Core Dump

A lot of companies are now using interactive voice repsonse (IVR)systems, in which you speak a response to a prompt rather than pressing a button on your phone. I can't stand these things myself (are you listening, Rogers?) and obviously other Paul English doesn't like them much either because he's put together a cheat sheet listing the commands that will get you through to a real live breathing human being with minimum fuss, at least if you're dealing with one of the 100 or so major companies on his list. A lot of the commands are similar from company to company, so a bit of experimentation might get you out of voice-mail hell with your favourite company. (If anyone knows how to beat the Rogers system, please let me know).

According to Jensen Harris, one of Microsoft's UI designers, Office 12 and Windows Vista will use a new font for the user interface, called Segoe UI. It's designed for ClearType and optimized for the smaller point sizes that will be used in the interface. You can read more about it on this Monday's post on his blog. He also links to a very intersting article on the history of the Tahoma and Verdana fonts, which are two of my favourites for online use.

It's possible that the dash is the most commonly misused form of punctation. The Trouble with EM 'n EN (and Other Shady Characters) takes a detailed look at the em and en dashes and when to use them, with special emphasis on the complications that you can run into in HTML.

The dawn of the web has frequently been compared to the invention of the printing press. But the web has also destroyed one of the greatest features of nearly every press since Gutenberg: the ability to publish pleasing type.

The printing press gave us type that was clearer and easier to read than that produced from a typewriter, because the typesetter had additional tools at his disposal—and knew how to use them. The web has cost us some of those tools.

There are two problems here. The first is that until HTML 4 came along, the web was missing almost all of these tools (it’s still missing many important ones).

But the larger problem is, now that they’re available, almost no one publishing on the web today knows how to use them—or often even knows of their existence.

Read this, though, and you’ll understand the answers to both problems far better than almost anyone else, including your English teachers.

I saw the latest Harry Potter movie last and enjoyed it a lot. It's darker (both in tone and visual style) than the earlier movies, and despite its length (2 hours, 37 minutes), moves along quite nicely. I do wish they'd shown more of the Quidditch World Cup though. Guess I'll have to wait for the DVD for that.

The Washington Post article, The Gathering Winds, looks at the 2005 hurricane season and examines the evidence, both for and against the idea that hurricanes are getting more severe.

The Physics Textbook is a 1200-page physics textbook, written by Christoph Schiller, Ph.D, and published free online. At a first glance, it looks like it's written at a level that would be appropriate for an advanced high school or general university student.

How does a rainbow form? Is levitation possible? Do time machines exist? What does 'quantum' mean? What is the maximum force value found in nature? Is 'empty space' really empty? Is the universe a set? Which problems in physics are still unsolved?

This site publishes a free physics textbook that tells the story of how it became possible, after 2500 years of exploration, to answer such questions. The book is written to be entertaining, surprising and challenging on every page. With little mathematics, the text explores the most fascinating parts of mechanics, thermodynamics, special and general relativity, electrodynamics, quantum theory and modern attempts at unification. The essence of these fields is summarized in the most simple terms: it is shown how they are based on the notions of minimum entropy, maximum speed, maximum force, minimum change of charge and minimum action.

The text explores the limits of time and space, and the wonders that can be discovered there. Written in English, its over 1200 pages are provided for students, teachers, and for anybody who is interested in the precise description of nature.

Here's another amazing QuickTime VR panorama -- this one's of the Large Hadron Collider ATLAS experiment, which is under construction at CERN in Switzerland. This one even has sound!

Newsweek has a long and thoughtful appreciation of John Lennon -- this year is the 25th anniversary of his death, and there will no doubt be many more articles.

I finished Peter F. Hamilton's Judas Unchained last night. It's the sequel to Pandora's Star, which I've mentioned here a couple of times before. Sequel isn't really the right word-it's actually the second half of a very long novel that the publisher split into two parts. Each book is close to 1000 pages. It's excellent - every bit as gripping as the first book. This is the most entertaining science fiction I've read in years.

If you want more information about Peter F. Hamilton you can check out his official site, or go to Second Chance, which is focused on Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained.

SitePoint has published The Blog Software Smackdown: The Big Three Compared, in which they review and ocmpare the top three blogging software packages: Moveable Type, WordPress, and Textpattern. I'm still using Blogger, which fits my fairly limited needs, but if I ever decide to run my own blogging software, I'd probably be looking at one of these. The main limitation in my case is that I'm using a free webhosting service (Doteasy.com), and I can't run scripts or my own software without upgrading to a paid account.

NASA engineers have found more cracks in the foam insulation on Shuttle external tanks. This does not bode well for getting the Shuttle off the ground any time soon. I'm beginning to wonder if the Shuttle program will be cancelled before there's another flight - at this point it looks like there might not be a flight before 2007.

A Denver woman has been arrested for refusing to provide ID while riding a public bus. The bus was on its standard route, which passes through the parking lot of the Denver Federal Center to take on and discharge passengers. Note that she wasn't trying to enter the center itself, and she was on a public bus on its normal route.

Panoramas.dk has a QuickTime VR panorama of the Spirit rover's view from the top of the Columbia hills on Mars. If this doesn't goose your sense of wonder, you don't have one. Truly amazing.

Docsymmetry is an excellent technical writing web site maintained by Lyndsey Amott of Winnipeg, Manitoba. The site contains several good articles on subjects, such as "Common Errors" and "The Writing Process" and an annotated list of recommended books. It looks like a particularly good resource for new writers or people who need to write documentation but aren't technical writers by profession.

eWeek is reporting that there is a new, zero-day exploit against Internet Explorer. Zero-day means the exploit code has been released before Microsoft has had a chance to patch the problem. It affects fully-patched versions of Windows XP SP2. If you're still using IE, it would be wise to turn off JavaScript. It would be wiser still to switch to Firefox.

Earlier this month, I posted about plans to build the world's largest telescope, a 30 metre monster that would be partially funded by a consortium of Canadian universities. Wired Magazine has just published an article that goes into quite a bit more detail about plans for this telescope. The telescope will have 780 mirror segments and will use adaptive optics. Resolution will be 10 to 100 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Getting people to review documents is always one of the hardest things a technical writer has to deal with. People just don't like doing it, and even the ones that do often review the wrong things or don't provide helpful comments. (My favourite example, "Wrong!" scrawled boldly in red ink through a paragaph -- it would be nice to know why it was wrong).

I've always thought that online reviewing was the way to go. In my first full-time technical writing job, I used a tool that worked with IBM's BookMaster that let reviewers put threaded comments right inline with the text. It was very helpful to writers and the developers seemed to like using it too. Quadralay recently introduced a tool called FinalDraft that works much the same way.

Useable Help has an article on document reviewing with an online tool called QuickTopic. This lets you read documents and post comments over the Internet. They have a Pro version that has extra features and lets you password protect your reviews to control access. At a first glance, I'm pretty impressed - in fact, I'm almost drooling.

The Japanese Hayabusa space probe failed in its attempt to land on an asteroid and grab a sample. Engineers are assessing the data from the attempt to see if they can make a second attempt.

Today's Dilbert is a good illustration of how a statement can be perfectly accurate, but completely misleading. And it's funny, too.

One neat thing that Google does, is to change the Google logo for holidays and other special days that they want to commemorate. They do have a repository of those logos on their site, so if you don't happen to log on to them every day, you can still view what they've done. My favourite from this year is Frank Lloyd Wright's birthday.

The first beta of Microsoft Office 12 is out and reviewed by PC Magazine. While the interface has drastically changed, it sounds like the back end is still the gnarly old Office we all love.

Our preliminary tests suggest that Microsoft put most of its energy into fixing the interface and the back-end connections to SharePoint servers. The inner logic of the applications remains essentially the same, which means some will conclude that Microsoft has put a better-looking face on a suite that's still difficult to navigate. The new interface does make features that were almost inaccessible before far easier to reach, but Word and Excel still perform automated changes that you may not want or expect, and you still have to learn their sometimes-obscure inner logic before you can master them.

"Sometimes-obscure inner logic." I like that.

News.com is reporting that Microsoft is considering producing free, ad-supported versions of some of its tools (Works, Money) and possibly an ad-supported version of Windows.

According to Robert Bruce Thompson, this is a clear sign that Microsoft is getting desperate about its disappearing market.

It may sound strange to describe a corporation that has the resources of Microsoft as "desperate", but desperate it is. Microsoft is losing the server room to Linux. Its Windows monopoly faces the growing threat of desktop Linux, which is a superior operating system in every sense except breadth of application support, and that gap continues to narrow every month. MS Office, which is the keystone of the Microsoft monopoly, is threatened by OpenOffice.org, and more particularly by the rapidly growing sentiment that favors open OpenDocument Format. And then there's Google and web-based services.

The Michigan Law Review has published an analysis of the government, particularly the Ministry of Magic, in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. From the abstract:

This Essay examines what the Harry Potter series (and particularly the most recent book, The Half-Blood Prince) tells us about government and bureaucracy. There are two short answers. The first is that Rowling presents a government (The Ministry of Magic) that is 100% bureaucracy. There is no discernable executive or legislative branch, and no elections. There is a modified judicial function, but it appears to be completely dominated by the bureaucracy, and certainly does not serve as an independent check on governmental excess.

Second, government is controlled by and for the benefit of the self-interested bureaucrat. The most cold-blooded public choice theorist could not present a bleaker portrait of a government captured by special interests and motivated solely by a desire to increase bureaucratic power and influence. Consider this partial list of government activities: a) torturing children for lying; b) utilizing a prison designed and staffed specifically to suck all life and hope out of the inmates; c) placing citizens in that prison without a hearing; d) allows the death penalty without a trial; e) allowing the powerful, rich or famous to control policy and practice; f) selective prosecution (the powerful go unpunished and the unpopular face trumped-up charges); g) conducting criminal trials without independent defense counsel; h) using truth serum to force confessions; i) maintaining constant surveillance over all citizens; j) allowing no elections whatsoever and no democratic lawmaking process; k) controlling the press.

I have to wonder if she was using some elements of the current US administration for ideas.

Today, BoingBoing had a mention in an article about the Sony DRM rootkit saying that they were checking into reports that some organizations were banning employees from playing Sony CDs at work (and with good reason!). However, I wonder if it might go further. I was reading an article on the web the other day (sorry, but I didn't bookmark it), saying that some companies are either forbidding employees from playing any music CDs in their PCs or re-evaluating their policies. Given the increasing use of DRM schemes in music CDs, I wonder if this might become an increasing trend. Of course, this will also lead to a reduced sales, because some people spend more time listening to music at work while they're working than they do at home. So the music companies are just shooting themselves in the foot.

News.com has a good article on how the OpenDocument format is gaining groupnd.

BoingBoing has put together an excellent timeline of stories about the Sony rootkit DRM software that they've used on soem of their CDs. They also have a statement from the EFF calling for Sony to take several steps to remedy the situation. Finally, there's news that the uninstaller may introduce a bigger security hole than the original softare. Boy, am I ever glad I didn't buy that Trey Anastasio CD!

Most technical writers who I know love FrameMaker for its speed and stability, but are a lot less happy with its interface. Let's face it - FrameMaker is getting pretty long in the tooth, and its interface could stand some major updating. But at least it's highly customizable, if you know how to edit the right configuration files, and Shlomo Perets does. For several years, he's been providing the ToolbarPlus Express for FrameMaker - a customized set of toolbars and keyboard commands that makes the Windows version of FrameMaker a lot easier to use. Up until recently Toolbar Express has been a free download, but with the release of version 4, he's now selling it for $25 US. Is it worth it? Read on for the my opinion.

Installation is straightforward. Unzip the ToolbarPlus Express files into FrameMaker's fminit\configui directory and change two lines in its maker.ini file. If you're paranoid, you can back up the directory and its subdirectories first, but I've never had a problem. There are no DLLs or executables involved - it's all done with modified versions of Frame's configuration files and the addition of some PDF files.

ToolbarPlus Express adds a new toolbar to FrameMaker. The four Frame Quick Launch toolbars are combined into two to save space. It adds drop-down lists for character styles and fonts. Buttons in the toolbar let you repeat paragraph and character style commands, set documents to read-only, copy paragraph, character, or conditional formats, increase or decrease zoom levels, and move around the document in various ways - and that's not a complete list. There are screen shots on the MicroType web site of the toolbar and some of the context menus, as well as a PDF file that describes everything in the application.

ToolbarPlus Express also adds an extensive set of keyboard shortcuts to FrameMaker's existing ones. Many of these mirror keyboard shortcuts that are standard in other Windows applications, making FrameMaker easier to use for Windows users. Others are mapped to the application and insert keys. If you're a keyboard maven, you'll find that you will hardly ever need to touch the mouse. I'm more of a menu guy myself, but I find that having many of the same CTRL and ALT key combinations that I use in Microsoft Word available in FrameMaker greatly lessens the mental gymnastics that I have to perform every time I switch between the two applications (usually, several times a day).

ToolbarPlus Express has been around for some time as a free application. Now that you have to pay for it, what new features make it worth upgrading to version 4? For a start, there's now a Microtype menu that gives you access to both the toolbar documentation, keyboard shortcut charts, and FrameMaker help and configuration files. The most useful command in the menu may be the Insert Special Characters command, which lets you insert the most common special characters from a menu. I find this much easier than trying to remember yet another set of keyboard commands. In the toolbar, there's now a paragraph button, which opens a drop-down menu for commonly used paragraph formatting commands, such as setting a paragraph to the top of the page.

New in this version are modifications to FrameMaker's top level menus and context menus. Show/hide conditional text is now a menu item in the View menu, for example, saving mouse clicks. Insert Special Character is available from a context menu. Other context menu items let you select various ranges of text or parts of tables.

I've been a big fan of the ToolbarPlus Express for years and have installed it on every version of FrameMaker that I use. If you aren't using it yet, the productivity gains you'll get from it more than justify the $25 US cost. If you're considering upgrading, the choice becomes a bit harder, but in my opinion it's still worth it. I've found that the additional commands added to the menus, especially the new Insert Special Characters command, and the selection commands from context menus more than justify the upgrade. I use many add-in products with FrameMaker, but ToolbarPlus Express is the one that I can't do without.

Structured FrameMaker uses an Element Definition Document (EDD) to map the structure of the document (usually from a DTD) to the format of the document in the form of paragraph and character styles. It also controls what elements appear in the document. Setting up an EDD is not trivial. Lynne A. Price of Text Structure Consulting has an updated version of her EDD template, which offers enhancements that make creating and working with EDDs easier. In particular, she's enchanced the commenting features, to make it easier to figure out what you did when you go back to it six months later. The template is under the Tips and Free Tools section of her web site. It's free too, which is kind of her, because she could probably get money for it.

SciFiction, a fiction site sponsored by the SciFi Channel, has announced it will be shurring down by the end of the year. According to Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing, it was one of the best markets on the Internet for short fiction. Under editor Eileen Datlow, they won serveral Hugo and Nebula awards and a World Fantasy Award.

I'm going to have to go to the site and print off a few of the stories that I haven't had a chance to read. Let's hope they continue to make the archives available online - I can't imagaine the bandwidth costs would be that high. Copyright issues will probably prevent doing something like donating them to archive.org.

If you want a good example of how far computer technology has come in 30 years, you could hardly do better than this - a 1975 500 KB hard drive. According to BoingBoing "This gigantic 1975 hard drive appliance held a whopping 500k and you had to wear a bunny-suit to work with it. It took "many days" to format it." The technology actually moved pretty quickly even in the first 10 years -- the first hard drive I had was a 5.25" 30 MB drive, which had 60 times the capacity in about 1/10,000 of the volume. Now, of course, you can buy a 500 GB hard drive that's the same size or smaller than my 1985 30 GB drive.

Jerry Pournelle has published a letter from the father of a Marine serving in Iraq that has a long and quite facinating discussion of US and insurgent weapons and tactics. This is stuff you won't find in the daily press.

I cant help but notice that most of the good fighting weapons and ordnance are 50 or more years old!!!!!!!!! With all our technology, it's the WWII and Vietnam era weapons that everybody wants!!!! The infantry fighting is frequent, up close and brutal. No quarter is given or shown.

Here's something for the "another thing to worry about" file.

New Scientist is reporting that it might be possible to assemble a bioterror weapon by ordering gene sequences by mail and assembling them. There are several companies that will take an order for gene sequences, splice them into a common bacterium, and mail the order back to you. Some companies screen such orders for threatening gene sequences, but not all do, and it's not likely screening would catch everything.

A more realistic risk is that terrorists could order genes that confer virulence to dangerous pathogens such as the Ebola virus, and engineer them into another virus or bacterium. They could also order genes for a hazardous bacterial toxin - although many of these are also available by isolating the microorganisms from the environment.

Ebola flu, anyone? Yikes!

In typical screw the customer and don't tell them about it fashion, Rogers have announced that they are dropping Usenet access after December 15th. To add insult to injury, they announced by putting a message up on their FAQ site, which nobody reads and is buried deep in their shopping portal.

To put it bluntly, I'm pissed off. Usenet has always been a large part of my Internet usage, probably because I was using it via BBS gateways before I even got on the Internet. But I'm in a minority, obviously. I'd be only slightly less peeved if Rogers at least had the decency to let me know by email that they were going to do this, and offer a discount for cutting Usenet off. But they arent' doing that either.

Switching ISPs is too much of a pain, so I probably will stick with their service, which otherwise is reasonably good. But I'm definitely going to let them know I'm not happy.

Baen Books is one of the major SF publishers. For some time, they've been putting some of their books online for free download. Their experience has been that this increases sales for both those books and the other books in their catalogue. They also ioffer paid subscriptions that let you download more books from them. Allen Smith has put together a site that organizes and annotates the free offerings from Baen.

I don't read books online as a rule, but there are some here that might make me reconsider - Andre Norton's classics The Time Traders and Galactic Derelict, for example. If I ever get a PDA or a tablet PC, I'll be grabbing a few of these to read on the GO train.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a list of CDs infected with Sonys' "copy protection" scheme that installs a rootkit on your PC. If you've played one of these CDs on your PC, you may have a big problem.

Trey Anastasio, Shine (Columbia)
Celine Dion, On ne Change Pas (Epic)
Neil Diamond, 12 Songs (Columbia)
Our Lady Peace, Healthy in Paranoid Times (Columbia)
Chris Botti, To Love Again (Columbia)
Van Zant, Get Right with the Man (Columbia)
Switchfoot, Nothing is Sound (Columbia)
The Coral, The Invisible Invasion (Columbia)
Acceptance, Phantoms (Columbia)
Susie Suh, Susie Suh (Epic)
Amerie, Touch (Columbia)
Life of Agony, Broken Valley (Epic)
Horace Silver Quintet, Silver's Blue (Epic Legacy)
Gerry Mulligan, Jeru (Columbia Legacy)
Dexter Gordon, Manhattan Symphonie (Columbia Legacy)
The Bad Plus, Suspicious Activity (Columbia)
The Dead 60s, The Dead 60s (Epic)
Dion, The Essential Dion (Columbia Legacy)
Natasha Bedingfield, Unwritten (Epic)

Guess I won't be buying the Trey Anastasio CD, and I won't be getting my son the Our Lady Peace disc either. That's two lost sales for sure.

The Kansas state board of education has rolled back the clock about 500 years and decided to allow the teaching of creatism in school biology classes, under the guise of intelligent design. Even more interesting, they've decided to redefine science, saying "no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena". Why don't they rename the state Oz while they're at it?

Wired has compiled a list of the 10 worst software bugs. It's an interesting list, with consequences ranging from destroyed satellites to dead patients. It would be interesting to have a companion article on the 10 worst software design failures - software that worked exactly as designed, but did something really bad as a consequence.

New Scientist has published the results of a poll they conducted to name the top SF books, television shows, and movies. It's an interesting list - it's pretty clear that the poll results are skewed by fans of Firefly and Serenity, which garnered the top spots. They were good - but not that good. My pick for movies, FYI, is still 2001 A Space Odyssey. For TV, Babylon 5, and for books, I couldn't even begin to list my favourites there.

There's a new ISO standard under development for technical documentation. The working title is Project 11.

The purpose of Project 11 is the creation of an international standard for managers of user documentation development. As a technical communicator, you can contribute in a number of ways:

* documentation managers who are prepared to provide their time and expertise can be Project Authors, and write part of the standard
* technical communicators and managers can be Project Reviewers, and get their say in the content of the standard

Project 11 is an informal initiative which will result in a base text for an ISO/IEC standard.

Technical writers and documentation managers are invited to particpate. You can sign up on the web site.

Update: Oops, forgot the link.

The International Open Source Network has created the User Guide to Using the Linux Desktop. It should be a very useful guide for anyone getting started on a current Linux distribution.

This user guide is meant as an introductory guide for a user to use a modern personal computer (PC) running the Linux operating system. The main aim is to provide a self-learning guide on how to use a modern Linux desktop system. It assumes that the user has no prior knowledge of Linux or PC usage.

After going through the guide the reader should be in a position to start using a Linux desktop for both personal and office use. In particular she should be able to:

* access the Internet and use the WWW and Internet email
* manipulate and manage files, folders and the file system
* produce and print simple documents and presentation materials
* advance to become a power user by further self-learning and exploring

The guide is available in several different formats, including OpenOffice, PDF, and HTML and accompanied by presentation slides intended for trainers.

The following post was published in the October issue of the Toronto STC chapter's newsletter, Communication Times.

A few years ago, structured authoring was the precinct of the military and aerospace industries or big corporations like IBM. But with the development of XML and the tools to support it, many technical writers are thinking about getting into a structured workflow, if they haven't done so already. Fortunately, there are now a couple of standard schemas and tool sets that we can use to get started, without having to develop everything from scratch, namely DocBook and DITA.

DocBook is the older of the two schemas, having originally been developed in SGML by O'Reilly & Associates in 1991, and now maintained by the DocBook Technical Committee of OASIS (Organization for Advancement of Structured Information Standards). It's pretty much a mature technology with a large and robust set of tools that support it, including FrameMaker. As you might guess from its name and history, DocBook is well suited to book and print publishing, and it's widely used for software documentation.

The DocBook DTDs, schemas, and specification are available from the docbook.org web site, which is the web site for DocBook 5.0: The Definitive Guide. You can also read the book online. The DocBook Project site on SourceForge maintains up-to-date stylesheets and tools related to DocBook. As with most subjects, there's a DocBook FAQ, which covers markup, tools, XSL stylesheets, and several other topic areas. DocBook is large and very complex, and it can be daunting a first glance. If you're new to it, a good place to start is the DocBook Primer. Local author Scott Nesbitt has several good introductory articles on his web site. The Software Documentation Weblog has created a handy two-page DocBook cheat sheet, with a list of the most important elements and their parameters.

Steve Whitlatch has built two DocBook projects, one using structured FrameMaker and the other using XSLT. He's put both of them up on his web site, along with commentary on the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. To get formatted output from a DocBook project, you'll need to work with XSL as well as XML, so you'll probably want to refer to DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide, by Bob Stayton; the complete text of the book is available online. Making your DocBook HTML/XML output not suck is a tutorial on how to improve the default HTML output of DocBook XML, which is serviceable but not very elegant, and it's also a good tutorial on CSS.

The other major structured authoring schema is DITA, or Darwin Information Typing Architecture. One of the key architects of DITA is IBM Toronto's Michael Priestly, who has been a frequent presenter to the Toronto STC. DITA is only a few years old, but is gaining wide acceptance for its flexibility and topic orientation — it's becoming an internal standard at IBM and Adobe uses it for their Creative Suite documentation. The Introduction to DITA paper and Michael Priestley's PowerPoint presentation are still among the best introductions to DITA. For more information, go to the DITA Cover Pages site, which contains a comprehensive list of articles and links to related technologies.

To use DITA, you'll need the schema, XSL transforms, and tools, all of which are available from the DITA Open Toolkit Project page on SourceForge. The Yahoo Groups dita-users group is a good source of news and support for DITA. Arbortext has put together a DITA FAQ; it's oriented towards users of Arbortext tools, but still a useful resource even if you're using something else. FrameMaker users will be glad to know that FrameMaker 7.2 now includes a sample DITA structured application.

Because of its topic-oriented architecture, DITA is particularly suited for use with content management systems. The Rockley Bulletin article "DITA: Is it the Standard of Choice for You" discuses this in more detail as does the DITA-Getting Started paper from the XTech 2005 conference.

I just finished reading Peter F. Hamilton's Pandora's Star. I don't reread books ofter - I just don't have the time - but Pandora's Star in reality is the first half of a long novel, and I just got the hard cover of the second half, Judas Unchained. I figured that I'd be lost if I started out reading the second book without reviewing the first, as it's not only a long book (almost 1000 pages), but has a very rich and complex plot. I enjoyed the book more the seond time around too - I was able to pick up on some of the details that I missed the first time around, and filter out some of the extraneous detail.

Pandora's Star is certainly one of the best science fiction novels I've read in a long time. It's not a literary masterpiece on the order of LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, and it's not as original as Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep (though it comes close in places). But it's about as perfect an example you'll ever find of entertaining, adventure SF, with a fair bit of solid speculation and some spectacular world-building thrown in for good measure. Hamilton is nothing if not cinematic, and I guarantee that you will never forget some of the key scenes in this book.

The second book, from the 50 pages or so I've read so far, takes off exactly where the first finished and continues on in the same fine fashion. I am curious about one thing - I bought the British edition, which is called Judas Unchained. The US/Canadian edition won't be out until February, and is called Judas Unleashed. I wonder if the British title sounded too kinky for US tastes?

The Amazon UK site, linked above, has several, generally glowing reviews of the book. One of them says: "Judas Unchained cements Hamilton's place as the most readable and enjoyable SF writer working in the field today." I agree completely.

Google has finally launched Google Print, which will eventually be a library of millions of books, all searchable. For now, full-text search is largely limited to older titles that are out of copyright, but you can browse the contents pages from many other books. A search on the word "London" brought up about 100 hits.

Google Print has been the subject of lawsuits by various authours' groups, who are under the mistaken impression that letting people search the text of their books and read small snippets of text will hurt their sales.

A team of Canadians is planning the world's largest telescope with a diameter of 30 metres. It would cost about $750 million and take 10 years to build. The telescope would likely be sited in Hawaii, Mexico, or Chile.

Interface designer, Greg Raiz, has a long and quite insightful post on how the Linux interface can be made better, not just better than it is now, but better than Windows. If you're interested in interface design and usability, this is worth reading.

It looks like some Sony CDs are using a particularly nasty form of copy protection that installs a rootkit on your PC. Basically, it's software that hides itself from the normal Windows operating system calls, so you can't view the files or even detect it's running. Not only does it hijack your CD driver, but it opens up a security hole that could let attackers take control of your PC without you knowing it.

This is seriously bad stuff and whoever at Sony authorized this should be sacked, at least. If this is the type of crap that music companies are up to, I'm damned if I'm going to buy any more CDs. I'd rather do without. And it's not going to stop pirates - the CD they tried to protect is available on file sharing networks.

Update: Here's a somewhat less technical article from The Register. This is the part that gets me really upset:

What makes Sony's CD digital media software particularly nasty is that using expert tools for removing the parasite risks leaving you with a Windows PC that's useless, and that requires a full reformat and reinstall.

Interest in DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) seems to be growing. Here are a couple of new DITA sites.

ditamap.com describes itself as a "gathering place for information about dita (xml). Content is a bit sparse yet, mostly just resource links, but it looks like it could be worth watching. Content Management Professionals has announced the formation of a DITA community. Again, content is sparse at this point, but with JoAnn Hackos, Kay Ethier, and Scott Abel involved, it should develop into something worthwhile.

I saw Ratdog last night at the Docks. This is the second time I've seen them, the first being at Massey Hall a couple of years ago. Musically, this was even better than the previous show. Ratdog were solid, tight, and powerful, and rocked like nobody's business. Highlights of the first set were the Help is on the Way > Slipknot opener, the Weather Report Suite closer, and pretty much everything in between, but especially the gorgeous version of Bird Song in the middle of the set, which had what may have been the best jam I've ever heard live by any version of the Dead or their followup bands.

It's really unfortunate that they had to play the Docks though. It's basically a converted warehouse, no seating, and had a late show time. So we ended up leaving after the first set, which was a major bummer. If they'd started on time and had a place to sit down, we might have stayed for another hour, but it was just getting too late for a work night. Guess I'll have to order the soundboard CD to hear the rest of the show.