ITauthor » General

Sky Broadband Support – Are they taking the mickey, or what?

ac — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 19:32:09 +0000

Over the past few days my broadband connection from Sky Broadband ("up to 20 Mb/s" so they claim) has been getting steadily more of a bad joke. In the mornings it's workable (today I was generally getting around 2.5 Mb/s download). After lunch it becomes sluggish and tiresome to use (round about 0.75 Mb/s). But from about 5pm you may as well give up.

As I write my download connection is 0.06 Mb/s. Yes, that's right, a measly 60 kilobits per second. That means a long, long wait between clicking a link on a Web page and eventually having the result page in a readable state in front of you.

At this speed iTunes and Tweetdeck simply don't work.

This, I'm assuming, is due to Sky's wonderful Traffic Management policy: the more useful you find the internet, the more we're going to try and discourage you from using it.

So I logged into my Sky account and went to try and raise a Support call. Here's the form they present you with, saying: "tell us about your query":

What?!!! In that space? Now they're really just rubbing salt in my wounds.

OK, so, after writing out my complaint elsewhere and then copying it into this field and submitting it, lo and behold, as I suspected (but didn't want to assume, in case I had to get all the way back there again if I was wrong) there's a follow-up screen where you can pick from options and then you can send Sky Support an email. But honestly! Usability: ever heard of it Sky? Did you ever roadtest this on anyone? Did you ever think how it feels to spend 10 minutes on a grindingly slow connection waiting for pages to slowly load, just to get to this page.

So I'm off to have a cold beer now, watch some football and cool down a bit.

And maybe by tomorrow this page will have uploaded to Web host. And maybe Sky will get back to me. But at the moment I'm not optimistic.

Remembering my first computer

ac — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 08:58:51 +0000

I bought my first computer in 1989. I was studying for a Publishing degree and we used the little, all-in-one, Apple Macs, with tiny black and white screens, for writing essays and doing page layouts in Aldus PageMaker (not easy on a tiny, tinsy little screen). At the end of first year, we were encouraged to get our own computers so that we could work at home and give the next year's first years a chance to get on the Macs in the computer suite.

Naturally, I wanted a Mac. But I couldn't afford one.* So instead I settled for an Amstrad PCW 9512, which couldn't do page layout but, as an alternative to a typewriter, saved me a lot of Tippex by allowing me to edit my essays on screen before printing them out to the daisy-wheel printer that came as part of the package. I had a small collection of typewriters that immediately became obsolete (although, all these years later, I still have them - but probably not for much longer).

A couple of months back I had a clear out and I took the PCW - which had been sitting, unused in a big cardboard box in a cupboard for the past twelve years since we moved house - and I added it to a pile of slightly less ancient computer equipment at our local recycling centre (otherwise known as "the dump").

This weekend I had another chucking out session and I came across the PCW keyboard, a collection of the sturdily built 3" disks that the PCW used and some books, including a well-thumbed copy of the original user manual. I'd forgotten what a good piece of documentation that was. Buy almost any hardware or software now and you'll get a flimsy little pamphlet, with health and safety warnings and some basic startup instructions, printed in 23 different languages. The PCW 9512 came with a really substantial book.

The PCW 9512 was sold as a "Personal Computer Wordprocessor". Its main market was small businesses that couldn't afford an IBM PC. It came with LocoScript, word-processing software, and a mail-merge program for producing personalised copies of standard letters.

But in the back of the user manual there were sections on using Mallard Basic and Logo. I immediately got deeply fascinated by BASIC and I started buying the PCW Plus magazine every month for the program listings they published. I ended up spending hours and hours, usually late at night, writing a Pacman-type game, instead of studying (or sleeping). Eventually this game got too big and unwieldy for BASIC - and the more functionality I added to it, the slower it became - so I started rewriting it in C. At this point it was becoming a bit of an obsession, with long, compulsive coding sessions, but the arrival of my daughter snapped me out of the habit and it was then several years before I did any more coding.

However, the starting point for my real interest in software - I mean writing it, rather than writing about it - came with this manual for the PCW. So, I'm a little loathe to consign it to the dump, but it's just part of the general clutter I'm trying to get rid of, so it's got to go.

For more details about the Amstrad PCW, have a look at it's page on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW

* I haven't been able to find the price for an Apple Mac SE in 1989 but, from memory, I think it was almost £2000, whereas the PCW9512 retailed for £499 + VAT and came with a bundled printer.

I love Emma Thompson

ac — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 14:29:28 +0000

I've just been for a run: round the loch, up the hill and through the woods at Bonally, with Lottie (my dog). I was listening to Emma Thompson on Desert Island Discs. I love it when someone you've really liked for years confirms your good opinion of them. I loved her choice of music, her choice of things to take with her to the island, and so much of what she said.

Among the things that struck a chord with me was this:

"I think it was John Ruskin said, he was talking about Capitalism and he said, 'The acquisition of each new thing just engenders a new form of weariness.' And I thought, it's the most brilliant way of describing stuff: the stuff that we accrete during our lifetimes. Greg and I certainly have got to the point where we say, 'Could we get rid of this? Yes, come on let's chuck it.' It's like you're going along in your boat and you just want to make it lighter, so you can travel faster and you can go with the wind a wee bit more."

For some unfathomable reason, the podcast I was listening to is no longer available at the BBC website, so here's a link to my own copy (until the BBC tell me to take it down):

http://www.itauthor.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/DID-Emma-Thompson.mp3
© BBC, 2010

And - although she knows it anyway - Patricia, it's you I really love.

twitter: the RSS for today

ac — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 06:33:40 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I published a podcast on the history of RSS. One thing I didn't mention was how some of the early uses of RSS are now pretty much defunct, thanks largely to twitter.

Over the years I've used various feed aggregators, latterly Google Reader, to keep me informed of what the pool of bloggers I'm interested in are blogging about. I'm not a great fan of reading the news on the Web (I get my news through the radio mainly), but I know a lot of people also used to use feed aggregators to keep them up to date with news. I think this is largely a thing of the past.

In recent years I found that I was looking at Google Reader less and less. For the blogs I was really interested in, I used FeedBlitz to mail me every time a new post appeared on those blogs.*

But these days twitter has taken over as the main way I hear about stuff. I use TweetDeck as my window on twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, rather than ever actually visiting those websites. TweetDeck gives you a column of tweets by the people you've subscribed to, a column for FaceBook, a column for LinkedIn, a column for direct message to/by you, etc. But it also allows you to add columns for searches of hash tags. So I have a column that shows any tweets containing #techwriting or #techcomm or #techcomms (the last one may be unnecessary now I think about it). This provides a fairly constant flow of links to interesting information about technical writing. And the good thing is I didn't even have to go out and find these people and subscribe to anything - I just get everything going into twitter that's been marked in this way. Amazingly (so far at least) it seems to be free from spam. And it's really useful.

I used to find Tom Johnson's community blog Writer River good for this kind of thing, and I used to post to it, now and again. But it was cumbersome to post to using the Publish2 browser plugin (which is buggy and required me to enter multiple sets of login information every time I'd cleared my browser cache - which is often when I'm working on WebHelp) - so I got fed up - it didn't seem worth the hassle. And besides, it's so easy to tweet. Aggregators and aggregated sites like Writer River seem like a part of history already. Twitter is so immediate and so easy. It's 140-character limit can be a challenge, but it turns out to be one of the best things about twitter because it prevents verbosity.

Dave Winer's metaphor about news aggregators providing a river of news turns out to fit twitter perfectly. According to the metaphor, you don't need to be by the river every minute of the day, you just go down there whenever you feel like it, or whenever you can, and take a dip - or paddle about a little. Tweets keep on flowing, you'll never read them all - so you don't worry about it.

RSS is still great for a number of things (particularly, for me, the magic of getting podcasts onto my iPod). But as a way of keeping up with blogs you like, or finding out about the big new thing, or being alerted about important news, or telling people you've blogged about something, or telling people about something interesting you've found out there on the internet, RSS just doesn't cut it any more. Twitter beats RSS hands down for all of those things.

And yes, I tweeted about this blog post.

* Want to use FeedBlitz to get emailed about an updated feed? Go to https://www.feedblitz.com and scroll down to "Subscribe to any blog" then enter the URL of the feed you want emailed about (e.g. http://www.itauthor.com/feed/), then click Subscribe.

Asteroids resurrected in IE9 trial

ac — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 09:16:03 +0000

The test drive pages for the current (functionality-limited) IE9 preview contain a little gem for those of us of a certain age who recall a simpler kind of computer game.

Friday/Saturday-night pub crawls in the late '70s were, for me and my band of pals, peppered with games of Defender, Galaxian (my personal favourite), Tank Commander and Asteroids. Here's what the original Asteroids looked like:

The IE9 test drive pages contain an SVG version called SVG-oids:

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/35SVG--oids/Default.xhtml

Have fun and (for those of us of a certain age) relive the golden age of video games!

You can tell from my score (below) that I'm a bit rusty at this:

And for a more authentic experience, have a go at this version:

http://www.play.vg/games/4-Asteroids.html

A history of RSS

ac — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:34:48 +0000

Note: This is the script for the ITauthor podcast #33 from March 2010.

Chances are you’re probably listening to this podcast on an iPod. And if you are, then you’ll know that you didn’t have to do anything special to get it on your iPod. You just plug the iPod into your computer now and then and new podcasts like this appear, as if by magic. All you have to do is initially choose which podcasts you want to listen to – or which video podcasts you want to watch – and click the Subscribe button. The rest of the process just happens.

Same goes for news readers. If you use Google Reader, or something like it, then you’ll know that it just gathers up blog posts, news articles and other information published on the Web sites that you’ve been interested enough to subscribe to at one time. After you subscribe to a site you don’t need to do anything else, just check Google Reader and see what new stuff shows up.

And how does this happen? Well largely through a technology called RSS. It’s been around a while now but it’s still there, doing what it does: making it easy for you to read blog posts; making it easy for you to publish information here, there and everywhere; making it easy for you to listen to podcasts like this.

So this the ITauthor history of RSS.

Introduction

I want to take you back to August 24, 1995.

In a circus tent on their Redmond campus, Microsoft are launching Windows 95, to a soundtrack by the Rolling Stones.

The Windows 95 launch party venue (above) and desktop (below)

And for an additional $50 you can buy another new Microsoft product: Internet Explorer 1.0.
AOL is the world’s largest internet access provider.
But if you don’t want to sign up with AOL, you could try a newcomer to the online connectivity market: MSN - not the instant messaging client that would eventually inherit those initials: but the Microsoft Network.

Like the market leaders (AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy) MSN is another walled-in online service. And like all of its competitors, this incarnation of MSN will suffer the same fate just as soon as people realise the alternative to these services is the full-blown, wide open world of the worldwide web.
Before AltaVista (which won’t launch until December of this year), and long before Google, the human-powered Yahoo is the way most people find what they’re looking for on the internet.
At the cinema, you can go and see Toy Story: the world’s first wholly computer-generated full length animation.
IBM are about to buy Lotus Development Corporation for a cool 3.5 billion US $ in cash just to get their hands on the hugely successful Lotus Notes.
Computer enthusiasts this year are looking forward to replacing their 14.4 kilobits per second modems with 28.8K modems later in the year, and they’re hoping soon to be able to replace their 4-speed CD-ROM drives with drives for a new kind of disks: DVDs. But they’re going to have to wait a while before those eventually get into the shops.
Boris Yeltsin is Communist Party General Secretary in the Soviet Union.
And in the White House, 21-year-old Monica Lewinsky has just started work as an intern for the Clinton administration.

And in the offices of Apple Computer at One Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California, a 30-year-old computer scientist named Ramanathan Guha, working in Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, has started developing something he’s calling MCF: the Meta Content Framework.

http://research.google.com/pubs/author17184.html

http://www.guha.com/mcf/mcf_spec.html

Guha described the problem he was trying to solve like this:

We use a number of different IMAs [information management applications] – browsers, email, newsreaders, file systems, etc. to manage our information. They each handle collections of information objects: web pages, images, email messages, files, folders, etc. …

Each IMA uses its own representations for these structures and provides its own utilities for viewing and manipulating them. Furthermore, the structures in use today are very simple and inexpressive. They don't allow us to represent very much about the content. The structure is typically a tree or graph with a very limited number of attributes such as the author, modification date and size …

We claim that the lack of an expressive, open standard for representing these structures is at the root of many of our information management problems. In fact, we have become so accustomed to these problems that we hardly even regard them as problems any more. For example, our information today is divided up into separate containers such as email, files, web pages, etc. This division is based not on what the content is about or which tasks they are relevant to, but on which protocol is used to access/manipulate them.

Guha, R. 1996. White paper describing MCF. http://www.guha.com/mcf/wp.html

Guha’s goal for MCF was that it would provide:

an adequate system for representing a wide range of information about content.

Guha, R. 1996. White paper describing MCF 0.95. http://www.guha.com/mcf/mcf_spec.html

Apple sauce

One of the first uses of MCF was something called HotSauce. This bizarrely named product never got past its beta version, but was nevertheless a typically innovative idea from Apple’s Advanced Technology Group. HotSauce used the description of a website, written in MCF, to display a representation of the website as a 3D graphic that you could navigate through: like you were steering some sort of flying vehicle in a video game. Objects in the website you were exploring were displayed as garishly coloured shapes, each bearing a label, and all set on a black background, so that it looked like the objects were floating around in outer space. The colours of the object denoted levels of depth within the website structure, and the shape of the objects indicated the type of resource. So pages and files were rectangles, whereas topic areas were lozenge-shaped.

You could move through the 3D space by pointing and clicking with the mouse, or you could reverse or go at double-speed by holding various keys while you clicked. The slogan for the product was: “Why just browse when you can fly?”

HotSauce was made available in 1996 as a standalone application and as a free plugin for Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. With the browser plugin installed, whenever you visited a website that was MCF-enabled, you could click a HotSauce link and the plugin could fetch the MCF file and display the 3D graphic, allowing you to fly around the site in its outer space representation. If you saw an object that interested you, you simply double-clicked it to display the page or to download the file.

http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/ectoc/echet96/echet96_nav.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotSauce

An example of the HotSauce interface, showing the Sailmaker Software website. http://mundi.net/maps/maps_018/hotsauce.html

Despite Apple’s claims of having 30,000 HotSauce-enabled websites in September 1996, HotSauce was never released other than as a beta, and Steve Jobs canned the project, and closed down the Advanced Technology Group, after he returned to Apple at the end of 1996.

Netscape and RDF Site Summary

In February 1997, Ramanathan Guha left Apple to become Principal Scientist at Netscape Communications. Here he met Tim Bray, who had worked on the W3C's specification for XML and was, at the time, doing some consultancy work at Netscape.

http://www.textuality.com/Tim.html

Bray picks up the story:

In 1997, Guha went to work for Netscape, at about the same time as I signed up as a consultant there. Netscape was already on its way downhill, suffering from self-inflicted wounds as well as Microsoft's Netscape delenda est [Netscape must be destroyed] attitude, but neither of us knew that.

They asked me to work with the newly-arrived Guha on making something happen with MCF by combining it with XML. There were a couple of reasons. First, they … really wanted to do some things with metadata. Second, Microsoft had recently roiled the waters with the first-ever proposed standard based on XML, namely Channel Definition Format (CDF), which was going to revolutionize “push” technology which at that point was going to be the future. And Netscape wanted to look like they were in the game.

The trouble with Guha is that he's really smart, I mean extremely remarkably smart, and he thinks faster than you do, and so it's hard to figure out what he's talking about. Fortunately, he doesn't mind explaining it five or six times till you get it.

After he'd explained MCF five or six times, I kind of got it, and we cooked up something called “MCF in XML”, which Netscape then submitted to the W3C [http://web.archive.org/web/20080103080131/www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-MCF-XML/ also: http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-MCF-XML/], along with a tutorial. I just now glanced over those and parts of them feel remarkably prescient, others frankly ridiculous.

Since MCF was very general-purpose, it could obviously have been used to do the things CDF could be used to do, and lots more besides. Blood was running from eyeball-sockets in Redmond at this point, and a gnashing of teeth filled the hallways there, and the angst was forcibly expressed not just there but inside the W3C.

In a fairly inspired move, the W3C announced that they were going to do a general-purpose metadata thingie, and that they'd already decided that it was going to be named RDF, which had the major advantage of being neither MCF nor CDF. Working Groups were formed (I was in the RDF WG for a little while), and eventually we got RDF.

Bray, T. 2003. The RDF.net Challenge. http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/05/21/RDFNet

These were the days of dial-up connections, when you were charged for the length or time you stayed connected. For most people, using the internet consisted of logging in, grabbing the information you needed and logging off again as quickly as possible. These were also the days of the concerns about “information overload”. This was seen as a growing problem of the modern life.

In October 1996, Reuters conducted the first ever study into Information Overload, called Dying for information,

People can no longer develop effective personal strategies for managing information. Faced with an onslaught of information and information channels, they have become unable to develop simple routines for managing information …

The problem will not go away and those that solve it will be the success stories of tomorrow.

Waddington, P. 1997. Dying For Information? A Report On The Effects Of Information Overload In The Uk And Worldwide. Reuters.
http://www.cni.org/regconfs/1997/ukoln-content/repor~13.html

With more and more information becoming available on the internet, sent to you in emails and accessible in databases, how could you cope with it all? What was needed was some way of organising it all and making sure it was easy to find important information amidst an ocean of less important, or completely pointless information.

At the same time the buzzword that was getting everybody excited was “push”. The idea behind push technology was that you only had to choose what sort of information you wanted, and it would be sent to you as soon as it became available without you having to go and look for it. PointCast were the first bright stars of push technology. They launched in February 1996 to huge press interest.

However, PointCast effectively exacerbated the problem of information overload. Also, PointCast really required an always-on connection to work the way it was intended, and at the time few ordinary users had that luxury. For those who did, it stretched the limited bandwidth of their network, and soon began to annoy users as PointCast customers realised that they could use the technology to push advertising onto users’ desktops.

Articles of the time discussed the relative merits of the “push” and “pull” models – with pull being likened to the way you’d use a traditional library, where you have to put the effort into looking up and retrieving the information you’re interested in, whereas push was more like television, with content being collated for you and delivered in “channels” dedicated to specific areas of interest. All you had to do was choose the channels you wanted and the information flowed straight to your desktop.

Pointcast’s star burned brightly, if briefly. Their stock price soared. In January 1997, News Corporation would make an offer of $450 million to buy the company. But PointCast sat on the offer and a few months later it was withdrawn (a lucky escape by News Corp).

These were the days of the first browser war, and Netscape and Microsoft vied to cut a deal with Pointcast. Netscape got there first in late 1996, but the deal fell through. Then in December 1996 Microsoft announced that the Pointcast Network channels would be available the following year as a feature of Internet Explorer 4.0.

Probably the most memorable Microsoft feature that came out of push technology was Active Desktop, which was released as an upgrade to Windows 95 and Windows NT at the same time as IE4. This enabled ActiveX controls to run on the desktop, which meant that users could display news feeds and other information on their desktop: not in an Internet Explorer window but directly on the Windows desktop. The idea was that as you worked on your Windows PC, opening and closing applications, you’d be able to see up-to-the-minute news, share prices, weather reports and so on, without having to open a browser window.

By default, when you installed Active Desktop, the only thing you got was the Channel Bar. This was a strip of icons that linked to the Microsoft Network, AOL, PointCast and some standard topic channels.

The Channel Bar on the Windows "Active Desktop"

Promotion for "live content" in IE4

And you could go online and get more so-called “live content” by adding channels to your Active Desktop. Each of the channels published on your Active Desktop got there thanks to a CDF file. As Tim Bray observed in the previous quote, CDF was Microsoft’s XML-based Channel Definition Format, that had prompted Netscape to develop an XML-based version of Guha’s MCF.

Microsoft described the purpose of a CDF file as follows:

The CDF file defines a hierarchy of pages included in the channel. In addition to defining the resources in the channel, the CDF file also specifies how each item will be used or displayed, and when the channel should be updated.

Microsoft Corporation. Introduction to Active Channel Technology. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa768023(VS.85).aspx

So, by the summer of 1997, it was possible to write a CDF file for your website that would allow Internet Explorer users to subscribe to your site as a channel, browse the site offline and receive an email when you updated your site.

BASE="http://domain/folder/"

LASTMOD="1998-11-05T22:12"

PRECACHE="YES"

LEVEL="0">

Title of your Channel

Synopsis of your channel's contents.

LASTMOD="1998-11-05T22:12"

PRECACHE="YES"

LEVEL="1">

Page Two's Title

Synopsis of Page Two's contents.

IE4 contained a Subscriptions item in the Favorites menu that allowed you to subscribe to the currently displayed web page.

http://www.microsoft.com/msj/1097/activedesktop.aspx

Clicking Subscribe in this menu launched the Web Site Subscription wizard, that took you through the various options you could configure for the subscription – like the update schedule, whether you wanted to be notified by email if something in a subscription changed, and how many layers of linked pages to download when updating subscriptions to allow you to browse sites offline.

And it’s probably worth noting that, despite their reputation for not caring about standards, here was Microsoft, in 1997, developing a very early implementation of XML (prior to the publication of XML 1.0), promoting the use of XML, and submitting an open specification of CDF to the W3C in March 1997. (http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-CDFsubmit.html)

But let’s get back to Netscape. Remember, Netscape Navigator had been the browser most people were using to browse the Web. But Microsoft had eventually got their act together and had bought a browser, which they then steadily improved over several releases, all the while sucking market share life out of Netscape.

We heard earlier that Tim Bray had met Ramanathan Guha at Netscape, worked on an XML version of MCF, and had then been on a W3C working group to produce something similar to MCF in XML (but more specifically designed for the purpose of representing information about resources on the WorldWide Web). This was RDF: the Resource Description Framework.

Ramanathan Guha also worked on the specification of RDF for the W3C. Guha evangelised RDF back at Netscape and, as a result, RDF was used by Netscape as the means by which websites could be summarised for syndication purposes (although, at the time, while push technology seemed like it was the future, “channels” was the word most people used, rather than syndication).

Netscape used RDF Site Summary (or RSS) on its My Netscape portal. At the launch of My Netscape, in March 1999, a Netscape executive explained:

The My Netscape Network is the Web's first open portal service that empowers consumers to view all the Internet content they want in one convenient location on the Web all through My Netscape

Cyrus Afzali. March 15, 1999. Netscape Launches Publishing Program. http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3_80051

The idea was that My Netscape would be a customisable start page where users would spend much of their time. This page would display information – such as news headlines, stock prices and sports results – from channels chosen by the user: all made possible by Web sites publishing RDF Site Summaries.

These summaries were just short lists of links – each item on the list simply consisting of the text of the link and the URL for the link. Web site publishers could make their content available as a so-called “channel” by publishing RDF Site Summaries that internet users could add to their own customized My Netscape home page.

Here’s how Netscape announced the idea in a press release from June 1998:

Netscape Communications Corporation today announced plans to roll out "My Netscape," a free new service that will allow Internet users to create, customize and maintain a personalized start page hosted by Netscape Netcenter, one of the leading portal sites on the Net. My Netscape will provide access to up-to-the-minute news, stock quotes, entertainment and sports information through a user's custom-configured page. …

In just a few minutes, Internet users will be able to register as a Netscape Netcenter member and begin building their own personal "window to the Web." Rather than having to check dozens of different sites for the information they need everyday, users will be able to create a single, integrated access point for all their needs, saving both time and connection charges. My Netscape will take advantage of tight integration with one of the leading search engines on the Net, Netscape Search powered by Excite, as well as Netscape Communicator, the market-leading Internet client software. …

My Netscape will provide the ultimate Internet start page allowing users the freedom to choose from a wide variety of compelling content from such information categories as: automotive, computers & Internet, business, education, entertainment, games, health, kids and family, lifestyles, local news, Netscape news, headline news, personal finance, real estate, shopping, sports, travel, technology, and weather, in addition to Internet discussion groups and professional communities.

http://www2.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/06-01-1998/0000670135&EDATE=

What this meant was that if you published a Web site, you could create an RDF file, make it available on your site, and submit it to the My Netscape Network. Netscape supplied the artwork for a button you could put on your web site that had the Netscape logo and the words: “Add this Site to My Netscape”. So, if visitors to your site were already signed up for My Netscape and they wanted to add your site to their home page, they could simply click the button and a little bullet-list summary of your site, regularly updated, would be added to their My Netscape page.

So RDF Site Summary was the original name that brought us the initials RSS. The definition of site summaries was done using RDF, which itself was an application of XML. So the relationship between RSS and XML was kind of grandchild to grandparent, in that RDF was a method of describing internet resources and was created as valid XML, and RSS was a way of providing summaries of Web site content and was created as valid RDF.

The version of RSS used in My Netscape in March 1999 was RSS 0.9. Versions of RSS, and the version numbering, will get a little bit tricky, so it’s worth emphasizing that this RSS, used for the original release of My Netscape, was 0.9 and it was based on the W3C-specified RDF that Tim Bray and Ramanathan Guha had been working on.

0.9 was a simple XML format that used just 10 elements to describe information about Web sites such as news sites containing collections of new stories. The document would contain a “channel” element describing the site, an “image” element to provide the logo for the site’s channel box on your My Netscape page, and up to 15 "item" elements, each of which themselves contained just a "title" element and a "link" element.

0.91: RSS becomes Rich Site Summary

The primary author of RSS 0.9 was a young programmer called Dan Libby, working in his first job out of university. Here he describes the troubled birth of RSS, at a troubled Netscape:

The original RDF/RSS spec was deemed "too complex" for the "average user".

… My (poor) solution was to create a simpler format, RSS 0.9, that was technically valid RDF, but dropped namespaces and created a non-connected graph.

… We shipped the first implementation, sans tools. Basically, there was a spec for RSS 0.9, some samples, and a web-based validation tool. No further support was given for a while, and I was kept busy working on other projects. Even still, channels started coming in, and the system worked in a rudimentary fashion.

At some point, it was decided that we needed to rev the RSS spec to allow things like per item descriptions, i18n support, ratings, and image widths and height. Due to artificial (in my view) time constraints, it was again decided to continue with the current storage solution, and I realized that we were *never* going to get around to the rest of the project as originally conceived. At the time, the primary users of RSS (Dave Winer the most vocal among them) were asking why it needed to be so complex and why it didn't have support for various features, eg update frequencies. We really had no good answer, given that we weren't using RDF for any useful purpose.

… The compromise was to produce RSS 0.91, which could be validated with any validating XML parser, and which incorporated much of userland's vocabulary, thus removing most (I think) of Dave's major objections. I felt slightly bad about this, but given actual usage at the time, I felt it better suited the needs of its users: simplicity, correctness, and a larger vocabulary, without RDF baggage

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/syndication/message/586

Dan Libby

http://osc.co.cr/aboutus/aboutus.html?menubar=aboutus

The important point to note about Dan Libby's work on RSS 0.91 was that he removed RDF from RSS at this point. So what about the name? How can you have something called RSS, standing for RDF Site Summary, when it doesn’t contain the RDF any more?

The solution Libby came up with was to rechristen the 0.91 release: Rich Site Summary – which was justified by the new features that had been incorporated, as Libby says: “from UserLand’s vocabulary”.

So at this point in the RSS story we need to bring in UserLand Software and it’s controversial founder, Dave Winer. I’ve held off talking about Dave Winer up until now just to try not to muddy the waters. But we can’t hold off any more, so – from 1999, where we’ve reached so far – let’s rewind a little and consider Winer’s role in the story.

Dave Winer and

UserLand was a California-based software company started by Dave Winer in 1988. Its original product was a scripting environment for the Apple Macintosh called Frontier, with a scripting language called UserTalk. However, Apple destroyed the original market for Frontier by bundling its own scripting language, AppleScript, with new Macs. So UserLand had to find a new line of business and eventually settled on Web publishing tools and services. Along the way, in 1997, Winer started publishing regular, date-stamped posts of his thoughts on a variety of subjects at a Web site called Scripting News. At the time there wasn’t a word for this type of Web site – personal opinions, seemingly random note-form snippets of information, liberal use of links to other sites – but by the end of this year (1997) a name had been coined: weblog, soon shortened just to blog.

Scripting News is generally regarded as one of the first blogs. And as of today (March 2010) Dave Winer is still posting to scriptingnews.com, which probably makes it the world’s longest running blog. And to look at it you can easily believe it’s antiquity: it still looks like something right out of 1997.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dave_Winer.JPG. Copyright: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Helge.at

licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5, Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 and Attribution ShareAlike 1.0

Back in 1997 XML was still in its infancy. XML 1.0 hadn’t yet been recommended by the W3C and XML wasn’t really being used for anything much yet. But that was about to change in a big way. Like never before, by 1997, systems needed to pass data around, quickly, from one system to another, across the room or around the world, flawlessly, irrespective of hardware or operating system. XML was a standard, text-based method of describing data, that could be endlessly extended to cover pretty much any type of information. Dave Winer was fascinated by the idea and its potential.

In mid December 1997, he wrote in Scripting News:

Everyone talks in hushed tones about XML. Shhh. It's exciting! But what does it do?

I can't get involved with something without immediately trying to ground it with an application. How else could I know if it's worth exploring?

Luckily, I had an application waiting for XML.

http://www.scripting.com/davenet/1997/12/15/realWorldXml.html

Winer’s application was a script that ran every night at midnight and produced a file called siteChanges.xml. The file described any new pages on the Web site, or pages that had been modified in the last 24 hours. Winer’s XML wasn’t RSS, but the XML file served a very similar purpose to the RSS files that, in the future, would list the most recent posts from a blog or stories from news sites.

A few weeks later, just before New Year, in one of his regular DaveNet newsletter emails – a posting that ends by asking readers if they know of any good New Year's parties – Winer mentions that the Scripting News Web site:

in addition to being an HTML web page, is also an XML application

http://www.scripting.com/davenet/1997/12/15/scriptingNewsInXML.html . Note: this post is dated as 15 December although it says in the post that it is between Christmas and New Year

What Winer meant was that as well as publishing a standard Web page, from now on he was also making the front page of the Web site available as an XML file. He wrote a script called scriptingNewsToXML that generated an XML file for that day’s posting on the site. The top-level element in this XML file was called (all one word) – so became the de facto name for this new application of XML.

Basically the XML format consisted of a bunch of header elements followed by a list of “item” elements, each of which could contain “text” elements and “link” elements, and that was pretty much it. But that was enough to describe what you could find if you went to the Scripting News Web site: each item represented a blog post and could contain multiple links (not just a link to the original blog post). In other words, the XML format provided everything a developer needed to produce real summaries of Web site content – not just links back to the article itself: these summaries could be consumed in their own right, and they might be all you needed – that is, you might not need to display the site itself.

Remember, this is December 1997. For a few months now, Microsoft has been using its Channel Definition Format (CDF) to allow you to see “live content” on your Windows 95 Active Desktop, and to let you subscribe to CDF-enabled Web sites in Internet Explorer, meaning you could then browse those sites offline. But Netscape’s launch of their My Netscape portal, which used RDF Site Summary (the original technology to bear the name RSS), was still more than a year away.

Winer has often been called the inventor of RSS. He would certainly go on to play a major part in the development of RSS, but back then, when Winer announced the XML version of his blog (before the appearance of RSS), it’s hard not to see Microsoft’s CDF as being the first application of XML to allow people to subscribe to Web content. Certainly Winer was well aware of CDF and there are many similarities between CDF and the XML format.

The following is an example of the original format. This is the XML for the Scripting News entry for 7 July 1998.

1.0

Fri, 07 Aug 1998 07:00:00 GMT

Sat, 08 Aug 1998 12:01:07 GMT

http://www.scripting.com/frontier5/xml/scriptingNews.html

Douglas Adams: "His opinions are passionately held, well-informed, intelligent, argumentative
and quite often wrong."

http://www.userland.com/slideshows/daveNetReaderProfiles/slide14.html

Douglas Adams

XML-related changes coming in Frontier 5.1.3.

http://www.scripting.com/frontier5/xml/stories/513changes.html

XML-related changes

Today's Scripting News XML file. There's one file for every day that we publish. Josh Lucas's
nightly mailing of Scripting News is based on this feature, as is Vignette's experimental StoryServer
displayer.

http://www.scripting.com/98/08/news07.xml

Today's Scripting News XML file

http://www.stonecottage.com/josh/scriptingNews.html

mailing

http://www.scripting.com/frontier5/xml/experiments/scriptingNews.html

feature

http://demo.vignette.com/publishing/scriptingnews/

StoryServer displayer

Tallent: Frontier ODBC Extension 1.0b8. <i>Mac and Windows.</i>

http://www.tallent.com/frontier/odbc/

Frontier ODBC Extension 1.0b8

Seth Dillingham on List-based support.

http://betty.userland.com/stories/daveWiner/98/08/dillinghamOnListBasedSuppo.html

Seth Dillingham

Fat Page: scriptingNewsToXML.

http://www.scripting.com/fatPages/websites/scriptingNewsToXML.html

scriptingNewsToXML

News.com: Web technologies usurp DCE. IMHO, eventually this will become the XML-RPC
story.

http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,25043,00.html?st.ne.fd.mdh

Web technologies usurp DCE

http://www.scripting.com/davenet/98/07/xmlRpcForNewbies.html

story

News.com missed something. Microsoft's COM is an implementation of DCE. It has more momentum
than they thought.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1996/sept96/dcompr.htm

COM is an implementation of DCE

Reuters: Eudora security flaw discovered.

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/zdnn_smgraph_display/0,3441,2126115,00.html

Eudora security flaw discovered

http://www.webstandards.org/.

SJ Merc: Here's a great picture of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer having a strong physical reaction
to something Becky Morgan said. Here's the rest of the story...

http://www.sjmercury.com/business/microsoft/media/photos/ballmer080798.jpg

picture

http://www.sjmercury.com/business/microsoft/docs/move080798.htm

story

Our friend Thea is looking for mind-blowing Frontier projects that she can showcase in her
Galleria. <i>A great flowbuilder!</i>

mailto:thea@yes.net

Thea

http://www.scripting.com/thea/

Galleria

Douglas Adams on his nose.

http://www.tdv.com/personal_worlds/douglas_a/nose/nose.html

his nose

http://www.scripting.com/98/08/news07.xml

The DTD for looked like this:

http://www.scripting.com/dtd/scriptingNews.dtd

And this is the RSS 0.9 DTD created by Dan Libby:

xmlns:rdf CDATA #FIXED "http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"

xmlns CDATA #REQUIRED>

http://www.rssboard.org/rss-0.9.dtd

Winer did nothing much with the XML format during 1998, which brings us back to 1999 again, with the launch of My Netscape in March, and it’s RDF Site Summary XML format: RSS 0.9.

Winer was excited by what Netscape had done, and no doubt pleased to have been ahead of the curve – but he was disappointed that Netscape hadn’t given RSS 0.9 at least the same functionality of the XML format. He wrote:

RSS is woefully inadequate. It's missing the key thing web writers and readers need. A channel is not a series of links pointing to articles, it's a set of paragraphs that point to one or more articles *per paragraph*. …

Writing happens in paragraphs. Web writing allows links to be anywhere. To limit channels to one link per paragraph is not good! Technology serves writers and readers, they shouldn't be limited by technology.

http://www.scripting.com/davenet/1999/06/16/aFaceOffWithNetscape.html

Winer got in touch with Netscape and tried to influence the direction of the next version of RSS. Winer says Netscape promised to incorporate the good stuff from into RSS, but Winer was obviously not convinced because he went away and revised , to produce the description language he was looking for.

The original format had contained just 12 elements. Version 2.0b1 had more than twice that number of elements: all of the new elements appearing within the header element.

The new elements included:

channelDescription

managingEditor and webmaster (for contact emails) and

skipHours and skipDays to indicate to the aggregator software, that went looking for updates, that the site wouldn’t be updated over those hours or days, so it needed bother come looking for updates.

2.0b1

Sun, 16 Nov 2003 08:00:00 GMT

Sun, 16 Nov 2003 14:06:38 GMT

http://my.userland.com/stories/storyReader$11

It's even worse than it appears.

http://essaysfromexodus.scripting.com/

Scripting News

http://essaysfromexodus.scripting.com/

scriptingNews

http://essaysfromexodus.scripting.com/picture$29

dave@userland.com (Dave Winer)

en-US

This is the archive of the Manila version of Scripting News that was on Exodus between the end
of 1999 and November 2003.

This page is an index to other resources on the new system.

1. Place to upload graphics.

http://scriptingarchivedata.scripting.com/pictures/edit/newPicture

Place to upload graphics

http://essaysfromexodus.scripting.com/xml/scriptingNews2.xml

Below, a “channel” box showing items from the Scripting News blog. This is produced using RSS 0.91:

The same “channel” generated from 2.0b1:

http://my.userland.com/stories/storyReader$11

0.91 again: Winer's version

So now, in the summer of 1999, we had RSS 0.91 (Dan Libby’s Rich Site Summary) and Dave Winer’s 2.0b1. There was also Microsoft’s CDF which had been around for a while now, and was used for subscribing to web sites from within Internet Explorer. And IE5 (released in March 1999) introduced the idea of Smart Offline Favorites, which allowed users to mark web pages as favorites and then view those pages offline at their leisure. This was useful when you were charged for the time you spent online, but subsequently became pointless once the world switched to always-on connections. CDF was supported in Internet Explorer right up until IE7, when it finally disappeared.

And for a while not a lot happened. Dave Winer wrote:

After RSS 0.91, we breathed a sigh of relief that lasted almost a year. Glad that's over!

http://www.scripting.com/2000/06/07.html#rss

In December 1999 UserLand shipped its Manila content management system with built-in support for 2.0b1, but Winer had decided to drop in favour of one common XML format. And in April 2000, UserLand added built-in support for RSS 0.91 for all Manila web sites.

UserLand was one of the few organisations using RSS actively, and Winer wanted to make some changes to RSS. The problem was that RSS wasn’t changing to meet his changing needs (http://scripting.com/2000/06/07.html#rss).

But the creators of RSS 0.91, Netscape – now part of AOL – were busy working on Netscape 6 and weren’t interested in doing anything with RSS. Eventually, in early June 2000, Winer had had enough, so he decided to go ahead and make the changes himself.

He published a new spec for RSS 0.91, announcing it in a post on his Scripting News blog:

RSS 0.91 was a major traffic accident that turned out pretty well. Netscape did a private spec, just for their own web service. I had a couple of problems with it. …

So all this is is a cleanup. All the Netscapeisms are removed. It's better organized and easier to follow.

… there is no room to debate new features, because the spec doesn't attempt to add any.

http://scripting.com/2000/06/07.html#rss

Winer considered calling this a spec for RSS 0.92, but – because of the cleanup nature of the revision – decided to stick with the existing revision number: 0.91.

Having two (albeit very similar) versions of RSS 0.91 was confusing. Worse though, in many people’s minds, was the fact that Winer had put a copyright notice on his 0.91 spec copyrighting it to UserLand Software.

1.0: Return to RDF

There was clearly a need to extend RSS, now that people were really starting to use it on their websites. Web sites like the Motley Fool financial website wanted to add elements to their RSS feeds for their own purposes (for example, an element to house the stock symbol for a listing), but there was disagreement about how this kind of thing should be done.

In an article on the O’Reilly xml.com website in July 2000, Rael Dornfest summarized the position of RSS:

RSS is going to have to evolve or die as it gets pulled in different directions. If it can't support the directions required by different developers, it will fade in favor of more special purpose formats.

…

RSS has seen a large degree of adoption from independent content producers, yet has failed to grab the attention of mainstream content providers. Perhaps the high eyeball/effort ratio message just hasn't been delivered. Or is it the "terminal beta" feel of RSS with its < 1.0 versioning that makes anyone but early adopters nervous?

…

RSS also needs more "killer apps,"

…

Scalable extensibility is a must if RSS is to continue being re-purposed. Yet this extensible RSS must remain relatively simple (somewhere between HTML and hard-core RDF should do!) …

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/07/17/syndication/rss.html

Dornfest took up his own challenge and in August 2000, together with a group of like-minded individuals (including Ramanathan Guha), he proposed that a spec should be developed for RSS 1.0. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/syndication/message/372

He also announced the RSS-DEV mailing list. The design goals of the RSS-DEV working group were:

The modular extension of existing RSS through XML Namespaces and RDF

stressing backward compatibility with RSS 0.9 for ease of adoption

by existing syndicated content producers.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/

The RSS 1.0 spec was published in December 2000:

http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/spec

It was an attempt to get RSS back on the RDF track, after it’s detour away from RDF with Dan Libby’s modifications for Netscape’s RSS 0.91.

But perhaps the main result was just more confusion because, while RSS 1.0 was backwards compatible with RSS 0.9, it was not compatible with either of the 0.91 versions.

0.92: Enclosures

Dave Winer added to the version numbering fun by publishing RSS 0.92 two weeks after the publication of RSS 1.0.

RSS 0.92 was significant in a number of ways. Character limits were removed, meaning, for example, a description could be just as descriptive as it needed to be. Every child element within the item element now became optional. And the four new elements were also optional, meaning that a 0.91 file was also a valid 0.92 file.

http://backend.userland.com/rss092

Of those four new elements, one would lead to a whole new use for RSS.

This was the enclosure element. Writing in 2003, Dave Winer explains the enclosure element like this:

Like the enclosure of an email message, an RSS item enclosure is something big that may take a long time to download, or something binary that isn't text you read. You can read the text that describes the enclosure, or the enclosure may somehow be related to the item.

An example. Suppose a news source, like the NY Times runs a movie review. It might make sense to enclose a trailer for the movie along with the review. Or a band might use RSS to keep their fans informed of what they're up to. An enclosure could include a bit of music to illustrate a point.

The cool thing about enclosures is that they can be time-shifted. The aggregator or news readers should not download the enclosure until the computer is idle, and should not present the item with the enclosure to the user until the enclosure has been downloaded and is resident on the local hard disk. The key premise is No More Click-Wait.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/enclosuresAggregators.html

However, back in December 2000 the full usefulness of enclosures in RSS was still a fairly vague dream in the minds of a handful of people, and the importance of this addition to RSS would remain unrealised for a few years yet.

There was now a period of relative quiet for RSS, in which the 0.92 version became very widely used, and millions of RSS feeds were published, around the world, using this format, allowing people to access regularly updated information, without having to browse the web. Information from the sites they subscribed to simply appeared, automatically, collected together in their feed reader of choice. Dave Winer discussed an 0.93 version with some small modifications, such as allowing multiple enclosures within an item element, but this version never appeared.

Feedreader application circa 2001

Syndirella feed reader, 2003

NewzCrawler feed reader, 2002

weblogs.com

During 2001 Winer made an important, and ingenious, change to his weblogs.com blog indexing site. The site had been using a script to go out and check for newly updated blog feeds and index them. However, by 2001 there were already a lot of blogs out there and it was becoming impractical to go out looking for changes on all those RSS feeds. So Winer turned the process around and the server that hosted weblogs.com now became a “ping server”. This meant that the server used a very basic function available to all servers: the ability to receive and record pings (that is, tiny messages sent from one computer to another, originally designed to check if the computer at the other end was running and responding). Instead of a service that has to go out and check whether feeds have been updated, the idea of a ping server was that the sites would tell the server when a feed had been updated. When the weblogs.com server received a ping it would flag up to anyone subscribing to the service that that feed had been updated. This allowed weblogs.com to serve as a central repository of information about new, and newly updated, RSS feeds, and it, in turn, was used by popular blogging services like Technorati and Feedster. The service became very popular with bloggers trying to make their blogs visible to a wider audience, and before too long weblogs.com would be getting over a million pings per day.

2.0: Rich Site Summary

The following year, in August 2002, Winer published the spec for RSS 2.0. Again this spec was copyrighted to UserLand Software. Prior to its publication, the spec had been developed using the version number 0.94, and, as this suggests, it was an evolutionary variation on the popular 0.92 spec.

One important change, however, was that the spec allowed for extension of RSS with elements that weren’t defined in the spec, provided those elements were associated with a namespace.

As of Dan Libby’s 0.91 version, RSS had stood for Rich Site Summary. The 2.0 spec now stated that RSS stood for Really Simple Syndication. This made sense as, by 2002, RSS wasn’t really about summarising a website any more – it was much more a way of allowing your newly published content to be republished in an unknowable number of places and contexts: perhaps within a stream of information in someone’s personal news reader or maybe on some other web page alongside information from similar sites to yours.

Sites quickly began to switch from 0.92 to the new 2.0 version, and RSS 2.0 became the most popular format for blog feeds. In November 2002, The New York Times showed that RSS had really started to be part of the internet mainstream when it extended its use of RSS, to allow its readers to subscribe to news feeds on a wide variety of topics.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=105317&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=593901

Winer left UserLand Software around the time of the initial publication of RSS 2.0 in 2002. The following year he became resident fellow at the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. In July 2003 he published a 2.0.1 version of the spec and assigned the copyright to the Berkman Center. It was then made available for use under a Creative Commons licence.

Winer wanted RSS 2.0 to be something that was now set in stone and couldn’t be changed. The reason for this was that he wanted “to foster growth in the market that [was] developing around it, and to clear the path for innovation in new syndication formats.” http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification#roadmap

Winer’s increasingly dominant version of RSS was therefore, for all practical purposes, frozen.

Atom

On the 16 June 2003, Sam Ruby, a software developer at IBM, wrote a blog post called “Anatomy of a Well Formed Log Entry”, including a link to a wiki he’d set up for the purpose of discussing what a standard blogging format should look like.

The wiki quickly became a rallying point for people who were keen to see some development of RSS (now frozen at 2.0).

One of the supporters of this effort was Tim Bray (who had worked with Ramanathan Guha at Netscape back in 1997 and had been on the RDF Working Group). Bray described the reasons for working on this new project:

Firstly, there were too many versions of RSS, and confusion over which one should be used

Next, it seemed unlikely, to say the least, that it would be possible to bring together the various factions, who had opinions about RSS, to produce a new, merged RSS version. Bray wrote:

"the interested parties have a track record of inability to get along and work things out and make progress. To the extent that in some circles “RSS” has become a synonym for “Reliably Spiteful Squabbling."

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/06/23/SamsPie

Bray believed that the RSS 2.0 spec was “significantly underspecified”, which led to a variety of problems – for instance, the title element in RSS 2.0 might contain HTML or it might be plain text, but there was no easy way for an RSS application like a blog aggregator to know which type was being used.

Finally, there was a feeling that the technology surrounding RSS had matured (even if some of the personalities involved hadn’t) and a large enough community had developed with a good understanding and agreement about the problems that needed solved.

What evolved out of Sam Ruby’s wiki was originally called “pie” (with the intention that it should be as easy as …), but was then also known as “echo” for a while – until finally the name “atom” was settled on.

Atom was specifically intended to support blogs. It did pretty much exactly what RSS 2.0 did, but was designed to be more flexible.

Here’s Tim Bray on the similarities between Atom and RSS 2.0:

SOUND CLIP OF:

“So what is Atom. If you know RSS 2, Atom is really, really, really like RSS 2.”

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1155.html# 20.35 mins

Initially, in 2003, there was lots of excitement and noise about Atom. Dave Winer seemed to have an uncanny knack of sparking off flame wars on a regular basis, and there were a lot of people who were contributing to the Atom debate at least partly because it promised an RSS-type solution that had nothing to do with Winer.

The development of a spec for Atom continued, and things gradually quietened down, and as 2004 wore on RSS 2.0 continued to establish itself.

By 2004, enthusiasm for Atom had already quietened down (http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail260.html# ~57 mins)

However, Atom had many influential friends.

In February 2003 the blogging tool Blogger had been bought by Google. Blogger had been co-founded by Evan Williams, who went on to start up the podcasting directory Odeo, before creating the phenomenon that is twitter.

In January 2004 Google added Atom support to Blogger, allowing its million-plus users to generate feeds that could be aggregated by Atom-enabled feed readers. Blogger’s support for Atom was a huge boost to the adoption of the new format, but RSS 2.0 was used by Yahoo, by Microsoft on parts of their website and by a host other major websites and publishing tools.

The Atom 1.0 spec was eventually published in December 2005:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt

In October 2006 IE7 was released with support for RSS, but not Atom. Within IE7, when you visited a site with RSS feeds, a little orange RSS icon lit up on the toolbar. Clicking this gave you a selection of links to the feed pages, from where you could click to add the feed to your own personal list of RSS feeds, which you accessed within the Favorites panel.

RSS 2.0 is generally considered to have won the war of the feed formats. Atom is probably a superior format in many ways but, just like the VHS/Betamax battle of the 1980s, the technically superior challenger doesn’t always win. However, unlike VHS and Betamax, there didn’t have to be a winner. Aggregators support both formats just fine and users don’t need to choose – in fact users don’t even need to know whether the site they’ve subscribed to uses Atom or RSS.

For consumers, a more interesting topic in 2004 was something that had been happening as a result of the introduction of the enclosure element into RSS.

The birth of podcasting

In an article from July 2003 Dave Winer describes the use of enclosures:

Adam Curry is a television personality with several weblogs and his own reality show called Adam's Family. He was also one of the first video jocks on MTV in the 1980s. He was the guy with the fantastic hair, and great sense of humor.

Adam uses a weblog tool that allows him to include an enclosure on any item. …

Now, on the receiving end, I have subscribed to Adam's feed in my news aggregator. In its hourly scan, the aggregator notes that there's a new item that has an enclosure. It adds the information about the enclosure to a table it's keeping, of enclosures that have not yet been downloaded.

When I'm finished for the day I leave my computer on. I like to have my aggregator check new feeds every hour even when I'm not there, and I also like to give it a chance to download enclosures so the clips that Adam creates will ready for me to watch when I arrive at work early the next morning.

Sure enough, yesterday Adam released a new installment of his reality show, and the QuickTime movie, all 34 megabytes of it, is on my hard drive, just waiting for me to watch. There's a note on the desktop website home page alerting me to its existence. I fill up my cup of coffee and then sit down to watch the latest from Adam's family in the Netherlands.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/enclosuresAggregators.html

In October 2003 Christopher Lydon interviewed Adam Curry. Curry talks about how RSS could be used to solve the bandwidth problem for consuming media files via the internet:
SOUND CLIP OF:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/lydondev/2003/10/03/connecting-the-dots-with-adam-curry/

16.29–18.02 mins - ends: “ands that’s a huge success”

A year later (12 October 2004), in an interview with Doug Kaye on IT Conversations, Curry describes the birth of his iPodder script in more detail:

SOUND CLIP OF:

http://cdn.itconversations.com/Adam%20Curry%20-%20Behind%20the%20Mic.mp3
31.48–35.06 mins

The enclosure element that made all of this possible had actually been part of RSS since the publication of the 0.92 spec in December 2000. Curry was one of several people who had talked to Winer during that year about adding an element that would allow audio and video files to be referenced in an RSS feed in such a way that it would be easy for users to retrieve these files from within their feed aggregator.

So the enclosure element was in there, in 0.92, but hardly anyone ever used it, and many people didn’t even become aware of it until RSS 2.0. Here’s IT Conversations founder Doug Kaye talking in August 2006:
SOUND CLIP OF:

http://news.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1192.html#
6.12–7.10 mins, ending: “that was the early days”

But a select few had been doing things with RSS and audio files prior to 2004.

For example, in summer 2003, Stephen Downes created an application he called Ed Radio that collected links to MP3 files from RSS feeds and published them as a playlist on WebJay, a website for creating and playing collections of audio files.

Dave Winer himself was another early user of the enclosures element. From early 2001 he started testing the use of enclosures by publishing an RSS feed containing a different Grateful Dead track every day or so:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/examples/sampleRss092.xml

Then, in 2003, Winer put together an RSS feed containing a collection of recordings of technology interviews done by his friend and colleague at the Berkman Center, Christopher Lydon (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/lydondev/all-the-lydon-interviews-in-one-download/). We heard a clip from Lydon’s interview with Adam Curry a little earlier.

So the enclosure element had been used, but Adam Curry had two ideas that were key to making media file delivery via RSS really work:

Don’t just present the user with a link that they click on to download the file then and there – and wait ... and wait ... for the file to start playing – instead, get the file on the sly, in the background, drip by drip, and then (and only then) tell the user about it so that they can listen to it or view it without any delay.

Take the downloaded file and put it straight onto the user’s portable device, so that it just appears there without the user having to do anything other than connect their MP3 player to their computer.

When audioblogging (as it was then called) started to take off (with shows like Dave Winer’s “Morning Coffee Notes” and then Adam Curry’s hugely popular “Daily Source Code”) the first of these points, downloading the media files, was handled by an application like Radio, UserLand’s blogging software. Getting the files onto your MP3 player was generally left up to you.

Adam Curry had written a script to perform the second task, getting the files onto his iPod, and several other, more fully featured programs appeared during 2004 to do this job.

But for most people, it wasn’t until Apple embraced podcasting that these 2 functions really came together seamlessly. Podcast support was introduced into the desktop iTunes application with iTunes 4.9 in June 2005, and quickly became the most commonly used way of getting podcast files onto the world’s most popular portable MP3 device, the iPod.

The term “podcasting” first appeared early in 2004. The first published use of the word seems to have been in The Guardian newspaper in an article called “Audible revolution” published in February 2004. The name podcast – a combination of “broadcast” and “iPod” – reflects the total dominance of the iPod in the MP3 player market, a dominance gained almost from the day it was launched, back in October 2001.

Advertisement for the first iPod, launched October 2001

Will the real Podfather please stand up?

There has been some debate about who created podcasting. It’s a fairly pointless debate. However, it’s clear that the drip-feed/watch-it-when-it’s-downloaded idea was Adam Curry’s.

In a DaveNet article entitled “Virtual Bandwidth” from October 2000 Winer writes:

In New York I spent the better part of two days brainstorming with Adam Curry, former MTV video jock, Internet advertising entrepreneur, and now a man obsessed with a vision that I'm beginning to understand.

http://www.scripting.com/Davenet/2000/10/31/virtualBandwidth.html

Then in January 2001, in a post titled “Payloads for RSS”, Winer writes:

When I started talking with Adam late last year, he wanted me to think about high quality video on the Internet, and I totally didn't want to hear about it. Like a lot of people, I had tried it, and found it unsatisfying and frankly, exhausting.

I thought that video on the Internet was a loser for three reasons, that build on each other:

1. When I click on a link to view some video, I have to wait.

2. The wait is longer than the video. (In other words I have to wait two minutes for ten seconds of video.)

3. The quality is horrible.

All three effects are bad, but the first is the worst. The Internet lifestyle is frenetic. There's no time to wait. The remaining two negatives only make video less attractive, but the first is the killer.

But Adam persisted and showed me that if I was willing to change my point of view, it could work, without any waiting and with very high quality.

What if, in the middle of the night, while I'm not using my computer, it downloads huge video and audio stuff to my local hard drive. …

Let's see what happens with 1, 2 and 3 in this scenario.

1. When I click on a link to view some video, it starts playing immediately, because it is already on my local disk.

2. The wait is zero.

3. The quality is limited by the size of my local disk, not by the capacity of my connection.

What's different about this system is that you subscribe to channels instead of clicking-and-waiting.

http://web.archive.org/web/20010202144800/www.thetwowayweb.com/payloadsForRss

Conclusion

RSS has been one of the technologies that has helped make the internet a worldwide publication system that, every minute of every day, brings information and entertainment to the world. From an impossibly vast ocean of information on the internet, RSS makes it possible for us to divert a river of news that we can dip into as and when we want. It lets us subscribe to email notifications of blog posts, and it lets us write a message once and have it appear on our blog, on Facebook, in twitter and elsewhere. It allows us to watch or listen to programs on our mobile devices when we’re on our way to work or at the gym or in the supermarket. It was one of the first successful applications of XML and yet for most web users it’s completely invisible.

And without RSS you wouldn’t be listening to this now.

Where are they now?

So what happened to the main players in the development of RSS?

Ramanathan Guha

is reported to have walked away from $4 million in stock options when AOL acquired Netscape because he wanted to be free to start up his own company.

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/11/magazine/instant-company.html?pagewanted=2

In 1999 he became one of the co-founders of Epinions.com, a shopping and consumer review website.

Guha left Epinions after a year, and, for a second time, he missed out on making himself a very rich man. By April 2003, Epinions was in trouble and was sold to DealTime, another online shopping site. The result of the deal was Shopping.com. Unfortunately for Guha, he wasn’t around to share in the bonanza 18 months later when, on the day of its IPO, the board members of Shopping.com made an estimated $250 million profit on their shares.

From 2002 to 2005 Guha work for IBM Research and since 2005 he’s been working as Principal Scientist at Google.

Tim Bray

worked as Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems until February 2010. He now works as a Developer Advocate at Google.

Dan Libby

left Netscape in 1999 to join Ramanathan Guha’s web startup Epinions.com.

In 2001, Libby began working as a private consultant and then moved to Costa Rica where he works on open source projects.

http://osc.co.cr/aboutus/aboutus.html?menubar=aboutus

Adam Curry

continues being one of the internet’s most prolific podcasters. He continued producing the Daily Source Code pretty much every day of the week until 2008, when episodes started to become less frequent and the last show, to date, appeared in February 2009. Since October 2007 Curry has appeared on the No Agenda podcast twice a week with John C Dvorak.

In October 2004, Curry co-founded PodShow.

In 2008 PodShow became Mevio – the name change indicating a change of emphasis: away from podcasting and towards slicker, more professional media, in particular video rather than audio. No surprise here since video had originally been what Curry wanted enclosures for in RSS.

Dave Winer

sold weblogs.com to VeriSign in October 2005 for $2.3 million (http://news.cnet.com/VeriSign-snags-Weblogs.com/2100-1030_3-5890829.html).

Winer continues to blog almost every day on his Scripting News blog.

So finally, let’s end with some words from Dave Winer, from a Morning Coffee Notes podcast from July 14, 2004.

SOUND CLIP: Dave Winer blog 14 July 2004 – last part of

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/blogs/gems/crimson1/coffeeNotesJuly14.mp3

from answer 4 to end of podcast

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TweetDeck creator describes the benefits of Adobe AIR

ac — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:39:33 +0000

Until I came across this video I hadn't realised that:
a) TweetDeck was a UK creation
b) It was the work of one man: Iain Dodsworth

TweetDeck is a phenomenal piece of work to be created by one man. Hats off to the guy!

But why does someone go to the trouble (and it must have taken a serious amount of work) to create application as superbly usable as TweetDeck? To make some money out of it? How do you make money out of something that's given away free? Iain Dodsworth explains his plan:

What makes Steve Jobs an irresistible leader?

ac — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 12:22:35 +0000

So we all know about Steve Jobs. But, what the heck, let's trot through the well-worn path of his public life.

The early years where he hooked up with a brilliant young engineer called Steve Wozniak and got him to design circuit boards that people still consider works of engineering artistry. The huge success of the Apple II in the late '70s when the microcomputer industry was in its infancy. His immediate grasp, on visiting Xerox PARC, of the business potential of the mouse and graphical user interface. The Apple Lisa and then the phenomenon that was the Macintosh. His sacking from Apple in 1985 and the launch of NeXT (identifying UNIX as the operating system that would allow him to continue pursuing the ideas he'd been trying to develop at Apple). The $10M purchase of a division of Lucasfilm the following year (which went on to become Pixar). The transformation of that $10M into a $585M share value when Pixar went public in 1995. The stagnation of Apple without Jobs. His return to Apple in 1996 (shortly afterwards taking on the mantle of "interim" CEO - as if anyone was fooled that he wouldn't stick around). The uber-stylish iMac in 1998 (the first of the iBrands and the fast-selling Macintosh ever). The license to print money that was the iPod/iTunes application/iTunes Music Store triumvirate. The successful replacement of the old Mac OS with Mac OS X, an operating system based on the work done at NeXT. And then in 2007 the launch of a mobile phone - but not just any mobile phone - of course it's not - this is Apple, so it just has to be, indisputably, the best mobile phone ever.

So that's all well and good. But out of all his background of success and his personal qualities - his obsession for beautiful hardware design, his extreme attention to detail, his ferocious determination to protect Apple's intellectual property, his own personal self-branding, his Wonka-esque control over what information comes out of Apple - out of all this, what is it that makes people follow Jobs, and hang on his every word, like no other business leader.

For an answer, look no further than this footage from Apple's sales conference in Hawaii in October 1983:

It's his passion, his complete commitment and his palpable belief in the importance of what he's saying that make this so totally captivating. If Jobs had been an army recruiting sergeant, looking for recruits to fight the evil Big Blue, I'd have enlisted on the spot.

Scott Hanselman and Chris Sells on managing people and your time

ac — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:13:52 +0000

As a manager who never set out to be a manager (but who, nevertheless, is trying to be a good manager) Scott Hanselman's recent follow-up interview with Chris Sells about management struck a chord with me and I wanted to share it.

Among the things Scott and Chris discuss are:

Being an advocate for the people you manage
Getting things done means ignoring emails ("At Microsoft you either write code or you delete email")
"No meeting Wednesday"
Weekly or daily task setting and progress reporting
Prime motivators for getting things done: shame and fear

Chris talks about Scott reduced posting to Computer Zen since becoming a manager. I think what he's saying is: you can be a good manager, a good website contributor, a good husband, a good father - but you only get to choose one of the above.

I'd like to think that's not true.

Please note: This video is from Microsoft's Channel 9 website and (I'm guessing) is the copyright property of Microsoft, or maybe of Scott Hanselman. Go to the original page on Channel 9 to see the video in its Channel 9 context, complete with comments.

Brian Eno’s Bloom application on your PC

ac — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 11:41:38 +0000

Thanks to my colleague Jim for sharing this via Facebook.

Brian Eno has created an ambient music application for the iPhone. The blurb at http://generativemusic.com/ says:

Developed by ambient pioneer Brian Eno and musician/software designer Peter Chilvers, Bloom explores uncharted territory in the realm of applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. Part instrument, part composition and part artwork, Bloom’s innovative controls allow anyone to create elaborate patterns and unique melodies by simply tapping the screen. A generative music player takes over when Bloom is left idle, creating an infinite selection of compositions and their accompanying visualisations.

Fortunately, for those of us without iPhones, there’s a Flash version of it for the PC. Go to this URL, turn on your speakers and click around:

http://www.nuigroup.com/bloom/bloom.swf

Listening to RealAudio on your MP3 player

ac — Sun, 24 May 2009 13:49:24 +0000

I love listening to spoken-word audio on my iPod,, but, on the whole, I don’t like listening to audio from a Web page. Partly this is because the sound card on my Dell Vostro 1700 is extremely poor and picks up interference from the hard disk drive. But mainly it’s because I like to listen to audio when I’m walking the dog and when I’m commuting to work in my car.

Most of the time this means listening to podcasts and usually these days, where audio is available on a Web page it’s in MP3 format and it’s also available as a podcast. But in some places audio is still only available as RealAudio, which has to be played on your computer using RealPlayer.

So, if you’re like me, you need a way of getting audio that’s only available in RealAudio format off a Web page, into MP3 format, and into your iPod or other MP3 player.

My particular case was that I wanted to listen to the well-known audio documentary “Ghetto Life 101”. This is available from Sound Portraits (http://soundportraits.org/on-air/ghetto_life_101/) as a RAM file. Alternatively you can find a collection of David Isay documentaries, all as RAM files, here: http://www.talkinghistory.org/isay.html.

So here’s one way of doing this (this relies on using Firefox as your browser):

Download and install Firefox if you don’t already use this as your browser.
Once you’ve installed Firefox, download and install the DownloadThemAll Firefox add-on.
Browse to the Web page containing the RAM file you want to play on your MP3 player. For example, try going to http://www.talkinghistory.org/isay.html.
Choose Tools > DownloadThemAll! Tools > DownloadThemAll!

The DownloadThemAll! dialog box opens, listing all the downloadable files on the Web page.
Unselect any selected Filter checkbox and enter *ram in the Fast filtering field. This will select just files with the .ram file name extension.

In this screenshot I’ve used the filter *isdn*ram, because the page I’m processing has three versions of each RAM file and I only want the ISDN-quality files (which all have “isdn” in the file name)
In the Save files in field, enter the location where you want to save the file(s).
Click Start!
Download and install FormatFactory.
Start FormatFactory and click All to MP3.
Click Add File.
Select all the RAM files you downloaded.
Click OK.
Copy the resulting MP3 files to your MP3 player, or drag them into your music folder in iTunes and sync your iPod.

If you’re downloading a lot of files, you might like to give them all the same artist or album tag. To do this really easily, right-click this link and download and install ID3-TagIT (note: this link points to a zip file containing an .exe file – always run your virus scanner on any executable file you download before running it).

Is twitter yet another barrier to getting things done?

ac — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 12:00:33 +0000

Ever since I first heard about twitter (way back when, probably on TWIT), I’ve resisted getting involved in it because I was certain that it would be just another thing that would stop me getting things done. I eventually signed up at twitter, but just in a kind of a land-grab sort of way: to get the itauthor twitter name before someone else did. But not a tweet was heard from me after that. Not until recently.

After listening to an interview with the makers of Blu on Hanselminutes, I decided to download this desktop client for twitter, just to see the login screen that Scott was getting so excited about. Of course, needless to say, I start using it and pretty soon I’m installing TwitterBerry on my Blackberry.

So will it stop me getting things done? Well, I’m not sure yet. I can’t see myself twittering very much – but you never know. What I’d like to know is:
Is there some way in which twitter could help me to get things done?
If there is then I could justify using it and it wouldn’t feel – as it does right now – like a guilty pleasure.

Changing your CVS host

ac — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 12:29:48 +0000

What do you do if the host name of your CVS server changes? For example, here’s my case. I checked out a whole lot of CVS modules from the repository while my laptop was on the domain. Now however, thanks to Vista SP1 not playing with an antiquated NT domain, the laptop can’t join the domain so to connect to a server I need to qualify its name with a domain. So, whereas I checked out the modules using the hostname “cvshost”, I now need to use “cvshost.mydomain.co.uk”.

Unfortunately, TortoiseCVS has no way to change the host names for modules you’ve already checked out. WinCVS can, supposedly, do this thanks to a macro. However, WinCVS stubbornly tells me I don’t have Python installed (I do) and therefore won’t let me use macros.

The solution is to just go through all the CVS “Root” files and change the host name. The Root file lives in the CVS directory at each level within a checked out module. This would be a laborious task by hand, but if you have SUA (Microsoft’s Subsystem for UNIX Applications) and Perl installed it’s easy. Just pull up a Korn shell and browse to the directory within which your checked out CVS modules live.

Run the following command.

find . -name 'Root' -print0 | xargs -0 perl -pi -e 's/oldhostname/newhostname/g'

For example, I ran the command:

find . -name 'Root' -print0 | xargs -0 perl -pi -e 's/cvshost/cvshost.mydomain.co.uk/g'

Which changed the Contents of the Root file from:

:pserver:achristie@cvshost:/company/repository

to:

:pserver:achristie@cvshost.mydomain.co.uk:/company/repository

New article: taking control of the iPlayer

ac — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 00:12:31 +0000

The BBC iPlayer is a great bit of technology, but it's also a peer-to-peer file sharing client and sometimes you don't want lots of data being uploaded from your computer when you're trying to use that bandwidth for something else.

I've just added an article (my first since revamping this site) that describes how to take control of the iPlayer's KService Windows service and the iPlayer program itself: khost.exe.

Read the article: Preventing BBC iPlayer running all the time

Bob Dylan – more new old stuff

ac — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:50:54 +0000

I just stumbled upon the news that Bob Dylan has a new album out next week and NPR are streaming it on their Web site right now (but probably not for much longer).

OK, I know this has nothing to do with technical writing. But I like Bob Dylan and, hey, everyone needs a break from tech writing for a while (or for 12 months, and counting, in my case).

From what I've heard so far it's pretty good stuff but very familiar - very like the stuff he's done over the past years. Not surprising really. It is the stuff he's been doing over the past few years. It's more outtakes and tracks that didn't get used. But don't dismiss it for that. In true Dylan style, the tracks that didn't get used are sometimes better than the ones that did.

The YouTube video below is one of the tracks off the album.

I also came across a great Dylan podcast recently. It's not really a podcast though. It's a radio program that's been split up into a series of short podcasts. It's presented by Patti Smith (yes, the Patti Smith), who sounds very cool, and it has lots of great guests. Two problems with it though:

1. Like most music podcasts, you only get 30 seconds or so of each song.

2. There are only 19 episodes.

http://blogs.legacyrecordings.com/podcast/category/bob-dylan-podcast/

ISTC Conference 2008

Graham Campbell — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 11:07:40 +0000

Graham Campbell writes ...

Just a quick note to say I'll be attending the ISTC Conference in Nottingham next week. I'm not known to many (any?) of you, but I plan to get as many faces to blog names as possible while I'm there. So on that note, who else is attending? I hope to grab as many people as possible for impromptu, informal chats that may form the basis of a future podcast. If you'd be willing to donate 5 minutes of your time and insight to the ITAuthor podcast I'd love to hear from you.

When I return I'm sure I'll provide a round-up of the conference either in here or on the podcast itself. Alistair has been away at the UA Conference this week and may provide an update himself when he gets back.

ITauthor blog’s esteemed readership

ac — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:53:45 +0000

One thing about writing a blog is that most of the time you have no idea who's reading your posts. As a result, I usually assume no one's reading apart from me, until occasionally someone at work will mention something I wrote about. Of course I don't mind having an assumed readership of one because, by and large, I write this blog is for my own benefit and I do quite often use it to find out technical stuff I would otherwise have spent much longer finding via Google.

However, once in a while I'm reminded that other people might be reading some of this stuff too from time to time. This evening I logged into my WordPress dashboard (not something I often do, because I always post to my blog from Live Writer) and I noticed there was a comment sitting awaiting moderation.

Turns out it was a comment by brian d foy (his preferred style, in case you're wondering), the founder of Perl Mongers, author of Mastering Perl and co-author of Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl. Nice to know that at least one of my posts has had such an esteemed reader.

Oh and by the way, if you're reading this post of the front page of my blog, the way to post a comment is to click the post heading to display it as a single page and then scroll down the the comment form.

Another way to get emailed blog posts

ac — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:00:59 +0000

Following on from my previous post. I was looking for a way of getting emailed whenever anyone updated a shared Google calendar and I came across RSSFWD.

Here's how:

1. Copy the URL of the RSS feed.

Note: For a Google calendar, go into Settings, open the settings for the calendar you want to subscribe to, scroll to the bottom of the page and copy the URL for the publicly available RSS feed.

2. Go to
http://www.rssfwd.com/

3. Paste the URL into the "Enter the URL ..." field (replacing the text that's in there already).

4. Click Submit.

5. On the next page, enter your email address.

6. Select an email format from the drop-down list.

Note: As of today, individual emails are only being sent out once a day. I got a clutch of emails all sent at 2.40 am. So, given that you don't get individual emails throughout the day, you may as well choose one of the combined email formats.

7. Untick 'Share at "popular feeds" page'
THIS IS IMPORTANT!

8. Click Subscribe.

9. Go to your email application and check for a new email from .

10. When you get the email, click the link in it to confirm your subscription.

You will now be emailed updates to the RSS feed - for example, changes to a shared Google Calendar.

Get blog posts emailed to you

ac — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 10:42:39 +0000

I never seem to have time to read through Google Reader to see what new blog posts have been collected there. I prefer to get stuff mailed to me so that I can read it in Outlook. I'd set that up with a couple of blogs and then forgotten how I'd done it. Turns out I use FeedBlitz (as described in a previous post on this blog). Here's how to do it:

Get your RSS feed URL (for example, the RSS feed for this blog is http://www.itauthor.com/feed).
Paste the URL into the field below.
Click Submit Query.

Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

ac — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 17:51:34 +0000

YouTube is a wonderful thing. A few years ago there would be no way I'd ever have been able to watch a complete lecture given at a US university. So, like millions of other people who have watched it on YouTube, I'd have missed this lecture (below) by Randy Pausch, who died of cancer last week.

When he gave the lecture, he knew he had a few months left to live and he gives some sound advice for how to live your life, including the following:

You can't get there on your own. You need people to help you
Tell the truth
Be earnest ("I'll take an earnest person over a hip person every day, 'cause hip is short term, earnest is long term")
Apologise when you screw up
Focus on others, not yourself
Brick walls are there to let us show our dedication - [they're there to separate us from those who don't want the thing on the other side of the wall as badly as you do]
When people give you feedback, cherish it and use it
Be good at something, it makes you valuable
Find the best in everybody, even if you have to wait a long time for them to show it

Right now the points from this list that most resonate with me are:

Tell the truth
Professionally and in my personal life, I've increasingly come to wish that everybody would just stick to the truth. Things would be so much simpler and people, projects, companies would get in much less trouble if we really tried to tell the truth. Or, if you really can't tell the truth for some reason, just say nothing at all.

Focus on others
I'll admit it, this is not a strong point for me. I've recently been reminding myself on a regular basis that I've got to put more effort into this one.

Be good at something, it makes you valuable
Luckily for me I know I'm good at something. I'm good at documentation. Bid deal you might think, and maybe a year a go I was thinking that too. And, okay, it's not curing cancer or reversing global warming, but it's not nothing. I think it's something valuable, so it's worth trying to do it really well.

Find the best in everybody
I sometimes feel like I work in a very negative environment, where people take every opportunity to find fault in other people. And it's a very infectious thing. I admit to giving in to this bad habit. This is another thing I'm determined to work on. Maybe it just takes a few people to buck the trend and create an infectious habit of pointing out the good in people.

Here's the lecture:

Podcast automation without iTunes

ac — Fri, 16 May 2008 08:42:50 +0000

A lot of people still think that you need an iPod to listen to podcasts. Podcasting was lucky to piggyback on the phenomenal success of the iPod and the result was a lot of people listening to podcasts who wouldn't have been if the iPod had never been invented, or if podcasts hadn't been called podcasts. However, the name podcast has also had the downside that lots of people assume podcasts require an iPod. So there are lots of people out there with MP3 players, PDAs and media-playing mobile phones don't realise they could be part of the podcast-listening community. I've been listening to podcasts since mid-2005 but have never owned an iPod. I started listening by just downloading MP3 files and playing them on my PC on Windows Media Player, then got a PDA and started using that, transferring files over from PC to PDA via ActiveSync (a painfully slow process). I then discovered podcast clients that handled the downloading for you, and settled on Juice as the best of them. Then, after the PDA packed up, I was using a little stick-like MP3 player, again manually transferring files across from the Juice download directory onto the MP3 player. Finally, last year, I got a company Blackberry Curve, which includes pretty decent music playing software, and I started using that. I used the Sync feature in Windows Media Player to copy files onto the Blackberry. But it was still a little bit of a manual process to have to open Media Player and click Sync > Blackberry. What I wanted was the seamless experience of the iPod and iTunes, where syncing happens without any manually effort other than plugging in your iPod.

The following instructions tell you how to achieve this. It's a bit geeky I admit, but once you've set it up you don't need to do anything but plug in your MP3 player, phone or PDA and it gets loaded up with the latest podcasts you want to listen to. Additionally, it deletes old podcasts for you, so you don't have to do that manually to free up space for new stuff.

The method requires the following (more detail in the instructions below):

A Windows PC
An MP3 player of some description that shows up as an external storage device in Windows Explorer (in my case my Blackberry Curve
Perl installed on the PC
A couple of Perl scripts written by me (see below)
A podcast receiver such as Juice
Microsoft SyncToy

Of the above, you only need to pay for the hardware - all the other items are free downloads. So here are the setup steps. How to set up automatic podcast delivery to your MP3 player

Download and install Perl.

I use ActivePerl from ActiveState. There might be other versions of Perl for Windows, but ActivePerl is easy to install and does the job, so I'd recommend using that. Download the Windows MSI installer from ActiveState and then just run it like any Windows installer. It's dead easy, but if you need instructions you can find some in this article on About.com.Note: You want the Standard distribution, which is free. You'll get asked for registration details but you can leave the fields blank and just click Next if you want.
After installation is complete, open a command console window and type perl -v.If Perl is correctly installed you should see the Perl version details.
Download and install Juice, or any similar podcast receiver.
Subscribe to some podcasts in your podcast receiver.
Set up the podcast receiver so that it starts up when Windows launches (e.g. put a shortcut to the application in the Startup subdirectory of the Windows Start menu) and set the download folder in the Preferences, making sure there are no spaces in your directory names (i.e. D:\MyStuff\MyPodcasts good, D:\My Stuff\My Podcasts bad).
Set the scheduler so that as well as checking for new podcasts when the application start (see the Preferences) it also checks at regular periods thereafter. For example, I have Juice set to check for new podcasts every four hours:

So you've now got things set up so that you get new podcasts onto your PC automatically. Pretty straightforward stuff so far. The problem with this setup is that your hard disk will gradually fill up with an enormous amount of MP3s. The next thing to do is to set up a Perl script that will delete old files from your download location for you.
Create a directory to hold the Perl scripts you're going to need. For example, mine live in:D:\Alistair\ProgrammingStuff\PerlScripts

Note: As previously noted, the directory names shouldn't have any spaces in them.
Use the following link to download a zip file containing two Perl scripts:http://www.itauthor.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/podcastperlscripts.zip

Unzip the file and save deleter.pl and run-synctoy.pl to the directory you created in step 7.The script we're interested in right now is deleter.pl. It's a simple script that just deletes files in or below a specified directory that are older than a specified number of days old. Here's the code in case you're interested (don't worry, you don't need to understand this to use the script):

   1: #!perl -w

2:

   3: use strict;

   4: use File::Find;

5:

   6: # This script deletes all files older than a specified age

   7: # in, ***or below***, a specified directory

   8: # (or the current directory if none specified)

9:

  10: # To test the script (i.e. list files that would have been

  11: # deleted, without actually deleting them),

  12: # comment out the line containing "unlink $_".

13:

  14: usage() if (! @ARGV || $ARGV[0] =~ /\D/);

15:

  16: my $age = $ARGV[0];

  17: my $dir = $ARGV[1] || '.';

  18: my $message  = "\nThe following files have been deleted:\n";

  19: my $files    = "";

20:

  21: find(sub { $files .= "$_\n" if (-M $_ > $age && $_ ne "."); }, $dir);

  22: find(sub { unlink $_ if (-M $_ > $age && $_ ne "."); }, $dir);

23:

  24: $message="\nNo files were deleted.\n\n" unless $files;

  25: print $message.$files;

26:

27:

  28: sub usage {

  29: print <<'EOF';

30:

  31: USAGE:

  32: ========

  33:  n [directory]

34:

  35: Where:

  36: - scriptname is the name of this Perl script.

  37: - n is the number of days previous to today.

  38: - directory is an optional parameter that specifies

  39:   the directory where files exist.

  40:   Note: the default is the current directory.

41:

  42: For example:

  43: - "perl deleter.pl 5" - deletes files older than 5 days.

  44: - "perl deleter.pl 120 c:\temp" - deletes files in or below the

  45:   c:\temp directory that are older than 120 days.

  46: EOF

  47: exit;

  48: }

Now the script is in place, you can set up a Windows scheduled task to run this script.

From the Windows Start menu select All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Task Scheduler.
Choose Action > Create Task.Note: These instructions are for Vista but the process should be very similar on XP.
In the General tab, give the task a name – for example, podcast-deleter.
Make sure the Run with highest privileges check box is selected.
In the Triggers tab, click New.
In the New Trigger dialog box, set up the schedule for the task. For example, I have my task scheduled to run daily at lunchtime (13.19 to be precise).
Make sure the Enabled check box is selected and click OK.
In the Actions tab, click New.
In the New Action dialog box, leave the Action as Start a program.
Click Browse and find the perl executable file. If you installed ActivePerl, the path is probably C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe.
In the Add arguments field, enter the following on one line:

– the full path to the deleter.pl script

– the number of days old a file must be older than for it to be deleted (I've got mine set to 5)

– in double quotes: the full path to the directory into which your podcasts are downloaded

The value I have in this field is:

D:\Alistair\ProgrammingStuff\PerlScripts\deleter.pl 5 "D:\Alistair\Downloads\podcasts"

Note: you can leave the Start in field blank.
Click OK and, back in the task Properties dialog box, click OK again.

You've now got a scheduled task that will run automatically every day and delete your old podcast files. I listen to a lot of weekly podcasts, mainly from the BBC, and I've almost always listened to them within the 5 days they get to stay on my PC.

Now let's turn our attention to getting the podcasts onto your MP3 player.
Download and install SyncToy from Microsoft.

Note: Make sure you get version 2.0 or higher. If the link above doesn't work by the time you're reading this, go to the Microsoft Download Center and search for "SyncToy".SnycToy is a great, free application whose silly name belies the fact that it is a seriously useful tool. In short what it lets you do is choose two folders that you want to synchronise. Typically you'd use it to automatically backup documents, images or music onto a network drive, an external hard drive or another computer on your network. But here we're going to use it to copy over your podcasts from your PC to your MP3 player, phone, PDA etc.
Make sure your MP3 player is connected to your PC.
Start SyncToy and click Create New Folder Pair.
Using the Browse buttons, enter the paths to the podcasts directory on your PC ("Left Folder") and the destination directory on your MP3 player ("Right Folder").
Click Next.
Select Echo.

Echo provides a one-way sync from left to right. This means that new podcasts on the PC will get copied to your MP3 player, and when the script deletes podcasts they'll be deleted from the MP3 player.
Click Next.
Give the sync job a name, making sure the name doesn't contain any spaces.
Click Finish.
You can now click Run to run the synchronisation for the first time.

Note: the first time you run a synchronisation it may take quite a long time to complete. Be patient. For subsequent syncs it does incremental backups and is much faster. Now we need to automate SyncToy to run at regular intervals. Fortunately, SyncToy comes with a separate executable that's designed to be run from the command line. We're going to use the other Perl script you downloaded to run this executable silently, in the background, without the user interface being displayed.
Go to the location in which you saved the Perl scripts you downloaded earlier and open run-synctoy.pl in a plain text editor such as Notepad or UltraEdit.
Carefully edit the values for the three variables so that they reflect the correct details for your setup:

$destination

The full path to the directory on the MP3 player where you want podcasts to be synced to.

Note: Make sure you use two backslashes for every backslash in the path (so G:\Music becomes G:\\Music).

$synctoy

The full path to the SyncToyCmd.exe file.

Note: If the path contains any directories with spaces in their names you're going to have to rename these. For instance, I had to rename SyncToy 2.0 Beta as SyncToy-2.0-Beta. Also, make sure you specify the command-line version of the application, SyncToyCmd.exe, and not the user interface version: SyncToy.exe.

$flag

The name you gave to the folder pair in SyncToy.

Note: the quoted value must start with a space followed by -R followed directly, with no space, by the name of the folder pair.

Here's what my version of the file looks like:
```
   1: #!perl -w
```
```
   2:
```
```
   3: use strict;
```
```
   4:
```
```
   5: # Edit the following to the destination drive & path for your MP3 player:
```
```
   6: my $destination  = "G:\\Music";
```
```
   7:
```
```
   8: # Edit the following to the path to SyncToyCmd.exe on your computer:
```
```
   9: # Note: The path must not contain any spaces.
```
```
  10: my $synctoy      = "D:\\programs\\SyncToy-2.0-Beta\\SyncToyCmd.exe";
```
```
  11:
```
```
  12: # Edit the following to "-R:
```
```
  13: my $flag      = " -Rpodcasts-to-blackberry";
```
```
  14:
```
```
  15:
```
```
  16: unless (-e $destination) {
```
```
  17:         die ("The desintation location:\n" . $destination . "\ndoes not exist -");
```
```
  18: }
```
```
  19:
```
```
  20: unless (-e $synctoy) {
```
```
  21:         die ("SyncToy not found at the specified path:\n" . $synctoy . " -");
```
```
  22: }
```
```
  23:
```
```
  24:
```
```
  25: `$synctoy, $flag`;
```
Save your changes.

OK, we're near the end now. Congratulations if you've got this far.

Pretty much all we have to do now is set up another Windows scheduled task to run this Perl script on a regular basis. The reason for using a Perl script here, rather than just running the executable directly is that it allows us to check whether the remote destination is available (e.g. your phone or MP3 player is connected to the PC) before attempting to run SyncToy.
Back in Task Scheduler (All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Task Scheduler) choose Action > Create Task.
In the General tab, give the task a name – for example, Sync-podcasts-to-Blackberry.
In the Triggers tab, click New.
In the New Trigger dialog box, set up the schedule for the task.
You probably want to set up a few of these triggers because you may not always have your MP3 connected when the task kicks off, especially if it's your phone. For example I've got four triggers set up, at 11am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm:
In the Actions tab, click New.
In the New Action dialog box, leave the Action as Start a program.
Click Browse and find the run-synctoy.pl script.
Leave the Add arguments field empty and in the Start in field add the path to the directory in which Perl lives. If you installed ActivePerl, the path is probably C:\Perl\bin.
Click OK and, back in the task Properties dialog box, click OK again.

You've now got a scheduled task that will run automatically several times a day, causing SyncToy to copy new podcasts to your MP3 player and delete the old ones.

And that's it!

The beauty of this setup is that the end result is you always have a recent selection of podcasts to listen to on your MP3 player, you don't have to manually delete old podcasts, all you do need to do is plug the device into your PC. Job done!

Interviews are for both sides of the table

ac — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:34:36 +0000

Finding the right person for a job is a little bit like finding the right house. Any time I've been looking for a new house it's been because I've moved somewhere new and I need to find a house within a defined timeframe. I've taken on a six month rent initially just to give me a chance to settle in and get to know the area, and I don't want to find somewhere right away because I've just committed to six months rent. So I give it a few months, settle into my new job and then start looking for a house. That means, in reality, I've maybe got three months to find a house and move in so that I don't have to pay another six months' rent.

The point is that you only get to choose from what happens to be available within that little time slot. Despite the fact that this is the place where you're going to live for the next few years, maybe many years, you have to choose from the few properties that happen to come up for sale right when you've looking.

Filling a position within a company is a bit like that. As the recruiter, you've got to choose from what's available. And if you've got a good recruitment agency working for you, and you're lucky, you might just get some great candidates applying. Now what you've got to watch out for is that you don't blow your chance of getting a great candidate take the job.

A great place to live will be lived in for years and years. The people who live there will be in no rush to leave. So that house maybe only comes up for sale once every twenty or thirty years. And when it does, it'll be sold in a week at the price the seller wants to get. If you take a week off from your house searching, you might miss it. If you see it and love it, but you hum and haw about the price and then decide maybe you'll be able to bid low and steal it, then you'll miss out and live to regret it. I'm speaking from experience here. I still remember a fantastic house in Portobello I wish we'd bid more for.

Similarly with great candidates for that role you need to fill. The really good tech authors or developers or testers - if they're looked after by an employer and nurtured in their careers - maybe only only come on the market once in ten years.

As the recruiter you've got to make sure that you remember that the great candidate is not desperate to have this job you're trying to fill. The interview should not be like an interview down your local nick: "We ask the questions sonny!" This is a two-way trading of skills, experience and labour in return for a great working environment, interesting work to stimulate and stretch the candidate, and a great package of benefits (not just cash, but a decent spec laptop, up-to-date software, no skimping on the budget for software and books, a work-from-home policy, food if you have to work through lunch or in the evening - all the kind of stuff that avoids people feeling like they're just working for the man).

I've been recruiting for a new tech author recently and I always try to remind myself, before I go into an interview, of the one that got away. The candidate who shone out as an obvious big asset for the company, who I failed to sell the job to, and when I offered him the job he turned it down. Hiring and firing are two of the most important things to the health of a company - especially for a fairly small company. For a company of ten thousand, one bad hiring doesn't have a huge impact unless it's at director level. For a company of a hundred, one bad hire at any level will hurt, and one great hire will make a positive difference that will ripple throughout the company. For that reason, letting a great hire slip from your grasp is a serious offence but an offence for which the offender is never punished.

As a recruiter your job has two imperatives:

1) Make sure you choose the best person for the job. There may not always be a great candidate, you may have to just choose the best of the good ones. But you've got to make sure this person is right for the job and right for the company. There are many thousands of pounds at stake here. Chances are the hiring decision is the biggest single purchase you'll ever make on the company's behalf. Spend it like it was your own money.

2) Make sure you don't miss out. In any job interview, the candidate is selling himself and you're testing and judging him. But remember he is testing and judging you too. He knows a bit about the company - knows enough to think that maybe it might be a cool place to spend most of his waking hours for the next few years, but he doesn't need to come and work here and it's up to you to sell him the job and the company. Why is this a great place to work? Why is it such an interesting job? If you can't answer those questions convincingly to yourself you shouldn't be conducting the interview.

Job interviews are for both sides of the table, but all too often - especially when it's several of you versus one candidate - the interviewers forget that there needs to be give as well as take.

Personally I try to avoid overuse of set questions. I prefer conversations to stock questions and stilted answers. And if the conversation is heading in an interesting direction and you're getting to know the candidate, then keep it going with ad hoc questions. Interviewers who rigidly confine themselves to a set of prepared questions on the grounds that everybody must be treated identically, are merely depriving themselves of getting to know the candidates and therefore getting the kind of information that will help them identify the best person for the job.

Two things to avoid as an interviewer are:

1) Setting a time limit to the interview. Sometimes you'll know someone is right within the first ten minutes. If you know this beyond doubt, the interview shouldn't take long. Sometimes you'll know someone is wrong within the first ten minutes. If you know this beyond doubt, you should start wrapping things up immediately. I don't like being rude to people, but continuing an interview when you know you're not going to offer them the job is dishonest. However, sometimes an interview just needs more time than you'd expected and, in that situation, if you need more time, take more time.

2) Saving candidate questions to the end. If you've spent two hours firing questions at a candidate and then you allow them to ask a couple of questions, you haven't really bought into the idea that this interviewing business is a two-way thing. If it's a great job and she is a great candidate then you should be as keen to hire her as she is to get the job, and the questions/answers should be pretty evenly numbered from either side (except the candidate is on your turf so, inevitably, and rightly, the interview is going to be led by you).

Never allow the situation to arise where you go away having found out all you need to know about the candidate and happy that you can offer the job to someone who you are confident will be great in the job, while the candidate has gone away unsure what the job really is, not convinced there's enough to keep her interested and fulfilled, and doubtful that the working conditions will be any better than those she has now. If all you do to a great candidate is convince her that she's much better off where she is now than she'd previously thought, then you've failed big time.

Take it from me, I've made that mistake once. Never again. I hope.

The power of informal demos

ac — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 20:48:13 +0000

I've recently been encouraging people at work to record any demos they do. The need for this was highlighted for me by the fact that - due to recent laptop problems that ended up with me having to reinstall Vista and losing all my Outlook data - I missed an important demo. Fortunately, however, I'd been very close to the development of the functionality being demonstrated, so I wasn't missing anything I didn't know about, but if I hadn't already known about it, missing the demo might have meant I wouldn't have found out about the new features for some considerable time.

But if someone had plugged in a mic and switched on Camtasia or Jing, captured the demo and published it somewhere, I could have just played it back at my leisure. And for anyone at the meeting who, a couple of weeks down the line, couldn't remember how something worked - they could just replay the relevant part of the recording.

In general, I think recording stuff like that is a good idea and there's also a strong case for recording product design meetings, release authorisation meetings, or any company meeting where important information is communicated or important decisions made. However, sometimes you've got to move one step at a time. The first step is to get demos recorded: both internal product demos, Webinars with customers and feature demos that can be put on the Web site for general consumption.

This afternoon I've spent some time brushing up on SharePoint. As I've mentioned here before, I've been advocating adoption of SharePoint at work for about a year and a half now and recent signs are that this is, finally, going to happen (at least, I've heard a purchase request is sitting in an inbox waiting for a signature). So, as the resident SharePoint evangelist, I felt I should refamiliarise myself with it, and I came across a very effective, informal demo by Darren Strange, UK product manager for Microsoft Office.

http://officerocker.officeisp.net/files/Shared%20Documents/ProjectColloboration.wmv
Note: This is in Windows Media format. I recommend clicking the "View Full Screen" button, bottom left of Windows Media Player.

Personally this is the kind of demo I really like. I like to hear a real person talking me through a product demo - someone who knows what he's talking about - complete with a few ums and ahs and pauses. I have no time for slick demos where some "voice talent" has been paid to read a script - because you just know the guy doesn't know what he's talking about and if you asked him a question the whole demo would fall to pieces. Equally, I sort of resent demos where there's no spoken word just lots of bubble pop-ups that you have to read. I find it annoying that someone's gone to all the bother of writing the pop-up text and setting up when they appear and disappear, when they could have just recorded an audio track and saved me the trouble of having to do all that reading. Especially annoying about those type of demos is when the only sound on the audio track is over-loud mouse clicks. It's bizarre! If you've got an audio track, use it!

Okay, I know it's often all about localisation and producing the demo in twelve different languages, but sometimes it's just down to a misguided belief that if a demo isn't "slick" it's not effective. Quite the reverse. For me, those slick demos - particularly the voiceless ones - are eminently forgettable, whereas the informal ones, like this SharePoint demo, really get the information across well and stick in your mind.

More demos by Darren Strange at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/officerocker/archive/tags/Blogcast/default.aspx

Incidentally, Darren mentions a little trick of Windows Media Player that's worth knowing. Press Ctrl+G to speed up the demo. You get through the demo a bit quicker without the commentary Mickey-Mousing. To get back to normal speed, just click the Play button.

For amusement value, try pressing Ctrl+S to slow things down.

Switching on the Agile lightbulb

ac — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 22:18:27 +0000

I've got to admit I'd always had a jaded opinion of the Agile software development methodology. From what I knew of it - no detailed requirements document, no functional specification, no prototyping, no design thoroughly first then build it - from all of this it seemed to me that Agile was something dreamed up by a software developer, for software developers, but a potential nightmare for testers, technical authors, marketing, sales and support. To me it seemed like Agile was a kind of a "let's just bash on and make it up as we go along" approach that left developers free to do whatever seemed best (or maybe just easiest), without being tied to anyone else's plan, or maybe any plan at all. And, as a technical author, how do you document something that's evolving from day to day according to the whim of developer? So that was where I was with Agile until the week before last. Not hostile to Agile, but definitely skeptical. Then, as part of the restructuring exercise that's underway at my work, I spent a week with MarketAcuity CEO and Agile guru Sam Bayer. I'm not entirely sure what Sam's mission was: whether he'd been tasked with introducing Agile product development to the company, or just talking us through the Agile methodology. He has a very laid-back, discursive approach, so it's hard to tell. It never felt like he was trying to teach us particularly, more like he was just talking with us about one way of doing things. We started with some basics of Agile product development. What's the point? Answer: it's about accelerating value to the customer. The 4 pillars of Agile:

Customer The process is centred around the customer. It's not about producing some new, cool product because it's something we think would be interesting to work on, or because it's this year's big thing. It's about finding out what our customers and potential customers need and value and doing that for them.
Demonstrations Show your customers the real production software (not a prototype or a smoke and mirrors job) on a regular basis and get their feedback.
Iterative Build something, demo it, get feedback, build some more, and so on. Demonstrations could be a week or a month apart, but probably not more than a month apart, and always on a regular schedule. Don't go away and work on something for six months or a year only to find at the end of that time that it's not really what the customer wants, because they found it hard to explain, or you weren't listening, or they changed their minds/personnel, or the market or operational environment changed.
Collaborative This isn't the waterfall approach. There's no leader passing down commands that must be obeyed. Within the company everyone's got a role and a job to do, but these aren't set in stone with high walls. The team have to work together according to their knowledge and abilities to get the job done. And, looking externally, you've got to collaborate with the customer and bring them into the process.

Another concept that, first off, I found puzzling was that, as well as accelerating value to the customer, Agile helps you to accelerate failure. Sounds bizarre, but what it means is that if you're producing the wrong thing, or you've made bad decisions, or misunderstood the market, you get to realise this much earlier. You don't work on a project for a year, then have a launch and suddenly get hit with the truth that potential customers don't really rate what you've done, and the stuff they really want is missing from what you produced. If you're really going nowhere with a project then it's much better to find out soon, cut your losses and get on with doing something profitable. All of this, and more, makes perfect sense to me. But it really wasn't until day 3 of the week that things really clicked with me. A lightbulb went on and suddenly I saw a way of doing this product management thing successfully. So now I sort of feel like a convert to Agile. It fits with my way of thinking. Don't overcomplicate things. Don't weigh yourself down with a ton of process and procedure rules. Do one thing at a time, bit by bit. Tell the truth. Don't pretend you always have all the answers. Talk to people. Get their opinions. Keep talking. Keep listening. Be prepared to change your mind.

No more ITauthor for a while

ac — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 13:40:09 +0000

Suddenly I'm no longer in the documentation business. My job changed from Documentation Manager to Bid Team Manager. I'm currently involved in preparing proposals for a couple of new business tenders, which is going to leave me no time for podcasting, or even blogging.

So - at least for the time being - ITauthor.com is going into hibernation. Thanks for reading/listening, if you have been.

Bye for now.

Alistair

The Tech Writer Blogs Directory

ac — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 13:42:44 +0000

Want to read about tech writing? Check out Tom Johnson's directory of tech writer blogs at:

http://www.techwriterblogs.com/doku.php

More good stuff from Windows Live

ac — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:16:31 +0000

If you haven't had a look at Windows Live for a while, it's worth a look. There's a couple of really nice things on there now. The first one is the one that's had a lot of publicity: Spaces. This is, in effect, your own Web site on live.com. You get to choose a URL (e.g. yourname.spaces.live.com) and your get a personal Web space with a blog, a photo gallery, storage space for saving files that you want to access from anywhere, an event planner and the usual friends list. You can set up the permissions to keep everything private, make everything public, or specify who gets to see your pictures, your blog, your stored files, etc.

The other excellent addition to Windows Live is a replacement for Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, which, until today, was my default application for viewing image files from Windows Explorer and doing a slideshow. It's called Windows Live Photo Gallery. It does all the stuff Picture Viewer used to do, like rotating your photos and doing a slideshow, but it also makes it really easy to adjust your images, including cropping and resizing them.

If you have a look at my recent post on My podcast recording setup, the photos in there were fixed up using Live Photo Gallery. I took the photos in my poorly lit study, beside a very yellow desk lamp, without any flash lighting. The results were not great, but clicking the Auto Correct button worked wonders and made it look like I'd taken the photos beside a window with plenty of natural light. I also increased the brightness and contrast a little and then cranked up the Sharpness setting to the max just so's the settings on the mixer were as clear as possible. Compare a detail from the original photo and the fixed version:

Original:

Fixed:

The fixed version is quite grainy because of the artificially high sharpness setting I used, but I think the result are really good, considering the original photos were so poor.

I've always used Photoshop for most image adjusting, but for little quick things like this, I'll be using Live Photo Gallery from now on. By the time Photoshop has loaded I could have done my colour correction, cropping and resizing and posted the results to my blog.

For more information about Windows Live, see:

http://get.live.com/wl/all

Forcing a FeedBurner update

ac — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:23:05 +0000

The RSS page for your blog/podcast/whatever at FeedBurner updates periodically, and you sometimes have to be a little patient for blog entries or new podcasts to appear. If you can't wait, you can force FeedBurner to update their version of your RSS page.

To do this:

Go to https://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/login and log in to your FeedBurner account.
Click Troubleshootize.
At the very bottom of the page, click Resync Now.

Mishy-phens

ac — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 13:50:49 +0000

Thanks to fellow tech author Graham Campbell for telling me about the following list of true-life examples of badly hyphenated words:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.usage.english/msg/f615e0a4acfa21f1

My favourites are:

arse-
nal

fun-
draiser

lighty-
ears

rear-
ranged

pronoun-
cement

Surface computing

ac — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 12:32:56 +0000

Graham at work directed me to this Popular Mechanics video about what Microsoft are doing with "surface computing". This is really cool stuff. I want one of these!

A painful switch from Virgin to Sky

ac — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 18:42:26 +0000

After about three weeks down, this website is now available again! The reason for the downtime was that I have switched my ISP from Telewest (now part of Virgin Media) to Sky. The cause for the switch was, initially, that my broadband service from Telewest had been getting worse and worse since about Christmas. I nominally had a 2MB connection, but I was only getting a fraction of that, and working from home had become quite difficult at times, and very frustrating. My dissatisfaction with Telewest turned into real anger after they'd been taken over by Virgin, who announced that they would be dropping Sky One from their cable TV package - meaning we wouldn't see Lost any more.

So I paid my way out of 6 months of remaining contract with Virgin and signed up for a Sky TV, telephone and broadband package. Then the problems started. First we had to get our telephone switched back from Telewest to BT. This should have been a straightforward switch over at the exchange, but the day came for the switch and we lost our telephone connection. It turned out that Telewest had disconnected the BT line, rather than leaving it in place, so we had to get a BT engineer out to fix it. This 2-minute job resulted in a bill for over £200. Fortunately we managed to persuade BT not to charge us this, but we did have the inconvenience of no phone line for a few days.

Then we had a load of hassle getting our Sky TV installed. The engineer, due to turn up between 10 and 1, eventually appeared at 4.15 and on the stroke of 5 announced he had an urgent call from home and had to leave, job unfinished. He also broke the news that, as far as he was concerned we were only getting Sky TV, he knew nothing about broadband. After numerous phone calls to Sky call centres we found out that our area (in Edinburgh, a capital city - not some little village in the Highlands) no longer qualified for the TV/telephone/broadband package, so we'd have to pay an extra £20/month for broadband.

After much hassle and many phone calls we eventually got a satisfactory agreement over the TV, telephone and broadband, but we then had to wait a further 10 days to get the broadband switched on. That day arrived, but unfortunately we still didn't have a modem. Another phone call to the call centre and we found out that, according to Sky, the modem had been delivered and we'd signed for it. They agreed to send us out another one, which arrived a few days later.

That wasn't quite the end of the story though, because what arrived was a nice, white Netgear wireless router. But I'd been expecting a straightforward modem, and a router didn't fit into my existing network architecture because the router prevented my Smoothwall firewall from getting an externally visible IP address. However, we now had an outward internet link.

It's not until your unconnected for a while that you realise how important the internet is.

Website rework progress #2

ac — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:56:08 +0000

Well, I haven't sorted out the IE7 problem yet, but I have found a fix for the load speed problem. It's a plug-in called wp-cache. You can get it here: http://mnm.uib.es/gallir/wp-cache-2 Installing this plug-in has taken my time-to-load from 25+ seconds to just 3”“4 seconds, which compares very nicely with the performance I was getting from Plone. It does this by caching pages on the server so that preprepared HTML pages are served up to your browser, rather than dynamically generating pages on request, using PHP. You can check that you're looking at a cached page by viewing the source of the page. If it's a cached page, the last line of the source will be:

!-- Cached page served by WP-Cache --

Two installation methods are documented. I chose the manual method, just because that's the one everyone seems to talk about, so I reckonned I'd stick with tried-and-tested. Installation is a little more difficult than installing most WordPress plug-ins. But if you're used to ploytering around on a UNIX command line on your Web server you'll find it easy enough. There are 2 little problems with this plug-in that you must watch out for. Both of these cause your site to serve up completely blank pages after you install the wp-cache plug-in.

If you're server uses PHP 5 you need to edit /wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php, locate ob_end_clean(); in this file and replace it with ob_end_flush();That is, you need to change "clean" to "flush".
Don't use the documented command for creating the symbolic link. I copied and pasted it onto the command line and it created a duff symlink. The correct command, from the wp-content directory is:ln -s plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase1.php advanced-cache.php

Once you've sorted this out and added the define statement to your wp-config.php, you can go to the Options section of the WordPress admin and you'll see a WP-Cache tab. Go in there and click the button to enable the cache. Having done that everything should work fine and your pages will fly. Incidentally, I just did a php -v and realised I'm still on PHP 4.3, so I guess I should go and change back that ob_end_clean(); function, but it seems to work fine as it is, so maybe I won't bother.

Website rework progress #1

ac — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 08:34:15 +0000

Last night I did some work on the Blue Leaves WordPress theme to get it looking more how I'd like the site to look. I redid the main header, replacing the leaves image with an image of my own keyboard (doctored in Photoshop) and the old ITauthor logo from the Plone version of the site. However, when I did a quick check this morning in IE7 I notice it doesn't display correctly. It looks fine in Firefox 2 (my default browser) and Opera 9, but IE7 obviously has different ideas about how CSS should be interpreted. The other very disappointing thing is just how slowly WordPress serves up pages compared to Plone and even MovableType. I'm going to have to have a look and see if I can tune up. I'm getting 25+ seconds for the initial load (which is way too long, given that the images are all pretty small), and then 12”“15 seconds after that to load a page. This compares to about 4 seconds to load a page from Plone. I'm not sure how many people would wait 25 seconds for a page to appear.

The switch to WordPress

ac — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 08:45:04 +0000

I've been talking about revamping ITauthor.com for about two years now and, until now, done nothing about it. I finally decided that I've got to aim for simplicity. Originally, I saw ITauthor.com as a full-blown website mainly made up of articles about software and technical writing. Those articles never materialised because I just never had the time. Also, I never really got on with Plone. The whole architecture of Plone is very poor and I hated Python from the word go. I just didn't get on with Python at all. Give me Perl any day. I looked around at alternatives and very nearly went with Joomla, but it's more than I need and the setup and redesign I know I would get mired in would prevent me generating content, just like Plone did. I need something plain and simple, where other people have done most of the work for me. That's where WordPress comes in. Originally I'd thought of it as just blog software. But I also need to replace my old MovableType setup, which has always annoyed me because it's incredibly slow, difficult to redesign and (the version I'm using, at any rate) is full of usability issues. I've been using WordPress for over a year now for a private blog, so I know what it's like to use. I installed the latest version a couple of nights back and I've just spent my lunch break importing all my MovableType posts into this WordPress blog. It was pretty straightforward, with one caveat. Basically all you do is use MovableType's export facility (from the admin page) to export everything to one big text file, you then import this into WordPress from WordPress's admin page. The caveat is that it won't work if the file is too big. Mine consisted of posts going back to 2003 and when I tried to import it I just got a blank page. You've got to chop the file up. I chopped it up into 7 files and it worked fine. Note: several how-to pages on this talk about editing a .php file on the server. In WordPress 2 you don't need to do this - just use the Import tab in the admin section. The import wasn't flawless (of course). I lost most of the formatting, some of which I'll need to reinstate to make posts readable. The images appeared fine but they reference the images directory in the MovableType area of my web server so, to keep a logical structure, I'm going to have to move these and change the href values. But it's a start. I feel like I'm a big step closer to a simpler but more useful ITauthor.com.

“filesystem” or “file system”?

alistair at work — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 10:29:51 +0000

When investigating this question, I came across the following, which I liked so I thought I'd quote it here: --------------------------------------------------------------------- Re: Style question Author: John Fleck On Thu, Apr 11, 2002 at 02:21:26PM +0100, John Levon wrote: > > "filesystem" or "file system" ? > I tread gingerly into these word choice arguments, because to a certain extent an arbitrary decision has to be made. The GNOME Documentation project is going with "file system". This is one of those computer terms where you find a battle of common usage between the traditional English language - "file system" - and the computerized version of the word - "filesystem". This one seems to be right at the tipping point. (A Google or Altavista search is an interesting way to be crudely empirical about a question like this.) Some people will no doubt passionately argue the stern grammarianÃ¢ € ™s point of view - "But `filesystemÃ¢ € ™ is not a word, and just because the unwashed masses are using incorrect grammar doesnÃ¢ € ™t mean we should." Others will equally passionately argue - "But language is a living entity, and `filesystemÃ¢ € ™ is the way computer people really write it now." At this point in the argument, I back quietly out of the room. We had to pick one, we picked "file system", but if we had settled on "filesystem" IÃ¢ € ™d shrug my shoulders and use it. Cheers, John Ã¢ € “ John Fleck

The cost of reviewing documentation

alistair at work — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 13:38:21 +0000

The Content Wrangler has an interesting article by Lisa Woods about the cost (in more than just money) of protracted reviews of a document. The overview of a computer system she was tasked with producing was finally approved eight months after the original deadline at an estimated minimum cost of $53,000. It was a 15 page document, and no one was happy with the final result - including its author. The article contains some advice if you find yourself in a similar situation. Personally, the advice I would give is just to be more dictatorial about what goes in the document. I've always taken the view with document reviews that I'm the author and I'll decide what goes in the document - all I'll carry the can if I get it wrong. If a reviewer suggests changes I don't agree with, those changes don't go in. Do reviewers get to review the updated version of the document: absolutely not. I go back to them for a second review if I need to clarify something and I direct them very precisely to what I want them to review and leave them in no doubt that they are almost certainly wasting their time by commenting on anything else.

My favourite XDA apps

alistair at home — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 11:57:21 +0000

I've been using my XDA (a brand of PDA running Microsoft PocketPC) more and more over the last few months. Here are the applications I use most often:

Start page

OK, so it's not an application, but it's where it all kicks off from. Note: This is the XDA Developers' edition of PocketPC.

My phone

My XDA is my phone, so I see this page a lot. One of the things I really is being able to write text messages by scribbling on the screen rather than having to remember key sequences to generate letters.

Music & podcasts

I tried out various audio players for PocketPC, Pocket Music was by far the best. Most of the time these days I use it to listen to podcasts.

Books

Being able to read a book wherever I am is a great bonus. I used to get irritated by enforced "down-time" when I was stuck somewhere with no mental stimulation (e.g. waiting for a bus). Now I always have a good book to hand. Most recently I've been reading David Copperfield, which I can thoroughly recommend.

Personal database

I've always had a dreadful memory for people, so having a little database of pertinent facts about the people I meet is extremely useful. Data on the Run is nice little application built on Pocket Access. You have to pay for it (after an initial trial period), but most of us would be prepared to pay a little to supplement our memory?

Recording

The XDA didn't come with a good audio recorder, so I added this one. It's come in handy for recording podcasts. One useful feature is that it allows you to select the output format.

ActiveSync

Microsoft ActiveSync handles the interface between my XDA and my PC. I don't think it's a great piece of software - it's not particularly flexible, and it tends to fall over if you ask it to do too much - but most of the time it does what it's intended to do. ActiveSync is the means by which the MP3s that Juice downloads for me end up on my XDA. This screenshot is from my PC (ActiveSync is pretty much invisible on the XDA).

Calendar

The other very useful thing with my XDA (nothing new here to anyone who uses a PDA) is that it synchronises my calendar between my PC at work and my PC at home. I don't use Outlook on my XDA much - which is why I didn't include a screenshot of it - but it means that if I'm working at home and I add a couple of appointments, next day when I'm in the office these show up on my calendar on my work PC.

Useful links

alistair at work — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 11:52:49 +0000

The latest Update from Cherryleaf landed in my inbox in the past couple of days and I finally got round to looking at it. As usual it contained some interesting links - the prime ones being: How to measure the effectiveness of a document and Cheat Sheets by UK web developer Dave Child

A smarter zipper

alistair at work — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 11:49:51 +0000

I was looking for an application to unpack RAR files this morning and came across IZArc. I can recommend it as a smarter alternative to WinZIP. Download it free from: www.snapfiles.com/get/izarc.html

Bruce Leroy Smith

alistair at home — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 22:42:57 +0000

Nothing to do with technical writing, just a very poignant blog entry: http://aaronbsmith.org/archive/000104.html

CVS update codes

alistair at home — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 10:19:59 +0000

When you run update, it outputs information about what has happened. For example, if there was nothing to update it will just say “Success, CVS operation completed”. Normally, however, files have either changed locally (i.e. you’ve changed something) or in the repository (i.e. someone else has changed something) – or both. In this case, update outputs a line for each file, with a prefix that tells you what has happened. In TortoiseCVS the different operations also each have a different colour, which helps you to see at a glance what has happened (e.g. conflicts are in red).

The output codes are as follows:
(Note: Thanks to bioperl.org from which this is derived.)

U file

The local file has been updated to match the same file in the CVS repository.

This is done for files that you haven’t changed but which are not the most recent versions available in the repository. It is also done if you update a directory and CVS finds a file in the repository that is not in your working copy of the directory.

M file

Your local copy of the file has been modified since the previous update.

M can indicate one of two things about the local copy of the file:

You’ve change the file locally, but there were no modifications to the same file in the repository. In this case, CVS makes no changes to either file, but the local file and the file in the repository are now out of sync, so you will have to commit the changes you have made.
There were modifications in the repository as well as in your local copy, but the changes in the repository file were successfully merged into the local file, without any conflicts.

C file

A conflict was detected while trying to merge your changed version of the file with the version in the repository. Generally this happens because someone has committed changes to the repository while you were working on a file. Usually you can avoid conflicts by remembering to update a file before making any changes to it – or if you are working on a file for a significant period of time, save and update the file at regular intervals, and commit any significant changes you make as often as you can (provided you’re confident what you are committing is error free).

A file

This signifies that you have done a CVS add, to mark that this new local file needs to be added to the repository, but you have not yet committed the file’s parent directory, which is what actually adds the file to the repository. Basically, it’s a warning telling you that you need to commit the parent directory to add this file.

R file

This signifies that you have done a CVS remove, to mark that this local file should be removed from the repository, but you have not yet committed the file’s parent directory, which is what actually removes the file from the repository. Basically, it’s a warning telling you that you need to commit the parent directory to remove this file.

? file

The file in your working copy of the directory does not exist in the repository. Usually this means you’ve created a file locally but not yet CVS added it and committed you change to the directory. For example, if I edit a file called test.txt using UltaEdit a test.txt.bak copy of the file is always created in the directory. When I update the directory this test.txt.bak file shows up in the output as ? test.txt.bak.

Resolving conflicts

If you are using TortoiseCVS and there are conflicts, a dialog box is displayed, listing the affected files:

When you double click a file, you can choose the diff program you want to use to examine the conflicts. A message box then tells you the names of two temporary files (a “mine” file and a “yours” file) and tells you to change the “yours” file when resolving the conflicts:

Scroll down through the files, looking for highlighted conflicts:

At this point you’re supposed to edit the “yours” file, correcting the conflicts, then save your changes. However, I’ve never managed to do this because I get a message saying I can’t save the file to the current location. When you close the diff program TortoiseCVS asks you if you want to overwrite the unsuccessfully merged file with the “yours” file you’ve just edited.

The alternative solution (if, like me, you can’t use the above method), and the method used by Windows CVS users and UNIX CVS users alike, is just to open up the local file in a text editor and resolve the conflicts there. But first you need to be prepared for what you find in the file CVS has attempted to merge.

For example, I created a text file called test.txt, containing:

start
one two three
end

I saved this file, then added and committed it to the repository. Someone else then changed the file to:

start
one xxx three
end

They then updated and committed their change. I still had my local copy open and I changed it to:

start
one changedlocally three
end

I then saved the file and updated it, at which point I got a conflict message. When I open the local copy of the file, I see:

start
<<<<<<< test.txt
one changedlocally three
=======
one xxx three
>>>>>>> 1.2
end

You need to edit the bit between the line containing <<<<<<< and the line containing >>>>>>>. The line containing ======= separates your version (above) from the repository version (below). You need to manually reconcile these two versions and then remove the marker lines. Once you have done this and saved the file, you can commit the resolved version.

Incidentally, whenever there's a conflict, your original, unmodified, file is saved as .#filename.version. For example, if the file is called test.txt, the original file is saved as .#test.txt.1.1 or .#test.txt.1.2, etc. – depending on what version of the file you’re working on.

See http://bioperl.org/userinfo/cvsdoc/commands.html for more information about CVS commands.

login or log in or logon or log on?

alistair at home — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 12:06:24 +0000

Is it correct to have a dialog box called "Login"? What about a form field labelled "Login"? Or should it be "Logon"?

Some internet reading on the subject confirmed what I previously thought was the case:

Login and logon are adjectives (or occasionally nouns) – not verbs. So writing "To login, enter your password ..." is incorrect, it should be "To log in ...".
Login tends to be used in UNIX, logon tends to be used in Windows.
Developers generally don't appreciate the difference and will use login, log in, logon and log on throughout an application without noticing.
Note: Where I work, changes to the GUI of an application must be logged in Bugzilla and they are then prioritized (P1 meaning "Get this fixed NOW!!!", P4 meaning "In an ideal world, if we had a limitless amount of staff, we'd fix this"). A Bugzilla call asking for "To logon enter your username and password" to be changed to "To log in, enter your user name and password." would always, always be prioritised as a P4 bug.

Thomas Quine posted the following entry on GMANE back in September 2002:

The only thing I'd like to add to this discussion is a note about the correct use of "log in" or "log on" (two words) and "login" or "logon" (one word). Misuse of these terms is rampant on the Web.

The rule is: one word, it's an adjective, two words, it's a verb.

So for instance, you can "log in" to a website, and if you do so you are "logging in". If "login" were a verb, then the act would be referred to as "loginning".

Login (one word) is an adjective. An adjective, you will recall, is a word that modifies another word. Which is why it bugs me when a see a field with the label "Login". My mind unconsciously asks, "Login what? Login ID? Login username? Login password? Log in using your email address, what? What word is Login modifying here? What do they want me to enter in this field?" I have come across websites that use this word to prompt for each of the above. How's the poor visitor supposed to guess which one this time?

My rule of thumb is, label a screen field with words that make it clear what you want the visitor to type into that field.

This is not just being picky, because when we introduce even a momentary confusion in the reader's mind, we introduce an obstacle, and to me the key to information design is the removal of obstacles...

Source: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.infodesign.general/499

Getting iTunes to work on Windows

alistair at work — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 08:20:30 +0000

This has nothing to do with technical writing, but it took me a while to find this, so I'm noting it down here just to increase its visibility on the internet.

I installed Apple iTunes last night on my Windows XP PC. The install went OK, but when I downloaded a track it didn't play back well - in fact the sound quality was so bad you could barely make out what the track was. After lots of Google searching (there's a lot of pages out there about iTunes) I eventually stumbled upon the solution in a Quick Tip article on the About web site, contributed by Rachael Smithey:

Troubleshooting iTunes Playback on a Windows PC

Just in case this page disappears, the fix Rachael describes is as follows:

Having trouble with sound quality on iTunes for the PC? Is the sound crackling, skipping, echoing, or garbled? iTunes uses QuickTime for playback or audio, so in many instances you can fix this problem simply by adjusting QuickTime settings. Here's how:

Exit iTunes.
In Windows click Start > Control Panel > QuickTime.
Click to select the Sound Out option.
Under Choose a device for playback, click to select waveOut:Windows' preferred device or waveOut:name_of_soundcard
Reboot your PC.

Now you should be able to enjoy iTunes as it was meant to sound!

I set the playback to my sound card and it worked a treat. I quickly went from being totally unimpressed with iTunes to being moderately impressed. Functionally it's very good. It seems to have a huge database of tracks (I found the tracks I couldn't find on any other music download site, which was the reason for looking a iTunes) and the sound quality is excellent.

On the negative side, iTunes looks horrible. Apple were always renowned for their sense of style and their pioneering user interface, but iTunes looks drab, grey and old-fashioned. There's also the format issue. When you download a track you get an M4P-format file. You can play this with iTunes or on your iPod (for those of you who have one), but nothing else - so you can't play it with Windows Media Player, or load it into your MP3 player. There are ways round this, of course - for instance, if you have a good quality recording program you can play the track in iTunes, record it and export the recorded version as an MP3 file.

But I don't want to end on a negative. I found and bought the tracks I was looking for, and (having found the above tip) I'm pleased with the result.

Software project failure rates

alistair at work — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 13:19:29 +0000

This week's Computer Weekly has an interesting opinion article by Laurent Séraphin. In Bring discipline to software development he argues that “Software development needs to evolve from being a ‘black art’ to more of a managed business process. Despite the billions invested in software, its development is not scrutinised as any other business processes.” He's right. My experience of software development is that there is often a lack planning and defined procedures, particularly at the early stages, where most other businesses make sure they know exactly what work they are going to do (down to the last detail), what this involves in terms of person-days of work (i.e. cost/investment) and what constitutes a successful outcome of the project. The article contains the following astonishing statistics: “A Standish Group report, released this year, found that 30% of software projects are cancelled, 44% are too expensive, 60% are not considered a success and 90% are delivered late.”

What’s been happening?

alistair at work — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 13:22:02 +0000

I haven't posted much to this weblog over the past few months. There are good reasons for this. In that period I have taken my website away from the ISP who were hosting it and I am now hosting itauthor.com myself. This has taken quite a while to sort out, partly because wresting the domain away from my old ISP was not easy and took prolonged efforts and a not insubstantial amount of cash. The moral of this is that you should never enter into a relationship without first thoroughly researching your exit options. I will describe my hosting setup in full elsewhere, but I'll just outline the things that make this possible:

A cable broadband Internet connection
An old 233MHz PC that now acts as a dedicated hardware firewall
A slightly less old Pentium II, 333MHz PC, running Fedore Core 3, on a network of its own, that acts as my web server
ZoneEdit, to whom I transferred registration of my domain, and whose online forms allow me to control domain name mapping

Both of the old PCs sit in my basement, without monitors or keyboards and are accessible via SSH from my main PC (running XP) on my home network. The firewall and web server machines obviously have to be on all the time, but they have low-spec processors and don't generate much heat, so they only have power supply fans and therefore don't use up much electricity. A smoke detector and circuit breaker give me some peace of mind about leaving these machines on all the time. The beauty of this system is that I control it myself. My old ISP would not let me use MySQL, which pissed me off, and they charged me extra for the ability to run CGI scripts. They also only let me FTP to their servers if I connected via their dial-up account, which annoyed me because they charged by the minute, while I had a separate ISP account which I have preferred to use because I paid a flat monthly charge for it. I wrote a CGI script to get around this inconvenience, but having to do so didn't do much for customer relations. Like most ISPs they also didn't allow me access to a shell, so, again, I had to resort to writing CGI scripts to do things that I'd have preferred to do at a command prompt. Moving to self-hosting has been a multi-staged process. I had to move www.itauthor.com to a temporary home for a few months (which was possible thanks to ZoneEdit) during which time much of this weblog stopped working. This was because I could only move the HTML files, to give the appearance of a weblog. I couldn't install MovableType until I'd sorted out my own web server. Doing this required me to find an old machine for this purpose. The machine was being used elsewhere on my home network, so I had to provide a replacement. The replacement was a home-built PC using as much of the old machine as possible. I had to wait a while until I finally, after several attempts, won an eBay auction for an affordable P4 3GHz processor and Gibabyte motherboard. Having disassembled the old machine, built the new machine and rebuilt the old machine, I eventually had a bare-bones PC on which to install Fedora Core 3. I then rebuilt my MovableType weblog, using MySQL this time, instead of a Berkeley DB file. All I need to do now is redesign the whole site so that I originally wanted it to do over a year ago when I set it up. This redesign process may take me quite some time. I'll try to document the process because it might be useful if you want to do the same sort of thing.

Test – new version of ITauthor notes

ac — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 13:05:11 +0000

This is the first entry in the new incarnation of this weblog.

Thoughts from a technical author

alistair at home — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 12:52:19 +0000

I've uploaded my old 2002 Radio weblog Thoughts from a technical author onto this site. The pages had been sitting, undeleted on a Userland server since my try-out of Radio expired in August 2002. Thoughts from a technical author was my first experiment in blogging and, like so many weblogs, it doesn't exactly make riveting reading. But, if I haven't put you off, you can step back in time to 19 July 2002 when I posted my first entry.

Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See

alistair at home — Mon, 09 Feb 2004 14:04:00 +0000

My regular newsletter from Cherryleaf pointed me in the direction of a helpful article by Pat Holt, a former book review editor and critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. In Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See (but can easily fix when they do), she alerts us to habitual errors that are all too easy to slip into. Ms Holt is talking about creative writing, but most of the points she makes apply just as well to technical writing. Number 1 on her list is Repeats. As a technical author I am very aware of repeating myself time and time and time again. So often there's just no way around it, but I really should try harder to stop using "crutch" words. My favourite of these is "typically", which I use all the time because I'm describing software that is extremely configurable. Almost every part of the system can be configured to look and behave differently, according to customers' requirements. So I never know how something will look or respond and I end up starting sentences, "Typically, ...". Number 3 on the list is another good one: Empty Adverbs. Actually, I'm really not terribly prone to this problem. However, all technical authors should recite Pat Holt's mantra: "Precise and spare; precise and spare; precise and spare." For online help in particular, this surely describes the style we should always be trying to achieve. Most technical authors should probably have number 9 (Awkward Phrasing) tatooed on the back of their hands: Awkward phrasing makes the reader stop in the midst of reading and ponder the meaning of a word or phrase. This you never want as an author. A rule of thumb - always give your work a little percolatin' time before you come back to it. Never write right up to deadline. Return to it with fresh eyes. You'll spot those overworked tangles of prose and know exactly how to fix them. Pat Holt's site (www.holtuncensored.com) is worth a visit. For one thing it's very nicely designed by www.hyperarts.com.

Hyperdictionary

alistair at work — Mon, 26 Jan 2004 15:00:31 +0000

Following on from my last entry, here's another glossary (okay, so it calls itself a dictionary) that's very nicely designed: www.hyperdictionary.com/computer

Technical writing glossary

alistair at work — Mon, 26 Jan 2004 08:22:33 +0000

I created an in-house glossary here at Memex a couple of years ago, to make it easier for new-starts (like myself at the time) to get to grips with all the acronyms and product names that get bandied about in conversations. I remember coming across the following glossary about then and thinking that its design was much better than my own (except that mine allows you to add new terms or click a term and edit a definition). It's Mike Buckler's Technical Writing Glossary: http://members.iinet.net.au/~mbuckler/glossary1.shtml Mike is a technical writer, based in Mt Hawthorn, Western Australia, which is here (his map): I must get round to improving the look of my in-house glossary. Stumbling upon Mike's glossary again I'm reminded how much better-looking it is than mine.