verdict did not mean the ship was unsafe.

Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia, with its thousands of articles contributed from authors all over the globe. The most interesting feature is that the articles are editable. You might think this would lead to chaos, but I've been using Wikipedia quite a lot and have found it to be one of the best information sources on the net. Now there's a tool, a GreaseMonkey script, that let's you view the revision history of Wikipedia articles, in a very similar way to the track revisions feature in Word. This is useful enough that I'm going to have to install GreaseMonkey. (You'll need Firefox too, but you're already using it, aren't you?) You can see an example of what it looks like in action on Jon Udell's weblog.

The web site Safe ... Simple ... Soon is devoted to Shuttle-derived booster concepts, ranging from using a single SRB with a second stage to launch one of NASA's proprosed manned capsules to a heavy-lift monster that could lift more than the Saturn V. These proposals have been made before and my impression is that they would be neither cheap nor safe - I wouldn't ride on top of an SRB.

I thought I was being cool, recently buying a 5 megapixel digital camera. Anything I've printed off at a reasonable size has looked fine. Then I saw this, and I now have a bad case of pixel envy. The Gigapixel Project uses a digital camera with a 4 GB sensor - the raw image files are 24 GB! The level of detail is stunning. What would be truly neat would be a Google Maps type applet that would let you move around and zoom in on one of these images at will. As it is, their gallery images will have to do.

Now this should be good for a few sleepless nights - John Dvorak thinks that Bush's neo-con cronies are gearing up to repeal the twenty-second ammendment, so that Bush can run for a third term. On the other hand, the Democrats are so disorganized right now, that there's no credible opponent to whoever the Republicans nominate anyway.

The Text Encoding Initiative is a project to ensure that text encoded for electronic use, for example for posting on Web archives, is encoded in such a way that it's easily searchable. Essentially this means using some simple markup to denote things like page breaks, paragraphs, and quotes. There's an example page that shows a typical unencoded piece of text and what it would look like after being marked up. The markup is SGML-based, but not complex - anyone who knows HTML would have no trouble with it.

With the apparent demise of RoboHelp after its recent sale to Macromedia, then to Adobe, Quadralay's WebWorks Publisher has become a much more important player in the help tools market. It's always been the favoured solution for authors who need to single-source their output into print and online formats, something that RoboHelp couldn't easily do. WebWorks Publisher is also highly customizable, but the customization often involved digging into the program's arcane macro language or horrendously complex JavaScript code. WebWorks users groaned in envy when they saw the ease with which RoboHelp users could accomplish tasks like adding breadcrumbs or outputting multiple help formats from the same project.

Now all of that has changed. Quadralay has introduced WebWorks ePublisher Pro, and it's a completely new program. The only thing it shares with its predecessors is its functionality and the WebWorks name. The program's interface has been completely revamped, and the macro language is gone, replaced by a slick XML/XSLT-based engine.

The workflow in ePublisher Pro is still much the same as it was in WWP. You start by creating a project, selecting an output format, selecting your input files, then converting them. You now have many more options for customization along the way, and all of them are handled through the programs interface. However, you may find that you don't need to do that much customizing - the default settings are surprisingly good.

As a test, I used a Word document (the Word version is available now, the FrameMaker version will ship sometime in July) that I'd used with WebWorks Publisher 2003. It already included media types (now called conditionals, a la FrameMaker) that I'd set up for print and online versions. Incidentally, you can convert RoboHelp projects into ePublisher, but you're going to have to rebuild your old WebWorks Publisher projects from scratch. I selected the WebWorks Help 5.0 template and set the heading styles to split into separate pages and to be included in the TOC. The generated project was almost usable - I'd have to fiddle with some character styles and overrides that slipped in, and add the company logo and contact information, but other than that it looked fine - better than the original project I'd done in WWP for the most part. Line spacing and indentation was much more even and consistent for example. There was only one problem - text in bulleted lists was centred if the list item was on only one line - I've looked at this and not found a solution, so I've entered a support request with Quadralay. (In fairness, I should note that the online help is done in WebWorks Help 5 and is fine, so the problem could be due to flakiness in my Word file).

ePublisher Pro allows you to generate a preview that fairly accurately simulates the look of your final online output. You can now override the Style Designer defaults - if you are unlucky enough to have a document that is full of direct formatting, you can set up the online formats in the Document Designer without using styles at all. An ePublisher project will now let you output to different formats from the same project, so you don't need to recreate everything when your developers tell you that you need to switch from HTML Help to JavaHelp.

If you're considering upgrading from WWP to ePublisher Pro, make sure you're hardware can handle it. Quadralay recommends a 3 GHz system with 1 GB of RAM, and they aren't kidding. I ran my tests on my home system, which is a 1.7 GHz P4 with 512 MB of RAM, and generating a preview and the final output was slow - quite a bit slower than in WWP.

Overall, my first impressions are pretty favourable. As a veteran WebWorks user, I didn't have too much trouble figuring out the new interface, and the quality of the output impressed me (allowing for the one glitch I had). There are numerous customization options I've barely touched on, all available without coding. However, my projects have tended to be fairly straightforward - real WebWorks power users may have different feelings about not having the old macro language to play with. But so far, I haven't seen anything that would keep me from upgrading to the FrameMaker version when that gets released.

Findability.org is a web site devoted to findability: "Findability refers to the quality of being locatable or navigable. At the item level, we can evaluate to what degree a particular object is easy to discover or locate. At the system level, we can analyze how well a physical or digital environment supports navigation and retrieval."

Topic categories include: Design for Flexibility, Libraries and Literacy, Pervasive Technology, Value and Metrics, and so on. There's lots of interesting material here.

One of the predicted consequences of global warming is the weakening of the Gulf Stream. According to a posting on Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor web site, there is some evidence that this is now happening, and we could begin to see the climatic effects (colder winters in the Northeast US and in Europe to start with) as early as this winter. If true, the long-term consequences of this could be pretty major.

Earlier this week, the government introduced Bill C-60, Canada's answer to the dreadful U.S. Digital Millenium Copyright Act. U of Ottawa professor Michael Geist has written a lengthy series of articles about the bill and what it's effect would be on Canadians. If you use peer to peer file sharing services, copy the occasional CD or DVD, or record TV programs so you can watch them later, read this, as all of these activities (and others) will be affected by the bill.

American George Weller was the first foreign journalist to enter Nagasaki after the atomic bombing of August, 1945. He wrote a lengthy report of his experience, but censors refused to allow it to be published. Now, almost 60 years later, it's been published by the Japanese newspaper, the Manichi Daily News. It's pretty grim reading.

Writer Ian Eglinton and writer D'Israeli have put up a web-based comic of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds. The first 12 pages are up on the web now, with more to follow. I don't think this has anything to do with the forthcoming Speilberg movie (other than the timing); it seems to be a pretty straight adaptation of the H.G. Wells story. It's quite well done too.

Having suffered through one too many awful books about software, Joel Spolsky decided to do something about it, and The Best Software Writing is the result. It's a collection of 20 essays about software that might be worth reading - at least if the introduction to the book is any guide. (No I haven't read the book, but I want to.) Who could resist articles with titles like "Autistic Social Software" or "Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit". My curiousity is definitely piqued.

The software development world desperately needs better writing. If I have to read another 2000 page book about some class library written by 16 separate people in broken ESL, I’m going to flip out. If I see another hardback book about object oriented models written with dense faux-academic pretentiousness, I’m not going to shelve it any more in the Fog Creek library: it’s going right in the recycle bin. If I have to read another spirited attack on Microsoft’s buggy code by an enthusiastic nine year old Trekkie on Slashdot, I might just poke my eyes out with a sharpened pencil. Stop it, stop it, stop it!

IBM Keyboards - The Odyssey Continues is a paan to the old IBM keyboards - the ones that had a wonderful bounce-back key feel and were awfully noisy. But if you were a good typist, there was nothing like them. IBM doesn't make them anymore, but other companies do, and of course you can still get the original IBM models, which are amazingly durable.

This doesn't mean you should spend money for no reason, but it does mean you shouldn't stress over the price. Computer users are used to hardware that's worthless in three years and useless in five; clicky keyboards aren't like that. You could leave one of these things to your children in your will. Or be buried with it, like some kind of nerd Pharaoh.

Cory Doctorow's latest novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, is out. This one is an urban fantasy, set in Toronto, and the initial reviews have been really good. He'll be signing books at BakkaPhoenix books on July 11th, if you're in the Toronto area and want a signed copy. As with Cory's previous books, he's released it under the Creative Commons license, so you can download it if you wish.

I saw Batman Begins today and thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm not a big fan of superhero movies (or the original comics, for that matter), though I do go to see them. This one is darker and edgier than most. There's a good review on Kuro5hin that pretty much mirrors my feelings about the movie.

There's a good post on TechDirt talking about why people don't like to go to the movies anymore. Aside from the general low quality of the films, it's expensive ($50 for a family of four), you have to put up with endless commercials and previews, people won't shut up during the movie, the snacks are way overpriced. It's easier just to wait for the DVD, which often comes with lots of neat extra stuff, and watch it at home. If you have a big TV and a good stereo system, you're not losing that much and it's a lot more convenient and comfortable.

I now only go out to a few movies a year. It's just too expensive and I only go to see the big SF movies or effects-laden movies like Star Wars or Batman. Otherwise, I'd just as soon watch the DVD. The big threat to Hollywood isn't people downloading movies-it's the crappy product and the ripoff theatre chains.

I'd like a nice big, high-definition plasma or LCD television just as much as the next guy, but if I ever buy one, I'm going to have to think about the power consumption. According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor, big-screen TVs can use a lot more power than a standard, analog TV set (double or triple). Given the number of sets expected to be sold over the next few years, along with all the other associated components (5.1 surround sound systems, set-top boxes, DVD players, game consoles), and it looks like consumer electronic devices are putting a big load on the nation's power supply.

One of the staples of science fiction, the solar sail, will get its first test next week, when Cosmos 1 is launched by a Russian booster. The sail, about 100 feet in diamter, should gain 100 mph per day from light pressure after it's opened.

Weird Tales was one of the early science fiction and fantasy pulp magazines. Here's a gallery of their covers from 1923 to 1943. Contents for each issue are also listed - a nice bonus. The page text is in French, but don't let that stop you; the covers are great.

According to an article on MSNBC, Japan and France will collaborate to build a supersonic airliner capable of carrying 300 passengers at Mach 2.4. There have been no supersonic airliners since the demise of the Concorde a couple of years ago. The new plane would be more fuel efficient and have less of a sonic boom. Personally, I'd rather see the money going into a suborbital airliner, Tokyo to Paris in 45 minutes instead of six hours.

National Geographic has an astounding video of the insdie of a tornado. Researchers placed a probe with 7 cameras in the path of a tornado, which went right over the probe. Watch this and you will never ignore a severe thunderstorm warning again. The page has links to some other good videos about tornodoes - quite timely, considering we had at least two here in Southern Ontario last night.

I'm not particularly into fancy cases (unlike my son, who wants one of those AlienWare gamer cases), but this HAL9000 case mod is pretty cool.

Eric Nguyen's home page has some incredible storm chaser pictures of tornadoes. On June 9 he saw eight! We had some heavy weather go through here tonight, with more to come, but nothing like this, I hope!

Quadralay has announced that WebWorks ePublisher for Word, the new, completely rewritten version of WebWorks Publisher, is now shipping. It has a new, modern interface, and the core engine has been rewritten to use XML/XSLT.

I've been beta testing this and am quite impressed, but I don't want to say more until I know that I'm free from the NDA.

There's a very reasonably priced competitive upgrade for users of other help authoring tools like Doc2Help and RoboHelp. The FrameMaker version will be shipping in July.

The New York Times has an interesting article on Bob Dylan and his never-ending tour. Dylan is a notoriously idiosyncratic live performer, and this article explores that side of Dylan in some detail.

These shows have none of the strict choreography of the modern rock concert. Major touring acts will charge hundreds of dollars for a tightly scripted performance, with one or two opportunities for spontaneity. By contrast, Mr. Dylan's small ensemble plays confidently during each set's few anchors, but watches somewhat warily during the rest of the show, as Mr. Dylan decides which part of his huge repertory to sample next.

Update: Oops, added the link. The NYT requires (free) registration. However, the text of the article is available in the rec.music.gdead Usenet newsgroup if you don't want to bother with the Times registration stuff.

Eerie Magazine covers is a gallery of covers from the old monster magazine, Eerie. If you like old pulp covers, or horror, you'll like these. Not for the squeamish, though.

I've been thinking about upgrading my PC, which is now 3-1/2 years old. It was pretty much state of the art when I got it, but is now way behind the times. But with 64-bit and dual-core processors coming out, I've been wondering if I should wait a bit. Wired has a good overview article on the new chip technologies. I'm especially interested in the new dual-core chips, because the offer the potential of significantly better multi-tasking, but they're still too expensive for casual use.

A Rubric for IT Analysis Papers is a list of 20 things to watch for when reading IT analyses -- you know the type "Framijan is faster than Bloopsit", with lots of graphs and tables of supporting data. But does the data actually prove the conclusion? You can also apply some of the tips to other types of data - particularly financial analyses. I find graphs in newspapers often exhibit many of the errors mentioned in this paper.

Version control for non-programmers with Subversion describes how to use Subversion, a new source code control sytem, as a personal data storage system. Because Subversion is equally efficient with binary and non-binary files, unlike older source code control systems like CVS, you could use it for documentation projects, for example, or making sure your household accounts are secure and backed up.

Day-to-day use of Subversion is easy. Just commit your files whenever you've reached a point that's worth saving and describe the changes that you're committing. It's remarkably liberating to be able to attempt significant changes to a document when you know that it's a simple matter to recover a previous version with a single command or click of the mouse.

BoingBoing notes that a Colorado brewery is making a Hunter S. Thompson tribute beer with labels by Ralph Steadman. They'll come in a specially packaged 4-pack. I'd certainly love to get my hands on this.

Acronyma is search engine for acronyms. It claims to have about 450,000 terms in its database. It has one iteresting feature - you can search for words, and get acronyms that have that word in their definition.

A high-school student was refused his diploma for wearing a bolo tie under his graduation gown. It didn't meet the school dress code.

But officials from Maurice J. McDonough High School in suburban Washington said they warned him beforehand that a bolo violated the dress code for the event, held Wednesday for about 250 students.

The bolo “was not considered by staff to be a tie,” said Katie O’Malley-Simpson, a spokeswoman for Charles County schools. “We have many opportunities throughout the year to express cultural heritage. But we don’t do that at graduation.”

Sounds like he might have a case for a discrimination suit. Too bad you can't sue for stupidity.

Most of you have probably seen the story about what a car would be like if it was designed by Microsoft. Well, here's a new one. What would houses be like if they were built by software developers? It's pretty funny, but maybe you don't want to pass it along to your friendly developer co-workers unless you're sure they have a good sense of humour.

Herbet gestures around what appears to be an empty room with a self-satisfied smirk on his face. You peer around trying to work out what bizarre idea the builder has foisted upon the house now. “Where’s the BED, Herbert?” Herbert theatrically claps his hands together twice and stamps his foot.. the bed silently descends from an opening that appeared in the ceiling, you jump
out of the way just in time and the bed neatly touches down in the centre of the room. “Neat hey!” Herbert prompts you.. “Ah yeah, thats great Herbert".. You gingerly sit on the bed, it promptly collapses.. “Ah, yeah that happens a bit, you get used to it.".

The comments on the article are perhaps more interesting than the article itself.
Incidentally, this is a very interesting blog, and I'm going to have to spend some time looking at the postings. If you have any interest in UI design, it's well worth a look.
Update: Sorry, I forgot to post the link. The blog is the UI Hall of Shame, by the way.

Computer columnist, Robert X. Cringely, has an interesting column on the announcement earlier this week that Apple would switch to using Intel chips. He thinks that it's a prelude to Intel buying Apple.

Intel is fed up with Microsoft. Microsoft has no innovation that drives what Intel must have, which is a use for more processing power. And when they did have one with the Xbox, they went elsewhere.

So Intel buys Apple and works with their OEMs to get products out in the market. The OEMs would love to be able to offer a higher margin product with better reliability than Microsoft. Intel/Apple enters the market just as Microsoft announces yet another delay in their next generation OS. By the way, the new Apple OS for the Intel Architecture has a compatibility mode with Windows (I'm just guessing on this one).

He poses some good questions and comes up with an interesting speculation. Worth reading.

The BBC is offering free downloads of all nine Beethoven symphonies. Five are up on their website now; the others will be available after they are broadcast later this month. All the symphonies are performed by BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. The website also has links to reference and critical material about Beethoven and his music. Classical music is hard to find for download (especially free download!) - I hope they do more of it.

A study conducted for NASA shows that the Shuttle is at higher risk from orbital debris than previously thought. Discover Channel had a piece recently on tests showing that it was also at higher risk from foam strikes than previously thought-a piece of foam the size of a piece of popcorn could create a hole in the wing's leading edge-the same problem that led to the Columbia disaster. It really is time to replace the Shuttle. Let's hope they can get the space station completed and the Hubble serviced without another disaster.

Prior to his career as a film director, Stanley Kubrick was a photographer for Look magazine. The Chicago Tribune has just printed a photo essay he did about Chicago in 1949. It's clear that Kubrick was as masterful a photographer as he was a director-these are some of the best black-and-white news photographs I've seen.

Laszlo is an open-source alternative to Flash, for projects that require a "rich Internet application". Fair warning: I have not used this - I've just reviewed the material available on the web site, but it does look easier to use than Flash for things like animated menus, and the price is right. As well, there's a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE, so the development environment is state-of-the-art.

Having recently bought a digital camera, I'm finding that there are quite a few differences between digital and film photography. The New York Times has a very good article offering ten tips for digital photographers. From personal experience, I can attest that they all make sense.

Anti-terrorism posters done in the Soviet socialist-realism style are now appearing on Washington DC public transit. In both subject and style, they echo 1930s Communist propoganda art.

Some of us with long memories (and longer beards) remember the Osborne computer, the first "portable" computer. It was quite a machine for its time, with a 5" screen, two floppies, and a good software bundle that included WordStar (love at first sight on my part). Adam Osborne made one of the classic marketing gaffes of all time by announcing that Osborne would move from CP/M to the new IBM DOS architecture, causing sales of the now-obsolete CP/M Osborne's drop to zero overnight. The company collapsed before ever shipping a DOS-based Osborne.

I have to wonder if Steve Jobs hasn't done the same thing to Apple, by announcing that Apple will be moving from IBM PowerPC to Intel chips a year before the new computers will actually ship. Who is going to buy an Apple now when newer, faster, and probably cheaper machines are just over the horizon. I'm not the only one wondering this either - as I was putting this post together, I saw one on the same subject on TechDirt. If Apple sales tank over the next year, will shrinking iPod sales be enough to save the company? Maybe Apple will be forced to release a Mac-less, Intel version of OS/X as a stopgap.

The May issue of Harpers had a couple of the most interesting articles I've seen about the Christian resurgence in the US. Soldiers of Christ 1 is about life in the Christian bastion of Colorado Springs. Soldiers of Christ 2 is about Christian broadcasting. Both are long, well written, and worth reading if you're interested in one of the major forces driving today's society (more in the US than in Canada, but it affects Canadians too). From Soldiers of Christ 1:

As contemporary fundamentalism has become an exurban movement, it has reframed the question of theodicy—if God is good, then why does He allow suffering?—as a matter of geography. Some places are simply more blessed than others. Cities equal more fallen souls equal more demons equal more temptation, which, of course, leads to more fallen souls. The threats that suffuse urban centers have forced Christian conservatives to flee—to Cobb County, Georgia, to Colorado Springs. Hounded by the sins they see as rampant in the cities (homosexuality, atheistic schoolteaching, ungodly imagery), they imagine themselves to be outcasts in their own land. They are the “persecuted church”—just as Jesus promised, and just as their cell-group leaders teach them.

And from Soldiers of Christ 2:

What the disparate sects of this movement, known as Dominionism, share is an obsession with political power. A decades-long refusal to engage in politics at all following the Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for Christian “dominion” over the nation and, eventually, over the earth itself. Dominionists preach that Jesus has called them to build the kingdom of God in the here and now, whereas previously it was thought that we would have to wait for it. America becomes, in this militant biblicism, an agent of God, and all political and intellectual opponents of America’s Christian leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan. Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the Ten Commandments form the basis of our legal system, Creationism and “Christian values” form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all. Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and “homeland” security.[1] Some Dominionists (not all of whom accept the label, at least not publicly) would further require all citizens to pay “tithes” to church organizations empowered by the government to run our social-welfare agencies, and a number of influential figures advocate the death penalty for a host of “moral crimes,” including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft. The only legitimate voices in this state will be Christian. All others will be silenced.

The traditional evangelicals, those who come out of Billy Graham’s mold, are not necessarily comfortable with the direction taken by the Dominionists, who now control most of America’s major evangelical organizations, from the NRB to the Southern Baptist Convention, and may already claim dominion over the Christian media outlets. But Christians who challenge Dominionists, even if they are fundamentalist or conservative or born-again, tend to be ruthlessly thrust aside.

As for where all of this might take us, it might be instructive to read Robert Heinlein's Revolt in 2100, published more than 50 years ago, but which might turn out to be the most prescient of all his books.

Microsoft Office 2003 gathers quite a bit of information about how you use its online help, based on responses to the query "Did you find this information helpful". Inside Microsoft Office Online Assistance is a lengthy article about how Microsoft uses customer feedback to improve both the online help and the product itself.

At first, writers could spot low hanging fruit pretty easily. During the beta testing, for instance, it became clear there needed to be a topic about the blind carbon copy (BCC) line in Outlook, and that article was modified drastically to meet customer expectations. But now that the more obvious problems have been solved, the teams are noticing the less visible ones. "What was noise at the beginning of the project becomes more visible as a result of increased traffic from customers," Ashby says.

Bad labelling and instructions have forced Johnson and Johnson to recall several types of children's tylenol in the US. There's nothing wrong with the drug, but there are concerns that caregivers could get confused and give children an incorrect dose.

Anyone want to figure out the cost/benefit ratio of having a competent technical writer review the packaging before it was appproved?

Someone has come up with a truly nifty product - an electrified tennis racquet bug zapper. Whoever invented this must be Canadian, or at least spent some time outdoors in our summer.

Librarians in the US have been fighting federal and state laws that can force them to disclose the identify and borrowing records of patrons. Now someone has come up with a scheme that would allow anonymous borrowing - anonymous library cards backed by a cash deposit. Essenitally, you'd buy a card, and when you checked something out the card would be debited. When you return the item, the card would be credited. The library wouldn't have to know who you were. As the article points out, it's not a perfect system, but it should work.

Turtle's 78 RPM Jukebox is a site sharing a large collection of MP3s made from vintage 78 rpm records - by vintage, we're talking about 1900-1930. There's nothing here by anyone you'll ever heard of, unless you're a serious musicologist, but the list is pretty interesting. How about "My Little Bimbo (Down on the Bamboo Aisle) by Aileen Stanley or "Fido is a Hot Dog Now" by Bill Murray. There's a lot of what are clearly novelty songs, a fair number of patriotic airs, and some blues and ragtime.

Lloyd and Yvonne Penney have posted a lengthy list of Canadian SF and related conventions to the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup. Twenty years ago you could count the number of Canadian SF conventions on the fingers of one hand; now there are dozens. The Penney's are generous in including conventions in US states close to Canada that are traditionally attended by hordes of Canadians - Michigan's Confusion being one example, and some conventions that are very peripheral to mainstream SF - anthropomorphic and gaming conventions, for example. But it's a long and impressive list, and I might even get to a couple of them.

If you want something to make you really paranoid, this should do it - the science journal Nature has put together a special web page about the threat of a bird flu pandemic. I'd start buying N95 masks while you still can.

The next release of Microsoft Office, due out sometime next year, will use XML as its default file format. Although some news reports claim that this will make it easier for non-Microsoft software to work with Office files, MS has patents on its format. For another perspective on this, read Rober Bruce Thompson's web journal posting today.

Human Events, The National Conserative Weekly, has assembled a list of the worst books of all time, as chosen by a panel of fifteen conservatives. It's no suprise that the three top picks would be The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, and Quotations from Chairman Mao. But The Kinsey Reprt as number four? Honorable (dishonorable?) mentions go to Origin of the Species, Unsafe at Any Speed, Silent Spring, and The Greening of America.

The mind boggles.

Here's an interesting article positing the 10 laws of writing good science fiction. I wish some Hollywood movie-makers would pay attention to these, notably laws 2 and 3.

Making your DocBook HTML/XML output not suck is a tutorial on how to improve the default HTML output of DocBook XML. The standard DocBook HTML is serviceable, but it's not pretty. This tutorial should help you to improve it. It's also a pretty good introduction to CSS.