Core Dump

"Customers buy products they can understand" is a quote from this article in the Chicago Tribune, which makes the case that good manuals make money for companies.

"Companies are beginning to see it as marketing," said Elizabeth Wangler, formerly of Wangler & Associates in Chicago, which worked with Fellowes on its instructions. "The manual is the last thing the customer is left with. It is a way to drive loyalty for the brand."

It's an encouraging article for technical writers. I will add a personal anecdote here to buttress the point of the article. I bought a DVD recorder this week, which turned out to be defective, so I have to return it. But the process of discovering that the recorder, and not my setup of it, was defective was needlessly complicated by the recorder's documentation, which was barely adequate and badly organized. I won't be asking for a new one; instead I'll get another model.

Here's Wired's take on the worst tech moments of 2005. Some of their choices are the Sony rootkit debacle, Apple suing bloggers, and Bush using the NSA's Echelon network to spy on Americans.

Scientific American has a list of the top science stories of 2005. Many of these didn't show up in the mainstream news media and the list covers many different areas of science, from cell biology to deep sky astronomy.

Here's a strong editorial column from the Miami Herald

One wonders if Osama bin Laden didn't win after all. He ruined the America that existed on 9/11. But he had help.

If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden's attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution -- and then expect the American people to congratulate him for it -- I would have presumed the girders of our very Republic had crumbled.

Had anyone said our president would invade a country and kill 30,000 of its people claiming a threat that never, in fact, existed, then admit he would have invaded even if he had known there was no threat -- and expect America to be pleased by this -- I would have thought our nation's sensibilities and honor had been eviscerated.

I've seen some pretty amazing contortionists (some of the Cirque du Soleil acrobats, for example), but this gymnastic display pretty much defines flexibility. It's hard to believe that this woman (or young girl, more likely) has any bones in her body.

Yes, I know Christmas is past, but I couldn't resist posting a link to this amazing display of animated Christmas lights, set to music (a song by the Trans Siberian Orchestra, a group I'm going to have to check out). Somebody had WAY to much free time on their hands!

The tagline for Science Toys You Can Make with Your Kids is " Make toys at home with common household materials, often in only a few minutes, that demonstrate fascinating scientific principles." This is a really neat site, and sure to keep both kids and parents occupied, and you can learn from it too. I particularly like the Film Can Cannon.

Here's a guide to running Linux under Windows, using a platform emulator called Qemu. You'll also need the ISO image file of a Linux live distribution-in other words, a bootable Linux. This looks like a good way of learning Linux without the hassle of setting up a partition and installing a version on your hard drive. I'm going to play around with this over the holidays and perhaps post more later. Of course it'll only be as stable as your version of Windows -- running Windows under Linux is probably a better idea in the long run.

The Guardian has published a long and thoughtful profile of Ursula LeGuin, which includes an interview in which she discusses Harry Potter and its effect on the fantasy genre. Her Earthsea series and novel The Left Hand of Darkness are high points of the genre; she's the only living speculative fiction author who has a realistic chance at a Nobel prize for literature (though I can think of a handful of others who deserve one).

The interview refers to the Earthsea series, which included a school for young wizards:

Her credit to JK Rowling for giving the "whole fantasy field a boost" is tinged with regret. "I didn't feel she ripped me off, as some people did," she says quietly, "though she could have been more gracious about her predecessors. My incredulity was at the critics who found the first book wonderfully original. She has many virtues, but originality isn't one of them. That hurt." Savoured by adults and children, the Earthsea quartet, including The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1973) and Tehanu (1990), has never been out of print, and was augmented in 2001 by Tales from Earthsea and the novel The Other Wind.

And I should add that the first two novels were butchered by the Science Fiction channel TV movie.

The early Earthsea books were loosely adapted as a TV miniseries for the US sci-fi channel last year, but it was "roundly booed and deserves to die a quiet death", she says. "Everybody was white except for one black man. It was a travesty." Her own earlier screenplay has languished ("they said it was the wrong moment for fantasy in Hollywood").

I'd love to see a movie of The Left Hand of Darkness, though there are perhaps only a couple of directors (Ang Lee, being one), who could be trusted to do it properly.

I'll be on holidays over Christmas. I'm not travelling anywhere, but I will be busy relaxing, so there probably won't be a lot of posts until after New Years.

The recent hurricanes and skyrocketing oil and gasoline prices helped to prove the existence of a new element. In early October 2005, a major research institution announced the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element has been named “Governmentium.”

Governmentium (Gv) has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called ‘morons’ which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called ‘peons.’ Since Gv has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Gv causes one reaction to take over four days to complete, when it would normally take less than a second!

Gv has a normal half-life of 4 years; it does not decay; but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming ‘isodopes.’ This characteristic of moron promotion leads most scientists to believe that Gv is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as ‘Critical Morass.’

When catalyzed with money, Gv becomes “Administratium’ (Am) - an element which radiates just as much energy as Gv, since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.

Brian Jones' Office XML Formats blog has some more information about Microsoft's Open XML format, which has been presented to the ECMA as a standard. This will be the format for the next release of Office. It's a big standard too - the post shows a picture of it being handed over in two large binders.

It used to be said that the camera doesn't lie (though a good darkroom technician might not agree). But now, with tools like Photoshop, you really can't trust that what you see in a picture bears any relation at all to reality. This site loads an interactive Flash tutorial that shows what was done to a cover photograph of a model. If you have teenage girls who think that they don't look as good as the women they see in magazines, show them this.

VFXWorld is a site devoted to movie special effects. I used to have a subscription to Cinefantastique (which I had to drop because it was too expensive), but this is the next best thing. For current movies, there's articles on Narnia and King Kong. Note that you will have to register to view the articles, but it's free, and worth it.

Researchers are finding evidence that polar bears are drowning in increasing numbers as summer ice recedes and they have to travel farther to get to the ice shelf.

The researchers were startled to find bears having to swim up to 60 miles across open sea to find food. They are being forced into the long voyages because the ice floes from which they feed are melting, becoming smaller and drifting farther apart.

Although polar bears are strong swimmers, they are adapted for swimming close to the shore. Their sea journeys leave them them vulnerable to exhaustion, hypothermia or being swamped by waves.

Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, now has a blog.

If you think Saddam was bad news, then check out the new Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who's been getting quite a bit of press because of his recent statements about Israel and the Holocaust.

So a Holocaust-denying, virulently anti-Semitic, aspiring genocidist, on the verge of acquiring weapons of the apocalypse, believes that the end is not only near but nearer than the next American presidential election. (Pity the Democrats. They cannot catch a break.) This kind of man would have, to put it gently, less inhibition about starting Armageddon than a normal person. Indeed, with millennial bliss pending, he would have positive incentive to, as they say in Jewish eschatology, hasten the end.

To be sure, there are such madmen among the other monotheisms. The Temple Mount Faithful in Israel would like the al-Aqsa mosque on Jerusalem's Temple Mount destroyed to make way for the third Jewish Temple and the messianic era. The difference with Iran, however, is that there are all of about 50 of these nuts in Israel, and none of them is president.

The program for the 2006 Writers UA conference has been announced. It's being held April 9-12 in Palm Springs, CA. The program looks very good, and I'm going to try to get permission to attend, though I don't hold out much hope.

The Software Documentation Weblog has links to an article about technical authoring using the Eclipse development platform, along with some related links. Warning: serious geek content!

I just finished reading Steve Stirling's The Protector's War, which is a sequel to Dies the Fire, in which "alien space bats" manage to bolix up physics to the point where electrity, gun powder, and nuclear reactions stop working, and most of humanity dies in "the Change". This is very much a middle novel of a trilogy - events are set in motion that will obviously result in a final battle between the forces of good and evil in the third book.

I didn't enjoy this one as much as Dies the Fire. The main problem was the split chronology that he used to tell the two main storylines. It wasn't just the jumping back and forth - I can handle that - and I could handle the time disparity that was necessary to bring the threads together, but about halfway through the book I gave up trying to reconile the two month gap between chapters and just read the book in chronological order (the chapters are dated, thank god). The other was what someone on the Usenet called "Wiccan overload" - for the sake of the story, I'll accept that one of the surviving communities is Wiccan, but parts of the book read like a Wiccan tract. It really started to get in the way of the story for me.

But I'll no doubt buy the third book anyway.

Here's a link to the Science Fiction Weekly review of the book.

Hackers in Peru and Chile are attacking government web sites in each others' countries as a political dispute moves into cyberspace. I've recently seen reports that Chinese hackers have been attacking US government and military networks. Expect to see more of this as time goes by.

The program details for the DITA 2006 Conference have been announced. The conference will be held March 23-25 in Raleigh, North Carolina. If I was doing structured authoring I'd want to attend this; as it is, it looks really interesting.

Virgin Galactic will spend $225,000,000 to build a private space port on the edge of the White Sands missile range in New Mexico. They hope to begin sub-orbital flights in 2008 or 2009. If I ever win the 6/49 ....

Don Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog has a list of the best Web software of 2005. There's some obvious choices here (del.icio.us, Flickr) but quite a few others that I haven't looked at or even heard of. My favourite Web application, Bloglines, isn't listed. It's pretty clear that Web applications and services are going to be the Next Big Thing. (Thanks to Scott Nesbitt for finding this one.)

One of the things that makes Firefox so useful is its extensibility -- if the core browser doesn't have a useful feature, somebody, somewhere has probably written an extension to add it. Wired has an article that describes some of the more useful extensions for Firefox.

It'a not out here for a while yet, but here's a review of Peter Jackson's King Kong, written by SF author John Shirley.

Andrew Brown, in the Guardian, has some interesting comments about open source software, specifically OpenOffice.org.

More than 50,000 bugs have been reported. And how many have been fixed by open source's uniquely efficient processes? According to the (public) bugs database, at last count, there were more than 6,000 unfixed bugs, and more than 5,000 feature requests. While the number of bugs discovered seems to rise with the number of users, the number of fixes doesn't, and the number of fixers certainly doesn't. Only about 500 people have signed the legalese that would enable them to submit code to the project; since you need to do this even to make changes to the website, that will translate to far fewer than 500 volunteers submitting real code. A reasonable guess would be 50, or even five.

Basically, his point is that a project the size of OpenOffice.org may be too large for the open source model to work, without support from professional (commerical) developers, in this case Sun. He may be right - I can't imagine any amateur developer being able to figure out much of the source code in something as large and complex as OpenOffice.org, though the model certainly works well for smaller projects.

According to CNN, trader at a Japanese brokerage made a very expensive typo that cost his firm at least $224,000,000. In looking at the article in more detail, it looks more like an order entry error than a straight typo - he entered the price in the number of shares field and the number of shares in the price field. Sounds like a badly designed data entry system to me, but it's still a pretty expensive slip of the fingers.

MikeKelly's Weblog has some preliminary screen shots of the new help viewer that will be part of Microsoft's Office 12. It reminds me of the old Windows Help more than current versions of HTML Help - the default appears to be a single pane, though a TOC is available in a secondary window. It's not clear if there's an indexing feature - it doesn't appear in the screen shots, but that doesn't mean it's not there.

Jensen Harris' Office User Interface blog has announced that Microsoft will be introducing several new text fonts for the next release of Office and Windows. These fonts have been optimized for ClearType and for both print and online viewing. Perhaps the most interesting is Consolas, which is a monospaced font intended for code listings -- and it actually looks good. There are new serif and sans serif fonts as well. All of them look good, as far as I can see from the small samples shown. It'll be interesting to see how they appear on a piece of paper.

Blast/Radius seem to be moving fairly aggressively to support DITA in their XMetal authoring tool. Last week, I participated in a webinar in which they demonstrated authoring in DITA, but with an interesting twist. They took an unstructured FrameMaker document, converted it to a structured FrameMaker document, then imported it into XMetal, and then exported it back into FrameMaker to produce a nicely formatted, printable document which was fully structured and maintained all of the IDs and other structured information that they'd added in XMetal.

The twist was a new plug-in for FrameMaker, developed by Mekon, which will become part of the DITA Open Toolkit early next year. The plug-in will allow you to take DITA content from Xmetal and export it to FrameMaker to get a document that's perfectly formatted for print, and maintains all of FrameMaker's indexing and conditional text functionality. (Yes, I know you can output PDF from XML via XSL-FO, but FrameMaker has much better output for print).

According to an email posted by Mark Poston of Mekon to the DITA-users mailing list (quoted with permission)

The adapter that we are working on provides a direct import of XML into
FrameMaker. This means that the id/idref mechanism for cross referencing
is used (not paragraph styles as required in unstructured FM). In
addition, we are using FM hyperlinks to support other forms of cross
referencing.

The backward compatibility with existing FrameMaker templates is an
important feature. The Element Definition Documents (EDD) that will be
provided with the toolkit will be based on referencing to styles in a
template. At its simplest, this will allow users to modify to their own
needs in two ways:

Firstly, they could simply rename their existing styles to match those
in the supplied template.

Secondly, users who have already got experience with the development of
EDDs will be able to make direct changes to this and continue to use the
styles they have. For those with less experience, the EDD will fairly
easily to follow "by example".

The context rules within the EDD are class-based. This means that users
who have adopted a particular specialisation can easily build support into the EDD for them.

I have to say that this looked pretty impressive. You could have all of the benefits of authoring in a full XML/DITA environment and still get production quality printed output from FrameMaker.

Semantic, Structured Authoring is a good overview of what structured authoring is and some of the issues involved in implementing it. It's a good article to show non-technical writers when they want to know why you want to use XML.

Thinking Outside the Box Office is an interesting interview with director Steven Soderbergh in Wired. His next movie, Bubble, will be released simultaneously at theatres and on DVD and he talks about the reasons why in the interview.

Name any big-title movie that's come out in the last four years. It has been available in all formats on the day of release. It's called piracy. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, Ocean's Eleven, and Ocean's Twelve - I saw them on Canal Street on opening day. Simultaneous release is already here. We're just trying to gain control over it.

I'm with him on this one. When a movie comes out, I pretty much know whether I want to see it at a theatre or watch it on DVD, or both. Making me wait six months to get the DVD really has no effect at all on whether I go the the theatre to see the movie.

BBC News has an article listing the top 10 computer disasters of 2005. The list was compiled by OnTrack, a company that does data recovery.

One incident involved a dog that used a USB flash drive as a chew toy and almost ate all its owner's data. Also featured is a PC enthusiast who turned his hard drive into a box of spare parts when he tried to recover data himself. But top of the list is an old laptop containing key company data that was found filled with cockroach corpses.

Yikes. And I thought I had problems because Word occasionally eats my data.

The Center for Information-Development Management newsletter has just published three articles about DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture). Two are in the December 2005 issue and one is in its November 2005 issue. The most interesting of the three articles is "Is DITA Going to Tip", by Joann Hackos, in which she looks at the recent success of DITA and compares it to SGML, which never really gained wide acceptance in the way that DITA seems to be doing.

Vintage Aircraft Images (SAC, TAC, AAC) is a gallery of miltary aircraft images from the Cold War era. There's another page of pictures of more current aircraft.

SearchEngineWatch has posted an article about The Online Books Page, which is a searchable database of about 25,000 free, public domain e-books. Of course, many of these are older books or out-of-print, but most of the classics are here, and a lot of newer books that the authors have put in the public domain.

PBS' excellent program Frontline recently broadcast a program called The Storm, looking at what happenned when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and analysing what went wrong with the lack of preparation and the relief efforts. I haven't watched this yet, but I will because it's available online from the Frontline web site, along with a lot of other supporting material. Way to go, PBS!

There's an interesting article on SlashDot about the future of newspapers. Newspaper circulation has been declining over the last few years. The Internet may be part the reason - I now spend more time reading news online than I do reading the newspaper, and I've even considered cancelling my subscription to the Toronto Star or changing it to a weekend only subscription. Another reason may be changing demographics - younger people don't read as much as they used to and they tend to read more online. So what are newspapers to do if they want to survive.

The challenge for local newspapers that beef up their Web editions at the expense of their paper versions won't be to keep (or add) readers, but to teach advertisers that the Web, not paper, is the best way to reach their most lucrative potential customers.

Recent studies indicate that the warm water currents that help to provide Europe's moderate climate are weakening. This could usher in a mini ice age, similar to what Europe suffered a few hundred years ago (remember the paintings of skaters on the Dutch canals). Paradoxically, a cooler climate in Europe and the northeast U.S. is one of the predicted consequences of global warming.

The North Atlantic is dominated by the Gulf Stream – currents that bring warm water north from the tropics. At around 40° north – the latitude of Portugal and New York – the current divides. Some water heads southwards in a surface current known as the subtropical gyre, while the rest continues north, leading to warming winds that raise European temperatures by 5°C to 10°C.

But when Bryden’s team measured north-south heat flow last year, using a set of instruments strung across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to the Bahamas, they found that the division of the waters appeared to have changed since previous surveys in 1957, 1981 and 1992. From the amount of water in the subtropical gyre and the flow southwards at depth, they calculate that the quantity of warm water flowing north had fallen by around 30%.