Core Dump

Neil Young's new album, Living with War is now streaming from his web site. I've listened to most of it and like it a lot. It's lound, anthemic, hard guitar rock - quite a departure from Prairie Wind (which I also like).

From Fox News (of all organizations!):

Neil Young’s new album, "Living with War," is an incendiary, moving, totally American document of peaceful protest that is going to make a lot of people crazy one way or another.

Young's record company seems to be getting clued into to 21st century sales techniques too - as well as starting off by streaming the album, it'll be offered for sale on iTunes before the physical CD hits the stores.

PC World has an article on the current state of the art in PC technical support jobs and why it's so bad. ($7 per hour for entry level jobs with 2 weeks training is part of the problem). The comments about the artic on Digg are equally interesting.

This year will be the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt's birth. Of course the Dutch are planning all sorts of exhibitions and special events, and they've put together a very nice web site as well. My only complaint is that they could have given us larger pictures - it's pretty hard to appreciate one of his paintings in a 160 x 160 thumbnail.

Computer columnist Robert Cringley's column this week is especially interesting -- he posits that Apple should buy Adobe. It makes sense in a lot of respects, and hey, you'se Mac mavens might get your FrameMaker back.

The SciFi Channel has announced that they will produce a new Battlestar Galactica series, to be called Caprica. It's a prequel to the current series, set about 50 years before Ba ttlestar Galactica and will show how the Cylons were developed. Good news for SF fans, especially if it's anywhere near as good as the current series.

I just picked up the new Springsteen CD/DVD, "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger
Sessions". It's a collection of traditional songs (We Shall Overcome, Oh
Mary Don't You Weep, John Henry) done in a gospel/traditional/folk manner.
It's very nice stuff - I've listened to it twice so far and I'm still enjoying. I'm sure it'd be a gas live, even more than the usual Springsteen show (which is always worth seeing).

It's a dual disk - one side CD/one side DVD with about 30 minutes of material. HMV had it on sale for 14.99, which is less than what Amazon was selling it for. Given that you get 90 minutes of music between the CD and DVD, it's a great deal.

I've seen two reviews of it so far. Now Magazine panned it. Eye Magazine gave it five stars. I'm with Eye on this one - it's the best Springsteen CD since Darkness on the Edge of Town.

The Village Voice has a rather interesting article about some of the unintended side effects of the proliferation of camera phones and digital cameras - one being web sites put up by women to expose men who expose themselves.

Because Holla Back's mission is to fight street harassment—by photographing catcallers and posting pictures on its site—we are to assume the latter. Some other photos are accompanied by detailed accounts of offensive overtures, but here, a woman identified as "Shana" simply wrote, "Right out my third story window . . . this is SO annoying." Without much to go on, viewers must decide what's happening. As Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) points out, sites like Holla Back may open a door to misuse or defamation.

Internet and privacy experts are not surprised at the emergence of cyber-vigilantes like Holla Back. "Any human being with access to the Internet can pub lish for free an image or text and have it accessed by anybody, anywhere in the world," notes John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law. "But public awareness of the effect of that on your privacy rights hasn't caught up with the fact of the technology and the way people now use it."

Some readers of this blog may be familiar with Quadralay's FinalDraft, an online reviewing tool. I had thought that FinalDraft was the only tool of its kind, but it seems I was mistaken. I recently saw an eWeek review of PleaseReview, and the review mentions two other tools, Workshare and NextPage (though oddly, not FinalDraft). All of these tools work with Word files. The eWeek review is quite favourable:

PleaseReview (www.kcentrix.com) simplifies collaboration on Microsoft Word documents by letting groups work on a document through the Web browser and avoiding Word's cumbersome Track Changes capability. The application's offline client and good workflow make it a flexible solution for a broad range of companies. In addition, PleaseReview lets companies collaborate on PDF documents, PowerPoint presentations and image files.

If you need a tool to review FrameMaker files online, Quadralay's FinalDraft or Acrobat's comment features are probably your best bet.

Tor books employee Anna Louise has written a fascinating article on the economics of fiction publishing - how a publisher decides how to publish and market at book and what can affect that book's sales. Tor is a major publisher of mass-market paperbacks, including a large science fiction line. I used to work for a small Canadian publisher, James Lorimer & Company, and it's interesting to see the similarities and differences.

The average mass market paperback -- average -- sells one in three copies. Crichton is an Idiot gets one good review (Romantic Times BookClub Magazine says, "Aeryn Sun is up and coming -- check this one out for lots of hot sex and alpha-hero snarling.") and one bad review (Booklist says, "This book has no structure, no character development, and the romance is actually the two main characters beating each other up and then having violent sex, leaving nothing to the reader's imagination.")

Out of 25,400, Crichton is an Idiot sells 8,400.

On the initial profitability and liability statement, the excited, committed editor theorized it would print at least 50,000 and sell at least 30,000, and paid the author an advance of $12,500. She didn't want to go all the way up to $16,000, just in case she was slightly off the mark -- and normally a first time author would get something like $5,000 (just in case! and also leaving room to grow!), but this was out with four other houses, and the agent had a $10,000 offer from NAL, and, damn it all, the editor really wanted it, so her publisher let her pay an exorbitant amount.

Oops.

H. Beam Piper was a science fiction writer who died by his own hand in the 1960s. He'd probably be a lot better known had he lived longer -- his best books, like the Paratime Patrol series, the Fuzzy series, and Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen still have a solid fan following. One of the highlights of Torcon 3 a couple of years ago was finding a copy of his novel Space Viking, a book that I'd read when it was serialized in Analog almost 40 years ago and still remember fondly (and yes, it held up quite well).

Piper left behind fairly extensive notes and at least one novel (Great Kings War) has been written from them, and there may be others. You can find out more about his books at Hostigos.com, (Hostigos being a kingdom in Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen). It's put together by John F. Carr, who wrote one of the sequels to Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen and is working on a biography.

I found the design of the site rather irritating (the faux paper pages don't scale properly in Firefox), but it's worth it to get to The Kalvan Story, a 50-page PDF that contains much of Piper's notes and working material for the Kalvan saga. This is a real treat and not to be missed by any fan of Pipers books. And if you haven't read any of them, find one (several are still in print), and worth searching for.

Here's another web application - an Internet clipboard.

With cl1p.net you can copy and paste between computers.

Just enter in any URL that starts with http://cl1p.net (example: http://cl1p.net/mistihead/) and post. Then from any other computer enter the same URL and copy.

You can use it for text or file uploads, with a 2 MB limit.

Here's a Neil Young interview from ShowTime where he talks about his new album, Life in Wartime and his song Impeach Bush.

MicroType have updated their FrameMaker Annoyances, Bugs, and Issues list and their FrameMaker FAQ. The bug list is mostly a collection of fixed bugs from the various Adobe patches. The FAQ should be more useful though, as it's a large collection of items culled from the Adobe knowledge base and various other places.

At the Content Management Strategies conference a couple of weeks ago, I attended a presentation by a couple of writers from RIM who had just introduced a content management system for their technical publications group. As part of the discovery process, they put together a long list of questions to give vendors as part of the RFP (request for proposal).

The questions are now available for downloading from the DITA knowledge base at xml.org. If you're planning on implementing a content management system, or even soemthing simpler like document management, take a look at this -- the list is very complete and well thought out.

I noted here last week that April 12 was the 45th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's pioneering space flight. In the sci.space.policy newsgroup, Jim Oberg has posted some interesting remarks about Gagarin's flight. I'd heard a bit about this before - that they'd modified the location of the Baikonur cosmodrome in there official record claim, but Oberg provides a lot of detail (which comes in an excerpt from his book, Star-Crossed Orbits).

And if you want to read something really interesting, read the rest of the thread following Oberg's original post. Some people clearly have no sense of historical perspective -- but it's fun to read.

Google has released yet another web application in their bid to dominate the Internat - Google Calendar. I started using this one immediately, as it's a good way for Nancy and I to share our calendars, and it makes it easy for me to check my personal calendar from work (not that my social calendar is that busy).The interface is a perfect example of the best modern web programming techniques, it's slick, fast, and has Google's trademark simplicity and ease of use. This one's a winner.

I made a typo today and coined a new word.

fuction: In software engineering, synonym for bug.

Money Magazine and Salary.com have rated the best jobs in the US and technical writing ranks number 13. According to the article, the average salary is about $57,000 US with a predicted growth rate of 23 per cent for the field over the next 10 years.

In my last post, I mentioned John Varley as a successor to Robert Heinlein. I probably should have clarified my wording a bit, in that naming someone as a successor to Heinlein doesn't really make sense, but Varley, in Red Lightning, Red Thunder, and a few other novels (most notably Golden Globe) is writing Heinlein-esque stories deliberately and well, which in my books is a good thing.

Coincidentally, today I came across Robert A. Heinlein: A Biographical Sketch, by Bill Patterson, which is a long biography of Heinlein. If you don't know anything about Heinlein, his life, or why he's so important to science fiction, this is a good place to start. (And even if you think you know a lot about Heinlein, you might find something new here.) Then go out and read some of his books. They might change your life - they did mine.

John Varley is one of my favourite science fiction novelists. He writes ocmplelling stories filled with real people, he likes big ideas, and he isn't afraid to follow their implications. If anyone can be said to be Robert Heinlein's successor, he's the one. His latest novel, Red Lightning, is a sequel to Red Thunder, which you might call a hommage to Heinlein's wonderful juvenile novels of the 1950s. I enjoyed Red Thunder a lot, but I haven't yet read Red Lightning, so I'm pointing to a review by Cory Doctorow, who has read the book and likes it a lot.

Heinlein was an ideological libertarian. You could call his politics right wing, and they were, on many of the left-right axes. But Heinlein never would have sat still for the Patriot Act and the daily and deep incursions on liberties that have come to characterise life in America and increasingly Britain and other parts of the world. He never would have accepted that you had to take away freedom to save liberty.

It's easy to forget that today, amid all the debate, to forget how authoritarian we've become, how much we're willing to put up with today -- indiscriminate wiretapping, illegal detention of "enemy combatants" and a TSA with the charm of Stasi goons and the moral instincts of a viper.

Varley brings it home for us, tells us what old man Heinlein would have said about all of it. And he does it in the frame of a cracking, exciting space-adventure tale that'll have you laughing and cheering as it goes (especially when the vaderoid Homelanders try to take Mars and get destroyed by their own lack of acclimation to low gravity).

There are few writers whose work I love more than John Varley's, purely love -- but now that I've finished Red Lightning, I love his stuff even more.

O'Reilly's ONLamp.com site has a long article about software used in space exploration. Much of this is open source and available for download. One of my favourites is NASA's World Wind which lets you explore the Earth in many different ways. There's also discussions of other software, like NASA's mission control software, which is Linux-based.

Neil Young can write a pretty strong political song when he puts his mind (or maybe his heart) into it (remember Ohio?), and it looks like his new CD, Life in War, is going to be his most political yet. Given that the first song released is called Impeach Bush, there isn't much doubt about where he's going with this one. I'm looking forward to hearing it.

A taxi passenger on his way to an airport in England was arrested after he asked the driver to play London Calling by the Clash and Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin. So now the music you listen to can get you branded as a terrorist. Is it just me, or is the cure turning out to be worse than the disease?

Labels: The Crazy Years

When I was in high school I discovered haiku and spent a lot of time writing three line poems. The restrictive structure of the haiku offered an interesting challenge. Now there'a a new variation - Fibs, or poems based on the Fibonacci sequence. If you remember your high school math, numbers in a Fibonacci seqence are the sum of the two numbers before them: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on. So there are variations in Fibs, depending on whether the sequence determines the number of words or the number of syllables in each line.

The idea for Fibs came from screen writer Gregory K. Pincus, who posted it on his blog a few weeks ago. Here's one he posted when the New York Times published the article about him:

Mom?
Mom?
WAKE UP!
Fibs are fab!
Open the paper:
Your son is in the New York Times!

The European Space Agency's Venus Express space probe went into orbit around Venus last week. The first pictures are already coming back. They won't be as spectacular as the ones from Cassini, but they should tell us quite a bit more about Venus and perhaps why it's so hot.

In an incident very similar to what's been happening with climate scientists working for the US government, a Canadian environmental scientist has been forced to stop talking about his new book, a science fiction novel called Hotter Than Hell.

It is set in the not-too-distant future when global warming has made many parts of the world too hot to live in and has prompted a war between Canada and the U.S. over water resources.

Tushingham was scheduled to speak in Ottawa about his book and the science underpinning it. But an order from Ambrose's office stopped him.

"He got a directive from the department, cautioning him not to come to this meeting today," said his publisher Elizabeth Margaris of DreamCatcher Publishers in New Brunswick. Margaris had driven from New Brunswick to attend the speech.

If this makes you as mad as it makes me, I suggest you do what I'm doing, and buy his book!

There's no doubt that English spelling can confuse even native speakers the language. I can't think of a better illustration of how wierd English spelling can be than the Spelling Poems site. Here's an example:

I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.

Today is the 45th anniversary of the first manned spaceflight, the launch of Yuri Gagarin on April 12th, 1961. It's also the 25th anniversary of the first Shuttle launch.

On a related note, the Russian space program may be getting active again -- they are talking about a manned moon landing by 2015 and a Mars mission by 2030. While there's a tendency to take stories like this with a grain of salt (and a large shot of vodka), they are working on the Klipper, a reusable space vehicle superior in most respects to NASA's CEV, and their booster technology is probably superior to that of the US (the major US commercial launchers use Russian-designed engines).

Next week will be the 100th anniversary of earthquake that destroyed most of San Fancisco 100 years ago. I was in San Francisco last week, and it was hard not to notice the extra media coverage. This New York Times article provides a good description of the quake and looks at the risks that San Francisco faces now. And no, there were no quakes while I was there, at least none that could be felt.

According to a post on the WritersUA 2006 conference blog, Adobe has developers working on RoboHelp. Personally, given the way Adobe has neglected FrameMaker in the past few years, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a new version.

Also, according to the blog and followup posts on the HATT Yahoo group, WinHelp is officially dead, at least for Windows Vista users. It will not be supported at all in Vista. There had been some speculation that the WinHelp engine might be available as a separate download, but this has been confirmed to not be the case. There are a surprising number of companies still using Winhelp (either because they're too lazy or cheap to change, or because they like it - gack!) -- so if you're in that boat, perhaps it's time to start thinking about alternatives. OTOH, it may be a while before many people upgrade to Vista, given the reported hardware requirements.

Will Langford has put together an extensive guide to Firefox, including a gallery of Firefox extensions and a list of useful About.config hacks. If you use Firefox (and if you aren't, why not?), this is one site you'll want to bookmark.

One of the more interesting things I saw at the Content Management Strategies 2006 conference was Quadralay demonstrating using a DITA-compatible document with WebWorks ePublisher Pro. Instead of displaying the paragraph format tree, the Style Designer displays the element structure tree of the document. You can then use the Style Designer to format each element with all of the considerable formatting capability that WebWorks gives you. The document was an XML file - I believe it had been created in FrameMaker, although I could be wrong on that.

This is not an out-of-the-box solution, yet. If you're interested, you'll have to contact Quadralay and they will build the adapter for you, based on your DITA DTD and any specializations you may have. It's possible that this might bet put into a future build of the product. The sales rep I talked to said there was information about it on the Quadralay web site, but I couldn't find anything. But he did say I could post about it.

I attended the Content Management Strategies Conference 2006 in San Francisco last week. It was organized by the Center for Information Development Management, which is run by Joanne Hackos, a name familiar to many technical writers. About 325 people attended the conference, from 14 countries.

I'm not going to give a detailed review of the conference. It was well organized and most of the presentations I attended were interesting and informative. A few things are clear. First, content management is well within the reach of a well-organized tech pubs group, if they have a cooperative management and the will to do the work necessary to properly implement it. Second, there are real benefits to using content management with structured authoring (although you don't have to use CM with structured authoring, it will make your life easier in the long run). Finally, if DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) hasn't reached the tipping point yet, it's very close. All of the major content management vendors either now support it or will shortly, and DITA support is being added to most of the XML authoring tools. DITA 1.1, due out this summer, will add more features that will make it easier for writers to implement. At the conference, the presentations in the DITA track were the largest and best attended.

Next year's conference will be in Boston. If you're interested in content management or structured authoring with DITA, attending it should be a good investment.

The nominees for the 2006 Hugo awards are now online. There's a lot of good reading here, and it's free. Note that although there are links for the novels, you have to be a member of L.A.con to be able to get the novels.

It seems that Canada isn't immune to the Intelligent Design meme. A McGill scientist was denied research money by a federal government agency for a study about how the acceptance of Intelligent Design in the US is eroding the acceptance of evolutionary theory in Canada. Apparently he didn't provide evidence in his grant proposal that evolution is a fact. McGill is appealing the decision - good for them.

Well I didn't leave my heart in San Francisco, but my wallet is quite a bit lighter. I had a great time. San Francisco is a wonderful city to visit - the scenery is spectacular, the natives are friendly, and the food is good (though watch out for some of the restaurant prices).

Here's one of the better pictures I got, of the Forbes Island Diner, near Pier 39.



The weather turned out to be decent, considering the wet spell northern California has been suffering through for the last month. I had one day off after the conference and Thursday turned out to be warm and mostly sunny, so I was able to get out on a harbour tour, ride the cable cars, see a lot of the downtown, and get over (under actually) the bay to visit a friend in Oakland. And yes, Amoeba Records is as good as everybody has been telling me - easily the best music store I've ever been to.

I'll post more on the Content Management Strategies conference later. It was worth the trip.

I'm going to be attending the Content Management Strategies 2006 conference in San Francisco next week. I'm not taking a oomputer with me, so I don't know if I'll be able to get online while I'm away. So there probably won't be much if anything going on here until next weekend.