Core Dump

Lars Triehoff's excellent Software Documentation Weblog notes some recent software releases, including updates to the Syntext Serna and XML Mind editors, and a set of stylesheets to convert DocBook to the OpenDocument format used OpenOffice.org.

Emerald City is a Hugo-award-winning science fiction fanzine that's published online. Over the last couple of years I've found their reviews to be insightful and balanced and I now use them as one of my main sources for checking out new books. They've just published their review of 2005, including short fiction, horror, film, and conventions. If you're into science fiction or fantasy, don't miss this.

Authors Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have been expanding Frank Herbert's Dune series, using both their own imaginations and notes and outlines left behind by Frank Herbert. I read the first trilogy of books they did (House Atriedes, House Harkonnen, and House Corrino) and enjoyed them, but found the next ones pretty much unreadable. Now their working on what will be the final books in the series, based on an outline of Frank Herbert's for what would have been his 7th Dune novel. They've put up a blog in which they discuss the books (Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune), which will be one long novel published as two books. If you like Dune, you'll want to check this out.

TechSmith have released SnagIt 8, a major new release of the best screen capture program. This adds major new features to the editor part of the program, including the ability to easily create hotspots on images. They've also changed the interface (again), something I'm not sure is an improvement. But the improvements to the editor will make this one a must for me and a lot of other writers. I don't think there are many changes to the basic screen capture functionality, which is already about as good as it gets.

A leading US climate expert says NASA tried to silence him when he spoke out saying that more needed to be done to curb emissions of greenhouse gases.

The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth "a different planet."

The administration's policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.
After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be "dire consequences" if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.

Tomorrow will be the seventh anniversary of the Challenger disaster, which killed seven astronauts on January 28th, 1986. I still remember that day quite vividly. James Oberg has written an article called 7 myths about the Challenger disaster, in which he debunks seven ideas about the disaster that have become part of the common folklore, and which are wrong.

By now, many (if not most) technical writers are convinced that structured authoring and XML represent the wave of the future for technical communication. But your manager, or your manager's manager, may not be so easy to convince. XML Solves Tech Publishing Problems, from the South African STC, is a good summary of why XML makes sense for technical communication.

By employing XML and the practices outlined in this document, publication departments can realize significant cost reductions; without losing team members or sacrificing on improvements in quality and performance. However, before making the change one must first evaluate the technology to determine whether or not XML is a suitable solution. Do you have a need for the objectives we have discussed? If not, then XML is very likely not a solution for you. The cost incurred in moving to such a system could not be justified. However, just because you could benefit from a few of these benefits also does not justify a move without a solid business case.

Brilliant Screen Entertainment is trying to garner enough fan support to persuade FOX to let them produce a second season of the TV series, Firefly. I'd love to see it happen -- I bought the DVD set of the first season before Christmas and the whole family has been enjoying it immensely. The site has a short survey that you are requested to fill out if you're interested.

Integrating DITA at Idiom Technologies consists of a long interview with the senior technical writer at Idion Technologies "about the enterprise globalization software provider's venture into the world of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)". It's a very interesting article, because it's very much from the point of view of the writer in the trenches, who had to actually do the implementation. It gives a good idea of the benefits and some of the limitations of the technology as it curently stands.

When I joined Idiom, the DITA decision had already been made. Having already authored in XML at SPSS, it was easy to create XML documents. I don't find working in XML much slower than working in unstructured or structured FrameMaker, but the reusability and ongoing globalization benefits are significant.

Putting myself in the shoes of someone who hasn't used XML at all, I think the quickest way to get up and running is to have someone with XML experience help you get up and running and be available for follow-up questions.

The most difficult stage is getting the environment set up. When it is set up, the XML authoring tools you use won't let you make mistakes (unless you turn off validation).

"Appeals Court", a science fiction story by Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross, is available online at the Infinite Matrix site. This is a sequel to the story, "Jury Service", which is also available online. This is leading edge, gonzo SF at it's best, and you can't beat the price. This is a small sample:

Huw settles himself among the soup of heated glass beads and bacteria and tries not to think of a trillion microorganisms gnawing away at his dried skin and sweat.

"Bastard scum bastard," he mumbles at the battered teapot — a one-time host for a cultural guidance iffrit to the People's Magical Libyan Jamahiriya, and now evidently hacked by Ade and his international cadre of merry pranksters. "Why South Carolina? G'wan, you. Why there, of all places?"

He isn't expecting a reply, but the teapot crackles for a moment then a translucent holo of Ade appears in the air above it, wearing a belly-dancer's outfit and a sheepish expression. "Yer wot? Ah, sorry mate. Feckin' trade union iffrit's trying to make an alpha buffer attack on my sprites." The image flickers then solidifies, this time wearing a bush jacket and a pith helmet. "Like, why South Carolina? To break the embargo, Huw. Ever since the snake-handlers crawled outta the swamps and figured the Rapture had been and gone and left 'em behind they've been waiting for a chance at salvation, so I figured I'd give them you." Ade's likeness grins wickedly as tiny red horns sprout from his forehead. "You and the backchannel to the ambassador from the Cloud. They want to meet God so bad I figured you'd maybe like to help the natives along."

Lovely DITA, Docbook fades? is a blog post by Edd Dumbill in which he compares DocBook and DITA. I find it interesting that he thinks that there's not much going on with DITA in the open source community, when there seems to be quite a bit of development going on with people trying to make FrameMaker a suitable DITA publishing platform. (Although a lot of what's going on isn't really open source, as defined by the Sourceforge crowd, though it might result in free tools).

Time Machine Cuba is an essay by William Gibson about his discovery of history and science fiction, and how the Cuban missile crisis affected both.

One afternoon, though, I noted that workmen had arrived, and that some sort of renovation was being prepared for. Squeezing in past a sheet of plywood, I explored a series of cold, empty rooms. One of these (my heart beat faster) contained a damp old trunk. Having worked up the nerve to open it, I found only a few faded lithographs (as I now imagine they were) of airplanes. But these were airplanes unlike any I had seen, and they held my attention in a peculiar way. They were old, clearly of some other era, but exciting, and somehow frightening as well. Squatting there, staring at them, I felt as though some enormous wedge of information was being driven into my head. Various bits and pieces of half-knowledge were coming together, forming some new and utterly unexpected whole. I already knew, as if by osmosis, that there had been a war, though I didn't know when, or with whom. I had been raised, so far, by adults who sometimes spoke of "the war" as some previous time or era or world, but I had somehow never associated that with other, more vague ideas of some past and general conflict. I had read comic books about war, and played with military toys, but had never considered how those might fit into some way the world had actually been.

Wired has an article about the threat posed to the Internet and phone infrastructure by people who dig up buried cable. Usually this happens accidentally (as I know all too well, having once wiped out my neighbourhood phone service digging a post hole for a fence), but it could also be a terrorist threat.

Space junk, piece of orbital debris left over from launches and obsolete satellites, is becoming more of a problem. A recent study suggests that the number of pieces of debris will increase to critical levels by 2055, when the number of pieces created by collisions will be more than the number of pieces falling to Earth.

Seed Magazine, one of the best science magazines around, has launched a series of science blogs. They are:

• Adventures in Ethics and Science
• Aetiology
• Afarensis
• Cognitive Daily
• Deltoid
• Dispatches from the Culture Wars
• Evolgen
• Gene Expression
• The Intersection
• Living the Scientific Life
• No Se Nada Commentary
• Pharyngula
• Stranger Fruit
• Uncertain Principles

These should be worth following.

Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore has spoken out against George Bush and his administration's unprecedented expansion of the power of the exectutive branch of the U.S. government. This isn't a partisan political polemic - it's a well-reasoned, thorough, and elequent condemnation of the policies of the Bush administration.

The President has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap individuals in foreign countries and deliver them for imprisonment and interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes in nations that are infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for torture.

Some of our traditional allies have been shocked by these new practices on the part of our nation. The British Ambassador to Uzbekistan - one of those nations with the worst reputations for torture in its prisons - registered a complaint to his home office about the senselessness and cruelty of the new U.S. practice: "This material is useless - we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful."

Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is "yes" then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop, imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?

The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the Executive Branch's claims of these previously unrecognized powers: "If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution."

The fact that our normal safeguards have thus far failed to contain this unprecedented expansion of executive power is deeply troubling. This failure is due in part to the fact that the Executive Branch has followed a determined strategy of obfuscating, delaying, withholding information, appearing to yield but then refusing to do so and dissembling in order to frustrate the efforts of the legislative and judicial branches to restore our constitutional balance.

It's a long speech, but worth reading.

Locus magazine, the news magazine of the science fiction field, has put together a gallery of most of the science fiction magazine and book covers for 2005. The cover thumbnails are linked either to summaries in Locus (for the magazines) or to Amazon (for the books). I wish the pictures were a bit bigger, but it's still a nice browse.

SF author and blogger extraordinaire, Cory Docotorow, is beginning to podcast a new science fiction story, Human Readable.

Ars Technica has published what is probably the first full review of the new Intel-based iMacs. They look like nice machines, though not as fast as Jobs' keynote speach made them out to be. And no, they don't run Windows .... yet.

I posted last week about a deaf writer who went on a quest to improve the sound of his cochlear implant so he could listen to music. This PBS site has an interactive control that lets you hear what a cochlear implant would actually sound like.

I've been thinking about setting up Linux on my PC for a while, but have never gotten around to it. But now I've started, slowly.

I posted here last month about running Ubuntu under Qemu. I did try that and it does work, but it's very slow. Too slow to be usable in practice. It might work better if I had more RAM and a faster PC. Maybe I'll play around with it when and if I upgrade my PC.

I then tried running live CDs of Linux distributions, specifically Knoppix 4 and Ubuntu 5.1, on my wife's laptop, which is a 4-year-old Dell Celeron 700 with 128 MB of RAM running Windows ME (probably the worst version of Windows that MS has releaaed). It's now pretty much useless for serious work. Ubuntu wouldn't load - it got to a graphical desktop background and never past that point. Knoppix 4.0.2 boots quickly and runs well, with full Internet access. Even on an old, slow machine, Knoppix is snappy, at least for web browsing. Loading large applications, like OpenOffice.org, is painfully slow due to the limited RAM.

Both Ubuntu and Knoppix run fine on my PC, a 4 year-old 1.7 GHz P4. Out of the two, I prefer Knoppix, which loads much quicker than Ubuntu. I couldn't find the house network or my PC's drives under Knoppix though - they may be there, but I coudn't figure out how to access them. MP3s played, although I was getting a weird clicking, gurgling sound when for system actions, like opening and closing windows, and I couldn't find out how to turn it off or what was causing it.

So I decided to install a full distribution on my system, Xandros 3 Open Cirulation Edition (OCE), which has the reputation of being the best "desktop" Linux for Windows users. I freed up some space on one of my drives and ran though the installation, which was straightforward and actually easier than installing Windows. When done, I had a dual-boot system, with Windows and Xandros 3.

The Xandrox desktop interface is clean, fast, and easy to use. My PC can see the Internet and the other PCs on my Windows house network. It doesn't work the other way around though - my wife couldn't use my printer while I was booted into XANDROS, though I was able to print from it on my PC. I could see a printer installed on her machine over the network, but the printer setup dialog didn't show it (a Canon) in the list of available printers. I need to find a PPD file for it, which shouldn't be a big issue.

Xandros installed OpenOffice.org 1.1. I'll need to update that to version 2, and also update Firefox and Thunderbird to the recently released version 1.5. They aren't showing up in the Xandros Network installer, which means I need to figure out how to do it manually. It'd also be nice to set it up so that Firefox and Thunderbird used the same profile under Windows and Xandros. I found an article that suggests that this is possible, but might be a bit fussy to set up.

The one big issue I have is that sound isn't working. When I try to play an MP3, I get a message saying to check my sound card configuration. So far, all I've been able to find out is that my Soundblaster Audigy needs something called ALSS (Advanced Linus Sound System) (or something like that, I could be wrong on the exact name), which is installed. So I'm going to have to do some digging to find out what's going on - I was able to play MP3s in Knoppix. (Later: I did find an article on the Xandros knowledgebase with a possible fix that'll I'll try after I get home.)

I'll post periodic updates here as time goes by on my progress with Linux.

Activewin.com has published the most detailed look I've seen yet of the forthcoming Office 12. I have to say, based on what I've read so far, that I like the direction Microsoft has gone with the interface. Whether the underpinings will be as buggy as ever (at least in Word) remains to be seen.

John Dvorak has published a couple of articles about the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), that cover some areas I haven't seen mentioned much in the more general press coverage of the last week. One article is completely about Microsoft, including some interesting tidbits about Vista; the other article is about what wasn't at CES.

Nikon has announced that the company will no longer manufacture 35mm film cameras, instead concentrating on the digital format. They will continue to manufacture their professional F6 camera.

This is truly the end of an era for film cameras-Nikon has long been regarded as one of the top brands (along with Leica and Canon) by both professional and amateur photographers.

On a related note, a friend showed me some pictures he'd taken in Nova Scotia with his new Minolta digital camera. I'm not sure of the model, but it's 5 megapixel with a 12x zoon - a very slick little unit. The picture quality blew me away - the colours were rich and saturated and there was lots of contrast and detail. They were fully the equal of what I'd expect from a 35mm film camera in the same price range ($600). I suppose the real test would be to look at an 8 x 10 print, but based on screen images I looked at, at 8 x 10 you wouldn't be able to tell the pictures weren't taken with a 35mm camera.

It appears that Parkdale MP Sam Bulte, whose campaign is largely funded by the Hollywood/entertainment conglomerate, has a thing or two against "users". You can find out more about her campaign in this BoingBoing post.

Scientists have assembled the highest-resolution panoramic picture of the Orion nebula, using over 60 Hubble Space Telescope images. This is a stunning, beautiful picture. If it doesn't make your jaw drop in awe, it's time to reboot yourself. The version of the image I linked to is a zoomable viewer-it's hard to believe the detail in this image when it's fully zoomed.

This is one of the more fascinating articles I've read in a while. A deaf technical writer from Silicon Valley goes on a quest to improve the sound quality of his cochlear implant so he can listen to music again.

CSS Layout Techniques: for Fun and Profit, is a good introduction to doing table-less, multi-column web page layouts using CSS. I'm going to look at using some of this when I redo my site, which is well overdue for an update.

The Mythbusters is one of my favourite TV shows. In this article, Jamie and Adam answer questions posted to them by the readers of Slashdot.

Brian Jones' Office XML Formats blog has an interesting post about custom XML formats and Office 12. Perhaps the most interesting part is the discussion of new, custom controls that allow users to enter data, which keeping the rest of the document protected. This looks similar to the existing form field controls in Word, but much more flexible and easier to work with.

These new controls, and the new "grouping" functionality make it really easy to design a template where you have some structured islands of information you want the user to fill out. Each control has it's own independent settings as to whether it's editable and whether or not it can be deleted. You can also specify placeholder text to be displayed when the contents of the control is empty.

If you are building a solution, the controls are also really helpful because they can be given unique names that you can use to easily address them in the Object Model. That also makes it really easy to get at them in the file format, since each control will be marked with XML structure. The part that I find most exciting about the controls though, is that you can map these controls to XML nodes in your own schema as we saw in this example.

I could use this functionality right now in several places here.

Fontblog has a proposal for a new punctuation mark - the irony mark. I agree with the author that this is badly needed. It's usually easy to pick up irony in spoken conversation, where you have verbal and body language cues, but it's harder in print.

It looks like Sony has introduced what might be the first, really practical e-book reader. It has a 6" e-paper screen, which means text at close to laser-printer resolution, and unlike Sony's earlier attempt at this market, it will let you upload your own material to it, and will even grab RSS feeds. The only real problem I can see with it is that it's way too expensive - I'd pay $100 fot it, but not $400.

HTML has changed a lot over the years, and the W3C has plans for more changes. The Future of HTML examines some of the changes we might see over the next few years.

n this two-part series, Edd Dumbill examines the various ways forward for HTML that Web authors, browser developers, and standards bodies propose. This series covers the incremental approach embodied by the WHATWG specifications and the radical cleanup of XHTML proposed by the W3C. Additionally, the author gives an overview of the W3C's new Rich Client Activity. Here in Part 1, Edd focuses primarily on two specifications being developed by WHATWG: Web Applications 1.0 (HTML5) and Web Forms 2.0.

DocBook Roundtripping is a web site that has XSL stylesheets that let you transform DocBook to WordML and back again. Note that not all DocBook elements are supported. You can also convert to and from Apple Pages format. Thanks to Software Documentation Weblog for the link.

Usable Help have updated their gallery of onscreen help, which is a gallery of screen shots from over 300 different help systems. If you're looking for ideas, or just want to see how other people do help, this is a good resource.

Today is the 2nd anniversary of the landing of the Mars rover, Spirit. Both it and its sister rover, Opportunity, are still going strong. Not bad, considering the rover's design life was 90 days, and real optomists on the project team thought they might go for 180 days. This New York Times article has a good overview of the project and the current state of the rovers.

This isn't really a year-end review list, but a list compiled by New Scientist of 13 things that don't make sense in the light of our current scientific understanding - things like the homeopathic effect, dark matter, and cold fusion. Fascinating reading.

Eirik Solheim has created a time-lapse video of one year looking out his window in Norway, from winter's bleakness, through spring, summer, fall, and back into winter. It's a pleasant reminder that the white desert outside right now will be green and blooming in six months.