ITauthor

If you publish content on the internet, for the world to view, you might wonder how your site performs around the world. Pages might load okay for you, but how quickly do those same pages load for people on other continents?

A handy tool for checking on this is the InternetSupervision Web site:

http://internetsupervision.com/scripts/urlcheck/check.aspx

You stick in a URL and click Check and it loads those pages on servers around the world (so they say) and reports back its findings. Each time you click Check the numbers change, presumably because the servers are busy doing other stuff, and the connections they’re using each get quicker and slower from second to second. But it gives you an indication of who’s getting the best of your Web site and which locations probably have to wait longer for pages to finish loading.

Here are the stats for www.itauthor.com:

The BBC Home Page, by comparison, generally takes about 0.1 of a second to load in the UK, and is a bit faster than the current ITauthor Home Page in most place, but is about the same on their Los Angeles server.

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Professor Geoffrey Pullum, Professor of Linguistics at University of Edinburgh, recently wrote an article called ‘50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice’ in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Strunk and White’s Element of Style.

I visited Professor Pullum in his office in a beautiful new university building in the heart of Edinburgh to talk to him about his article and to discuss grammar and technical writing.

Among other things, we talk about:

• the split infinitive
• “none of us are” or “none of us is”?
• that and which
• the view of grammar as commandments brought down from the Grammar Mountain
• the pressure to enforce grammar rules, even when you don’t believe them
• why do most of us know so little about grammar?
• if we shouldn’t use Strunk & White, where should we go for grammar advice?
• nerdview

We also mentioned Professor Pullum’s talk at last year’s UA Conference Europe:
The Piranha Brothers, the Unwritten Grammatical Law, and the Phenomenon of Nerdview,
which is well worth reading if you find this interview interesting.

Related recordings:

• Professor Pullum on NPR’s Talk of the Nation phone-in, April 16, 2009
• Professor Pullum interviewed on NPR's Here and Now show from September 2006
• Marc Acito marks to 50th anniversary of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style on NPR, April 2006

Related blog posts:

• Happy Birthday, Strunk and White! – from the New York Times’ Room for Debate blog
• Pullum on Strunk and White from Orange Crate Art
• Hardly [adverb] convincing [adjective] from Orange Crate Art
• The End of Strunk from SLOG

Other links:

• Geoff Pullum’s Home Page
• Language Log

The music I play at the beginning and end of the show is by Amplifico. You can hear more of their music at Podshow.

A colleague of mine who I’d asked to review something I’d written for a bid proposal yesterday pointed out that I’d spelled appendices wrongly. I’d written appendixes.

Now ten/fifteen years ago I would never have done such a thing. When I was working as an editor I would have corrected other people’s appendixes to appendices. But yesterday I wrote appendixes with only the briefest of thoughts as to which version I should choose.

So, when I was taken to task over it, I wondered why I’d made the choice I made.

And I think the answer is that these days I’m trying to be less prissy about my use of English. So I don’t worry about the “thou shalt” linguistic edicts, like “thou shalt not use ‘which’ to introduce a restrictive relative clause” or “thou shalt not begin a sentence with a conjunction” (see my previous sentence for proof of my willingness to break that dumb rule).

My criteria for judging whether what I’ve written is acceptable or not are (in decreasing order of importance):

1. Is it clear what I mean?
2. Is it easy to read?
3. Does it sound like a phrase a human being might actually utter?

Anyway, I thought I should do a little research to find out if I was way off the mark in using “appendixes”. And the results certainly suggest that most people think appendices is the correct form and a lot of people think it’s the only correct form. As is so common with questions of grammar, the use of appendixes even seems to get some people quite angry. I find this hard to fathom since – even if you think it’s wrong – it’s perfectly clear that when someone writes appendixes they mean the plural of appendix. So why get all hot under the collar about it?

A good discussion of the matter can be found … hang on a minute, use of the passive voice, that’s forbidden isn’t it? Let me start that again …

You can find a good discussion of the matter at the WordReference.com Language Forums:

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=57302

Richard Bowen used Google to put together some statistics on how often the two words are used in the UK and the rest of the world. He found that, globally, there’s about a 3:1 ratio in favour of appendices; slightly less if you exclude UK Web pages, but for the UK pages alone the ratio is about 18:1.

http://www.richardbowen.com/appendix-plural-appendices-appendixes.html

So maybe I’ll go back to using appendices. However (yep, that’s another rule broken), I’m comforted to find out that all reputable dictionaries give appendixes as a valid spelling. And I liked the following contribution from mplsray on the WordReference forum:

I'd like to point out that The Century Dictionary of 1895 gives for the plural "appendixes or appendices," so appendixes has been a standard form for a very long time. And, although this might represent his opinion alone and not necessarily that of others of his time, Noah Webster in his 1828 dictionary did not consider appendices to be a naturalized English word, giving the only English plural as appendixes.

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I thought about calling this “the heavy breathing episode” because there’s a lot of puffing and panting in this recording: the puffing from me, the panting from my Italian Spinone, Lottie, as she sprints and I plod up the Pentland hills a few miles from where I live in Edinburgh.

In this podcast I talk about:

• My decision to try commenting on other people’s blogs
• Using twitter
• Trying to get more done

One aspect of getting more done is trying to use my time more productively. So, to that end, I thought I’d use some dog walking time to record this podcast.

I suspect some (or all?) of you may find the rambling nature of this recording tedious, but hopefully you’ll enjoy the birdsong! Let me know what you think by dropping me a comment. If no one likes this style of on-the-hoof recording I’ll stick to the indoor type in future.

The music I play at the beginning and end of the show is by Amplifico. You can hear more of their music at Podshow.

Despite all the bad press it got, I’ve always liked Vista. I actually don’t think it was any great shakes. There are no huge benefits as far as I can tell. Being able to start an application by pressing the Windows key, typing the first few letters of the application’s name and pressing Enter is great if, like me, you like to keep your hands on the keyboard rather than using the mouse. Perversely, some might say, I like UAC, and over all Vista does look nicer that XP.

But one thing that’s always irked me is the fact that, for some reason, Microsoft decided to remove the Text Document option from the right-click > New option in Windows Explorer.

I quite often add little text documents here and there and I always found this shortcut in XP provided a handy way of doing this. You could just right-click > New > Text Document, then double-click the file that was created and edit the document in your default text editor.

Putting this shortcut back again involves editing your Windows Registry. Not for the feint-hearted. But fortunately, someone has done this for us and created a .reg file that you can just save and then double-click to add the settings (provided you have administrative privileges for your PC).

You can get this file here:

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/154554-new-context-menu-restore-default-menu-items.html

Scroll down the page to the heading To Restore Text Document and click the Download button.

Follow the instructions on the page. It says you need to restart your computer. In fact you can just end the Explorer process in Task Manager and start a new Explorer process and you’ll have the shortcut.