Two projects blew up on me at work this week. That wouldn’t usually be a major problem — happens all the time — except that I got volunteered to run the games for Vacation Bible School at church this week. Then someone got the brilliant idea to start VBS at 6:30 instead of 7:00, which gave me no time to run home and get prepared... but now it’s out of my hands; I had to pass off the games to my (quite capable) assistant.
A while back, I mentioned wanting to move a desk into the bedroom, and expecting Mrs. Fetched to deprecate it as she usually does any idea of mine. But now it’s too hot to work on the porch (summers have attitude in the south, and the first day of summer had it in spades here), and everyone else was at VBS, so I just went ahead and did it. Then I ate some leftovers and got to work.
The family came in a bit after 9:00. Mrs. Fetched walked in, saw my setup, and said, “Good thing you cleaned that area up. That looks good there.” I was stunned but did a decent job of not showing it.
Just goes to show... Mrs. Fetched is completely predictable if you run an idea by her. But if you just do it, she’s completely random.
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Thursday, June 22, 2006 2 comments
Tuesday, June 20, 2006 No comments
I know the answer, but I can’t say...
Well, I can’t say it on a public mailing list using my real name, anyway. But it’s too funny not to share.
The following conversation took place on a mailing list I subscribe to. The text in red is from a documentation manager who works for a competitor; text in blue is someone who is trying to be helpful.
At this point, I should mention that I have a pretty good idea of which company it is that got acquired: one I used to work for about ten years ago, in fact — although the outsourcing bit must have happened recently. And so the thread continues:
You can probably guess what my vote would be. I was happy for the employees of this particular ex-corporation to see them get acquired; that’s a place in dire need of a culture enema. In fact, once the enema has been administered, I would consider working for them again.
I thought about jumping in on a thread on one of the other mailing lists that the competitor posted to, where my email address isn’t tied to the company I work for, but I don’t have anything to say that they probably aren’t aware of already — there isn’t a trivially easy migration path. You have to do what engineers call a “double-pump,” convert to an intermediate format that both programs understand, then convert that to your target format. If they are using structured FrameMaker, they could create AuthorIT templates to export XML in a format that their FrameMaker setup could use directly. Otherwise, they should export to Word format, using the same style names as their FrameMaker templates, and expect some cleanup work.
A question that will be harder to answer, but the manager is going to have to ask soon, is “Do we clear the decks of any ongoing work and do this conversion all at once, or convert each document as it’s needed?” There are advantages and trade-offs either way. Doing it all at once means you might miss some deadlines (which tend to slip on their own anyway), and you may end up converting documents that you won’t need later on, but you also don’t need to keep a rather expensive AuthorIT database around. Doing it piecemeal is probably easier, but you have to keep the old rig around (unless you just export everything to the intermediate format and do the second conversion later) and the goal line is hard to see (how do you know when you’re done?).
Such are the decisions a manager has to make. I suppose if I were the one making the decision, I would export everything to the intermediate format, and archive anything not being actively maintained. Then I could decommission the AuthorIT rig and “insource” some writers to import the active projects and get to work.
The following conversation took place on a mailing list I subscribe to. The text in red is from a documentation manager who works for a competitor; text in blue is someone who is trying to be helpful.
Anyone with experience converting from AuthorIT to FrameMaker 7.2?
Did you have any significant problems? What sort of prep work did you do before converting?
Did you have any significant problems? What sort of prep work did you do before converting?
Why are you interested in converting from AuthorIT to FrameMaker? I ask because I have just been working in a place where AuthorIT is being considered as a replacement for FrameMaker - is AuthorIT not delivering the goods?
My company uses FrameMaker and may go to XmetaL eventually. We acquired a company that outsourced the doc to a turn-key vendor that does not even store files on our corporate server, let alone use our standard templates, our file management system, and so on. This creates all sorts of problems, including putting our intellectual property at risk, severely limiting our control of resourcing projects, and so on.
At this point, I should mention that I have a pretty good idea of which company it is that got acquired: one I used to work for about ten years ago, in fact — although the outsourcing bit must have happened recently. And so the thread continues:
Thanks! That sort of outsourcing takes a lot of courage, or faith in your supplier, or stupidity!
You can probably guess what my vote would be. I was happy for the employees of this particular ex-corporation to see them get acquired; that’s a place in dire need of a culture enema. In fact, once the enema has been administered, I would consider working for them again.
I thought about jumping in on a thread on one of the other mailing lists that the competitor posted to, where my email address isn’t tied to the company I work for, but I don’t have anything to say that they probably aren’t aware of already — there isn’t a trivially easy migration path. You have to do what engineers call a “double-pump,” convert to an intermediate format that both programs understand, then convert that to your target format. If they are using structured FrameMaker, they could create AuthorIT templates to export XML in a format that their FrameMaker setup could use directly. Otherwise, they should export to Word format, using the same style names as their FrameMaker templates, and expect some cleanup work.
A question that will be harder to answer, but the manager is going to have to ask soon, is “Do we clear the decks of any ongoing work and do this conversion all at once, or convert each document as it’s needed?” There are advantages and trade-offs either way. Doing it all at once means you might miss some deadlines (which tend to slip on their own anyway), and you may end up converting documents that you won’t need later on, but you also don’t need to keep a rather expensive AuthorIT database around. Doing it piecemeal is probably easier, but you have to keep the old rig around (unless you just export everything to the intermediate format and do the second conversion later) and the goal line is hard to see (how do you know when you’re done?).
Such are the decisions a manager has to make. I suppose if I were the one making the decision, I would export everything to the intermediate format, and archive anything not being actively maintained. Then I could decommission the AuthorIT rig and “insource” some writers to import the active projects and get to work.
Sunday, May 21, 2006 No comments
Quotable quotes about Word
Another gem dug up in my email clean-out
As technical writers go, I’m relatively lucky. In my 20-odd (and I do mean odd) year career, I’ve only in the last couple of months ran into overload situations that had me working weekends as well as overtime (it’s not uncommon from what I’ve heard from other people). But I’m even more lucky because I haven’t had to use Microsoft Word as a serious writing tool for almost 10 years now. Before that, Word (up to Word 7.0/95) was a decent word processor, not terribly solid (especially for documents longer than 50 pages) but easy to customize, very scriptable and mostly predictable. Being a button-pusher by nature, I was able to find and then avoid the sharp corners and rough edges and get work done.
For people who live in their word processors, Word97 marked a major turn — downward. Corrupted files, always a possibility, became more frequent. Auto-numbering went straight to #3|| and skipped the handbasket. Preference changes would spontaneously change themselves back. Fortunately, about the time Word97 (and Word98 for Macs) landed on the world with a wet plop, I changed jobs and went to work at a FrameMaker shop. Frame isn’t the most feature-laden product in the world, but it is extremely predictable and very stable. The only way to lose significant work to a FrameMaker crash is to start typing in a new document without saving it before it crashes. Anyway, all the things I started hearing from Word users at that point made me less than motivated to go back.
Nothing I’ve heard has suggested the problems are being fixed. In fact, I’ve repeatedly asked a Microsoft program manager who works on Office file formats whether the next version of Word will fix the autonumbering problems that have been around since '98. No response. (Funny how the search function at Microsoft’s blogs.msdn.com couldn’t turn up its own blog address but Google could, by the way.)
So here’s a few quotable quotes about Word that I’ve collected from the Techcomm list....
“First thing I realized about trying to do documentation in Word is that I had to lower my expectations.” — B.A.
“Only entirely random actions, bizarre incantations and forceful oaths can make Word do what you want it to (especially when it comes to numbering).” — M.B.
“Nothing will work in Word if you're wearing the wrong kind of shoes or whatever.” — B.A.
“It's a known Word bug.” — a cast of millions
This profanity-laden rant is also notable, not only for expressing the frustration so many of us have with Word, but for being the only piece of writing I’ve ever seen that manages to use that much profanity and stay coherent.
And finally:
Word does (mostly) well for most people, who don’t need more than 10%–20% of the functionality it offers. It’s those of us who live and die by our word-processing skills who run into trouble with it, because we need to push it to the limit just to stay caught up. And pushing Word makes it tip over, quickly.
As technical writers go, I’m relatively lucky. In my 20-odd (and I do mean odd) year career, I’ve only in the last couple of months ran into overload situations that had me working weekends as well as overtime (it’s not uncommon from what I’ve heard from other people). But I’m even more lucky because I haven’t had to use Microsoft Word as a serious writing tool for almost 10 years now. Before that, Word (up to Word 7.0/95) was a decent word processor, not terribly solid (especially for documents longer than 50 pages) but easy to customize, very scriptable and mostly predictable. Being a button-pusher by nature, I was able to find and then avoid the sharp corners and rough edges and get work done.
For people who live in their word processors, Word97 marked a major turn — downward. Corrupted files, always a possibility, became more frequent. Auto-numbering went straight to #3|| and skipped the handbasket. Preference changes would spontaneously change themselves back. Fortunately, about the time Word97 (and Word98 for Macs) landed on the world with a wet plop, I changed jobs and went to work at a FrameMaker shop. Frame isn’t the most feature-laden product in the world, but it is extremely predictable and very stable. The only way to lose significant work to a FrameMaker crash is to start typing in a new document without saving it before it crashes. Anyway, all the things I started hearing from Word users at that point made me less than motivated to go back.
Nothing I’ve heard has suggested the problems are being fixed. In fact, I’ve repeatedly asked a Microsoft program manager who works on Office file formats whether the next version of Word will fix the autonumbering problems that have been around since '98. No response. (Funny how the search function at Microsoft’s blogs.msdn.com couldn’t turn up its own blog address but Google could, by the way.)
So here’s a few quotable quotes about Word that I’ve collected from the Techcomm list....
“First thing I realized about trying to do documentation in Word is that I had to lower my expectations.” — B.A.
“Only entirely random actions, bizarre incantations and forceful oaths can make Word do what you want it to (especially when it comes to numbering).” — M.B.
“Nothing will work in Word if you're wearing the wrong kind of shoes or whatever.” — B.A.
“It's a known Word bug.” — a cast of millions
This profanity-laden rant is also notable, not only for expressing the frustration so many of us have with Word, but for being the only piece of writing I’ve ever seen that manages to use that much profanity and stay coherent.
And finally:
When I first started using Microsoft Word professionally, about 10 years ago, someone told me that the only thing to do to get it to work as you thought it should was to sacrifice a small goat during the correct phase of the moon.
I ran a Google search today on ‘+"Microsoft Word" +"sacrifice" +"goat"’ and got 650 hits, so clearly this belief is now widespread. (OK, so some of the hits were about obscure religions rather than tech writing, but my point is still valid.)— D.F.
Word does (mostly) well for most people, who don’t need more than 10%–20% of the functionality it offers. It’s those of us who live and die by our word-processing skills who run into trouble with it, because we need to push it to the limit just to stay caught up. And pushing Word makes it tip over, quickly.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006 No comments
Caught in the (first) draft
In an example of synchronicity, articles about first drafts hit both 43 Folders and MacDevCenter today. 43 Folders suggests Just Doing It, while MacDevCenter explores tools (some of which don’t exist yet) to help eliminate distractions so you can focus on writing (instead of editing).
If you read the comments in the MacDevCenter article, you’ll see where I suggest the hoary Unix line editor, ed, for first drafts. It has been part of Unix systems since the first version in 1970 and is still lurking at the bottom of the most modern version of Unix (aka MacOS X). There’s also a neat trick for disabling the GUI at login time, leaving your entire screen dedicated to a white on black console screen: type >console instead of your user name and hit Return.
Now there’s an environment for first drafts: no email, no web browser, no instant messenger; just you, your thoughts, and your keyboard. Going back and editing a previous line is more trouble than it’s worth, using ed (you can backspace though), so you mostly just keep typing until you’re done. Plenty of time to edit later.
If you read the comments in the MacDevCenter article, you’ll see where I suggest the hoary Unix line editor, ed, for first drafts. It has been part of Unix systems since the first version in 1970 and is still lurking at the bottom of the most modern version of Unix (aka MacOS X). There’s also a neat trick for disabling the GUI at login time, leaving your entire screen dedicated to a white on black console screen: type >console instead of your user name and hit Return.
Now there’s an environment for first drafts: no email, no web browser, no instant messenger; just you, your thoughts, and your keyboard. Going back and editing a previous line is more trouble than it’s worth, using ed (you can backspace though), so you mostly just keep typing until you’re done. Plenty of time to edit later.
Monday, May 15, 2006 1 comment
Peace & quiet
Current music: DI.fm Goa-Psy Trance
I came in from work, ran out to check over a presentation about a power line running past the church (and quite a few other places), and came back to Nobody Home. No jabbering TV, nobody Going To Die if I didn’t drop everything and fix her problem right away... sweeeet. I spent some time weeding down my inbox (now less than 100 messages from over 500 on Saturday) and catching up on some other folks’s blogs.
An essential ingredient of Peace and Quiet is the lack of annoyance. Fortunately, there are few things harder to notice than something that is not annoying you. If that itch under my left shoulder blade isn’t itching, I don’t think about it. Upon finding the Monday morning meeting was cancelled (hooray!), I promptly forgot about it and did useful things all morning. I’m the kind of person who usually isn’t annoyed by low-level clutter, so I usually don’t notice it. (This is the source of some friction at FAR Manor, as Mrs. Fetched is annoyed by clutter... but often not enough to actually do something about it herself.) On the other hand, the TV is annoying, or at least distracting, so I tend to hike the iBook away from the living room and play music through a pair of earbuds.
There’s a drawback to forgetting about annoyances, though: when they come back, even when you know they’re coming back, their presence makes them twice as annoying... at least at first. I’m thinking about school buses — after the first week of summer vacation, I stop rejoicing in their absence and forget about them for the next two months (Two months? What happened to three months? This slow erosion of summer is ridiculous!).
Slumber calleth, so off to bed I go. Tuesdays and Thursdays are my work at home days, so I won’t be thinking about commuting tomorrow either.
I came in from work, ran out to check over a presentation about a power line running past the church (and quite a few other places), and came back to Nobody Home. No jabbering TV, nobody Going To Die if I didn’t drop everything and fix her problem right away... sweeeet. I spent some time weeding down my inbox (now less than 100 messages from over 500 on Saturday) and catching up on some other folks’s blogs.
Digression, or maybe not: On the way home from work, I picked up a copy of Getting Things Done — it comes highly recommended in certain Mac geek circles — and made a short start of it. From the summary I saw at 43folders.com, it looks like a Master Plan for actually making Lotus Notes useful... which is a miracle that I’ve got to see for myself. I did manage, over the last couple of days, to whittle the couple-hundred messages out of my Notes inbox at work down to five (on Friday) and then to three (today). Next step is to wade through my project folders, clear out obsolete stuff, and move anything important into the Todo list.
An essential ingredient of Peace and Quiet is the lack of annoyance. Fortunately, there are few things harder to notice than something that is not annoying you. If that itch under my left shoulder blade isn’t itching, I don’t think about it. Upon finding the Monday morning meeting was cancelled (hooray!), I promptly forgot about it and did useful things all morning. I’m the kind of person who usually isn’t annoyed by low-level clutter, so I usually don’t notice it. (This is the source of some friction at FAR Manor, as Mrs. Fetched is annoyed by clutter... but often not enough to actually do something about it herself.) On the other hand, the TV is annoying, or at least distracting, so I tend to hike the iBook away from the living room and play music through a pair of earbuds.
There’s a drawback to forgetting about annoyances, though: when they come back, even when you know they’re coming back, their presence makes them twice as annoying... at least at first. I’m thinking about school buses — after the first week of summer vacation, I stop rejoicing in their absence and forget about them for the next two months (Two months? What happened to three months? This slow erosion of summer is ridiculous!).
Slumber calleth, so off to bed I go. Tuesdays and Thursdays are my work at home days, so I won’t be thinking about commuting tomorrow either.
Monday, March 20, 2006 No comments
Bonus babies, aka new toys
They passed out bonuses at work on Wednesday — a little earlier than I was prepared for, because I’d like a new MacBook but want to wait on the next hardware revision. So to assuage the technolust, I settled for getting an iPod and all the stuff I’ll need to go with it. Seeing my iBook is fairly old, it took nearly four hours to copy all my music and photos over a USB 1.1 port... just an incentive to get that newer laptop, I guess. We also picked up a 250GB hard drive for Mrs. Fetched’s video editing system — that G4 dualie has churned along for nearly four years now with no hardware upgrades, and it seems like 80GB drives aren’t as big as they used to be — and a set of noise-cancelling headphones.
I’d like to say one thing about the headphones: They. Are. FANTASTIC.
It seems to be an axiom that whatever the absolute worst cube in the office is, it will be assigned to me. The dwelling place I’ve been stuck with for the last couple of years is certainly a candidate if not the runaway winner — as far away from the windows as possible, along a main traffic route, and directly across from a training room with at least one of everything we make. Many of those products have fans, and they run all day. The only thing that drowns it out is the blare of the trainer, whose voice carries through most of that part of the building — he “can’t” shut the door because it would get too hot. The new headphones don’t do much for the chatter, but they easily knock out 80% of the fan noise emanating from the training room. Switching off the noise canceller produced a roar that I thought at first was blood rushing through my ears (like you might hear with a seriously good headset with no sound coming in), but was actually the training room.
I was impressed enough to risk official opprobrium by wearing them on the drive home, playing my iPod into the ’phones instead of through the FM transmitter thingie. Like wearing earplugs on the motorcycle, I think I hear better with the headphones: all the wind noise and road noise and climate control fan noise simply fades away; leaving only the hum of the engine, a little residual background stuff, and the music... which I can play at a much lower volume.
The only drawback is that they're the kind that hook over your ears, with the connecting band going around the back of your head. For whatever reason, they irritate my ears after a few hours.
I would pay some serious money for a “cone of silence” headset — something that would cut out both white noise and external chatter.
I’d like to say one thing about the headphones: They. Are. FANTASTIC.
It seems to be an axiom that whatever the absolute worst cube in the office is, it will be assigned to me. The dwelling place I’ve been stuck with for the last couple of years is certainly a candidate if not the runaway winner — as far away from the windows as possible, along a main traffic route, and directly across from a training room with at least one of everything we make. Many of those products have fans, and they run all day. The only thing that drowns it out is the blare of the trainer, whose voice carries through most of that part of the building — he “can’t” shut the door because it would get too hot. The new headphones don’t do much for the chatter, but they easily knock out 80% of the fan noise emanating from the training room. Switching off the noise canceller produced a roar that I thought at first was blood rushing through my ears (like you might hear with a seriously good headset with no sound coming in), but was actually the training room.
I was impressed enough to risk official opprobrium by wearing them on the drive home, playing my iPod into the ’phones instead of through the FM transmitter thingie. Like wearing earplugs on the motorcycle, I think I hear better with the headphones: all the wind noise and road noise and climate control fan noise simply fades away; leaving only the hum of the engine, a little residual background stuff, and the music... which I can play at a much lower volume.
The only drawback is that they're the kind that hook over your ears, with the connecting band going around the back of your head. For whatever reason, they irritate my ears after a few hours.
I would pay some serious money for a “cone of silence” headset — something that would cut out both white noise and external chatter.
Thursday, March 09, 2006 No comments
Well, I’ve started...
The boss told us in the staff meeting that the word for the year is “automation.” I told him I could automate quite a bit of my work by going to a markup-based system, and he said go for it.
So I’ve stopped talking about dumping FrameMaker for groff and started doing it. Not a moment too soon — the new Intel-based Macs won’t run Classic applications, of which FrameMaker is one. I’m probably going to be getting a MacBook at work soon, and getting one for myself as well.
It helps that the latest version of groff adds support for links and bookmarks in PDFs, and the HTML output continues to improve, so I shouldn’t lose any functionality.
So I’ve stopped talking about dumping FrameMaker for groff and started doing it. Not a moment too soon — the new Intel-based Macs won’t run Classic applications, of which FrameMaker is one. I’m probably going to be getting a MacBook at work soon, and getting one for myself as well.
It helps that the latest version of groff adds support for links and bookmarks in PDFs, and the HTML output continues to improve, so I shouldn’t lose any functionality.
Friday, February 24, 2006 No comments
VoIP... coming to an office near me
One of the IT folks came by my cube this afternoon, with a brand-new toy: a Cisco VoIP phone. Ain’t it cute?
Unfortunately, they don’t quite have them enabled yet. It came up, told me it was downloading a software update, then showed me this plaintive whine. The IT guy told me their plan was to roll the phones out to everyone, make sure they were doing their job, then cut everyone over. Presumably they’ll come to pick up the old Nortel PBX phones.After looking at these pictures, all I can say is: my cellphone camera really sucks.
Saturday, February 18, 2006 2 comments
Dude... you got a discount
We got a company-wide email a couple of days ago, announcing that we were now part of the Dell Employee Purchase Program (EPP). We can get up to 12% discounts on Smelly Dell consumer models, plus a free download of XP Home.
ooooooooooooooooohhhhh... ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
The funny thing is, we’re in a de-Dell-ification process at work; people needing new computers are getting IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads. I’ve suggested to those who are waiting for their Smelly Dells to finish flaking out to “accidentally” drop them on the way to a meeting or something so they can get to the front of the line. Just trying to be helpful....
From experience, when people ask me what kind of computer to get, I tell them two things: 1) Don’t get a Dozebox. 2) If you ignore #1, don’t get a Dell. Then they get a Dell, have all sorts of problems with it, and I get to say I told you so. :-P I’d take one if they gave it to me, but I’d install Linux on it and use it for a music/video jukebox.
ooooooooooooooooohhhhh... ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
The funny thing is, we’re in a de-Dell-ification process at work; people needing new computers are getting IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads. I’ve suggested to those who are waiting for their Smelly Dells to finish flaking out to “accidentally” drop them on the way to a meeting or something so they can get to the front of the line. Just trying to be helpful....
From experience, when people ask me what kind of computer to get, I tell them two things: 1) Don’t get a Dozebox. 2) If you ignore #1, don’t get a Dell. Then they get a Dell, have all sorts of problems with it, and I get to say I told you so. :-P I’d take one if they gave it to me, but I’d install Linux on it and use it for a music/video jukebox.
Saturday, December 10, 2005 1 comment
December funk
Current music: Creation Steppin’ Radio
Sheesh. Not only is it December, it’s mid-December. Hey, at this rate I’ll wake up and it will be spring! (now that’s a happy thought)
Like most early winters, I wrestle with light deprivation and my disgust at the commercialist orgy that Christmas has become (if that O’reilly whackjob on Faux wanted to “save” Christmas, he should have started about 40 years ago). Unlike most early winters, this time it’s getting the better of me. The choir’s annual caroling & food basket delivery was this afternoon, and participating did more to boost my spirits than anything else has so far.
Another wrestling move I’m trying this year is been to throw myself into working over the technical writing chimeras called structure and metadata. Perhaps I didn’t dig deep enough, but most of the literature on metadata that I found in a Google search is geared more toward libraries and museums than technical writing.
The blob here is a mind-map of what I’ve come up with so far; I’m almost ready to start turning it into a paper (click the pic for something almost readable). The muddled state of the mind-map perhaps reflects the muddle in my own mind, but nothing I’ve run across so far has challenged my belief that most people involved are making things far more complex than need be. If I don’t write more about it on the blog, I’ll stash the paper somewhere and point to it.
But speaking of muddling, I’ll muddle through, like I always do. It’s nice that Christmas falls on a Sunday this year. Not being a member of a mega-church, we’re having a service on Christmas, although the pastor told me he’s thinking of just reading the story and letting it stand as such — not a bad idea, really. It will be nice to light that big white candle in the Advent wreath on the day it should be lit.
A funk isn’t much of a problem, in the grand scheme of things. A friend of The Boy’s spent last night at our house, and he and Lobster headed out about 10 this morning. About a mile down the road, he went off the road and literally flew over Lobster’s truck before rolling. Thank God he was wearing his seatbelt; the car is totaled but he has a split lip and needs a trip to the chiro-cracker. Lobster called 911 and waited until the first responders got there before leaving.
So later in the morning, Lobster calls from work in a near-panic. You see, he was supposed to hang around until the cops got there and give a statement; the cop who called him told him he needed to come down to the station to give his statement “and then we’ll decide if we should charge you with anything.” He was nearly freaked out, to the point where Mrs. Fetched agreed to go with him. He got off with a lecture, and a lot of teasing from everyone else, in the end.
Yes, there are things far worse than a simple funk. And the tinnitus has been mostly gone for two days, hallelujah!
Sheesh. Not only is it December, it’s mid-December. Hey, at this rate I’ll wake up and it will be spring! (now that’s a happy thought)
Like most early winters, I wrestle with light deprivation and my disgust at the commercialist orgy that Christmas has become (if that O’reilly whackjob on Faux wanted to “save” Christmas, he should have started about 40 years ago). Unlike most early winters, this time it’s getting the better of me. The choir’s annual caroling & food basket delivery was this afternoon, and participating did more to boost my spirits than anything else has so far.
Another wrestling move I’m trying this year is been to throw myself into working over the technical writing chimeras called structure and metadata. Perhaps I didn’t dig deep enough, but most of the literature on metadata that I found in a Google search is geared more toward libraries and museums than technical writing.The blob here is a mind-map of what I’ve come up with so far; I’m almost ready to start turning it into a paper (click the pic for something almost readable). The muddled state of the mind-map perhaps reflects the muddle in my own mind, but nothing I’ve run across so far has challenged my belief that most people involved are making things far more complex than need be. If I don’t write more about it on the blog, I’ll stash the paper somewhere and point to it.
But speaking of muddling, I’ll muddle through, like I always do. It’s nice that Christmas falls on a Sunday this year. Not being a member of a mega-church, we’re having a service on Christmas, although the pastor told me he’s thinking of just reading the story and letting it stand as such — not a bad idea, really. It will be nice to light that big white candle in the Advent wreath on the day it should be lit.
A funk isn’t much of a problem, in the grand scheme of things. A friend of The Boy’s spent last night at our house, and he and Lobster headed out about 10 this morning. About a mile down the road, he went off the road and literally flew over Lobster’s truck before rolling. Thank God he was wearing his seatbelt; the car is totaled but he has a split lip and needs a trip to the chiro-cracker. Lobster called 911 and waited until the first responders got there before leaving.
So later in the morning, Lobster calls from work in a near-panic. You see, he was supposed to hang around until the cops got there and give a statement; the cop who called him told him he needed to come down to the station to give his statement “and then we’ll decide if we should charge you with anything.” He was nearly freaked out, to the point where Mrs. Fetched agreed to go with him. He got off with a lecture, and a lot of teasing from everyone else, in the end.
Yes, there are things far worse than a simple funk. And the tinnitus has been mostly gone for two days, hallelujah!
Saturday, December 03, 2005 No comments
XML for books: Simple is enough!
Many technical writers have been looking long and hard at working with XML, for a variety of reasons — ranging from a resume bullet-point to a genuine hope that it could improve productivity and help us better maintain our documentation. The problem is, vendors and consultants are the primary cheerleaders for XML solutions; they’re are all too ready to roll out six-figure systems to the few companies that have documentation departments with sufficient budgets and ignore all the rest of us. I’ve ranted in the Yahoo XML-doc mailing list about this topic, warning that XML is poised to sink into obscurity like its predecessor SGML, and for the same reasons. I truly believe that if XML is to gain widespread acceptance by technical writers, there needs to be a simple (cheap, easy to learn, no consultants required) XML-based system that can produce real documentation. Something no more complex than HTML, for example.
As it turns out, standard HTML may be all that’s needed. Printing a Book with CSS: Boom! describes how the authors created a published (to paper) book using HTML to mark up the text, and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to provide the formatting. The trick is to use a commercial CSS-based formatter that supports the proposed functionality in CSS3 (a future standard), which provides page layout necessities like headers and footers.
My hat is off to the authors. We now know that HTML/CSS is adequate for book publishing; knowing that it’s feasible is half the battle.
As it turns out, standard HTML may be all that’s needed. Printing a Book with CSS: Boom! describes how the authors created a published (to paper) book using HTML to mark up the text, and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to provide the formatting. The trick is to use a commercial CSS-based formatter that supports the proposed functionality in CSS3 (a future standard), which provides page layout necessities like headers and footers.
My hat is off to the authors. We now know that HTML/CSS is adequate for book publishing; knowing that it’s feasible is half the battle.
Saturday, November 19, 2005 1 comment
Happy Dance Time
Two (much larger) competitors of the company I work at find it too much of a struggle to compete, so they’re joining forces. Our stock got hammered on the news, but those things are temporary. We’ll continue doing what we do best while they’re sorting things out.
The real winners, though, are Scientific-Atlanta employees. I was a contractor there for 3½ years before moving to where I am now, and have stayed for eight years. Cisco’s modus operandi with new companies is to provide a thorough corporate culture enema, and no company I’ve been at — or heard of — needs one more than S-A.
S-A’s corporate culture still somehow reflects its roots as a McCarthy-era defense contractor. Employees are simply cogs in the machine, to be paid as little as possible and discarded at whim. I’m hunting for an email address for Cisco’s CEO (or at least HR department) and suggest they simply can everyone at S-A above the supervisor level, and a third to a half of the sup’s.
So on behalf of people I used to work with and still think of as friends, I do the happy dance. If it were a bit warmer, I’d dance naked around FAR Manor to celebrate.
The real winners, though, are Scientific-Atlanta employees. I was a contractor there for 3½ years before moving to where I am now, and have stayed for eight years. Cisco’s modus operandi with new companies is to provide a thorough corporate culture enema, and no company I’ve been at — or heard of — needs one more than S-A.
S-A’s corporate culture still somehow reflects its roots as a McCarthy-era defense contractor. Employees are simply cogs in the machine, to be paid as little as possible and discarded at whim. I’m hunting for an email address for Cisco’s CEO (or at least HR department) and suggest they simply can everyone at S-A above the supervisor level, and a third to a half of the sup’s.
So on behalf of people I used to work with and still think of as friends, I do the happy dance. If it were a bit warmer, I’d dance naked around FAR Manor to celebrate.
Monday, October 24, 2005 No comments
Please Standby
Category: Work
Music: Groove Salad
I got included in an email chain at work late last week. To make a long story short, one of our customers was returning eMTAs (embedded MTA, a cable modem with phone lines built in) complaining that they could get dial tone but no Internet access. Our lab techs hooked them up to the test equipment, which reported No Fault Found. Upon further investigation, it turned out that somebody (whether a subscriber or an installation tech) was pressing the Standby button — which disconnects the Ethernet and USB ports from the cable network. The latest generation removed the Standby switch, since subscribers would also bump it unknowingly after installation, then complain that their service was out.
In some ways, we’ve made great advances and gone backwards simultaneously as far as user interface design goes. 40 or 50 years ago — let’s pretend personal computers were as available then as they are now for the sake of argument — a Standby switch would have been a big ol’ toggle switch on the front panel, clearly marked “STANDBY” up and “NORMAL” down. It would have been very easy to tell what mode the modem was in without trying to decipher a pattern of LEDs on the front panel. Product design these days is all about contours and smooth curves — a practical, easily visible toggle switch pokes out and just doesn’t fit today’s style.
Whatever happened to “form follows function”?
Music: Groove Salad
I got included in an email chain at work late last week. To make a long story short, one of our customers was returning eMTAs (embedded MTA, a cable modem with phone lines built in) complaining that they could get dial tone but no Internet access. Our lab techs hooked them up to the test equipment, which reported No Fault Found. Upon further investigation, it turned out that somebody (whether a subscriber or an installation tech) was pressing the Standby button — which disconnects the Ethernet and USB ports from the cable network. The latest generation removed the Standby switch, since subscribers would also bump it unknowingly after installation, then complain that their service was out.
In some ways, we’ve made great advances and gone backwards simultaneously as far as user interface design goes. 40 or 50 years ago — let’s pretend personal computers were as available then as they are now for the sake of argument — a Standby switch would have been a big ol’ toggle switch on the front panel, clearly marked “STANDBY” up and “NORMAL” down. It would have been very easy to tell what mode the modem was in without trying to decipher a pattern of LEDs on the front panel. Product design these days is all about contours and smooth curves — a practical, easily visible toggle switch pokes out and just doesn’t fit today’s style.
Whatever happened to “form follows function”?
Wednesday, October 19, 2005 No comments
RTF: the “other” interchange format
Category: technology
MacDevCenter’s Giles Turnbull has an article up on using RTF (Rich Text Format) as an interchange format. For non-technical users, this is probably the best way to move documents around without having to worry about whether someone can read them. Nearly all word processors that aspire to be “full-featured” provide some support for RTF these days, so it’s a good starting place.
This morning at work, I was asked to provide some information from a quick-start guide for a hand-off to a customer (who wants to write some custom stuff). We’re using FrameMaker for documentation, not Word, and Word users just seem to assume everyone else uses Word. Imagine that. (For those who wonder why I don’t use Word, this profanity-laden rant pretty well sums it up.) FrameMaker’s RTF exporter is less than wonderful, producing sloppy text formatting and losing the graphics, but the customer just wanted the tables so it’s all good.
Way back when, I brought RTF home once and used a text editor on an Amiga to make updates to a manual. We had a deadline and a snowstorm, so I wanted to make sure I could hold up my end of things even if I couldn’t get to the office. It worked, except for one minor detail: those spaces at the end of lines of RTF are significant, and my text editor insisted on removing them... so when I got back to work & opened it in the word processor, there were spacesmissing here and there. Running the spell checker fixed all but one or two of them.
So with all these wonderful real-world examples, what’s lacking in RTF compared to ODF, the virtues of which I’ve been extolling lately?
First, RTF has been one of those formats that is supposed to be well-known, but Microsoft has always had a penchant for omitting things. The newer specifications are better.
Second, there are RTF parsers and conversion tools out there, but they are far less well-known than equivalent XML tools.
Third, even Microsoft is moving to XML for document interchange.
RTF, given its Word-driven ubiquity, will be around for a long time to come and will continue to be a useful interchange format for people interested primarily in exchanging and using documents. Many people will continue to use older versions of Word and Office for a long time to come, and XML interchange won’t be feasible for them. But for those of us who want our computers to extract (and perhaps transform) the important pieces of the documents we get, XML is really the way forward.
MacDevCenter’s Giles Turnbull has an article up on using RTF (Rich Text Format) as an interchange format. For non-technical users, this is probably the best way to move documents around without having to worry about whether someone can read them. Nearly all word processors that aspire to be “full-featured” provide some support for RTF these days, so it’s a good starting place.
This morning at work, I was asked to provide some information from a quick-start guide for a hand-off to a customer (who wants to write some custom stuff). We’re using FrameMaker for documentation, not Word, and Word users just seem to assume everyone else uses Word. Imagine that. (For those who wonder why I don’t use Word, this profanity-laden rant pretty well sums it up.) FrameMaker’s RTF exporter is less than wonderful, producing sloppy text formatting and losing the graphics, but the customer just wanted the tables so it’s all good.
Way back when, I brought RTF home once and used a text editor on an Amiga to make updates to a manual. We had a deadline and a snowstorm, so I wanted to make sure I could hold up my end of things even if I couldn’t get to the office. It worked, except for one minor detail: those spaces at the end of lines of RTF are significant, and my text editor insisted on removing them... so when I got back to work & opened it in the word processor, there were spacesmissing here and there. Running the spell checker fixed all but one or two of them.
So with all these wonderful real-world examples, what’s lacking in RTF compared to ODF, the virtues of which I’ve been extolling lately?
First, RTF has been one of those formats that is supposed to be well-known, but Microsoft has always had a penchant for omitting things. The newer specifications are better.
Second, there are RTF parsers and conversion tools out there, but they are far less well-known than equivalent XML tools.
Third, even Microsoft is moving to XML for document interchange.
RTF, given its Word-driven ubiquity, will be around for a long time to come and will continue to be a useful interchange format for people interested primarily in exchanging and using documents. Many people will continue to use older versions of Word and Office for a long time to come, and XML interchange won’t be feasible for them. But for those of us who want our computers to extract (and perhaps transform) the important pieces of the documents we get, XML is really the way forward.
Friday, October 14, 2005 2 comments
Laziness and Open Document Format
Categories: technology, work
Current music: Groove Salad
Just before I took off for lunch today, the contractor who picked up the projects I was working on before the reorg motioned me over and asked me, “how did you do it? You put together the whole shell of this project, and I’m just hanging stuff on it. Especially the command-line stuff... how did you get so much of it done with nothing to work with?” Pulling miracles out of my, er, back pocket has been a lot of what I’ve done at the office for the last few years. I got deadlines, limited access (at best) to equipment, a little help from my boss when he’s not swamped with other stuff, very little in the way of specifications, and somehow I managed to maintain documentation for three entire product lines.
My secret is: I’m lazy.
Look, I sit in front of a computer all day. If I can get the computer to do something for me, especially if it’s something that needs to be done more than once, I’ll do it. For example, our original (now “legacy”) product line came with about 4000 pages of documentation scattered over about 20 different manuals. We provided a master index, a 110-page book of its own, as a way to let customers zero in on which manual(s) covered a particular topic. The first time I did the master index, it took two solid weeks of nothing else. This is one of those prime examples for automation: I had to build a book in FrameMaker of all the other books, tag each chapter in each manual, run the index, convert the tags to document references (for example, change “EG” to Engineering Guidelines), remove all but the first reference to any chapter, blah blah blah. To make a long story shorter, I wrote a handful of AppleScripts that eliminated literally 80% of the grunt work: instead of two weeks, I could build the master index in two days. Yesterday, I wrote a script that created index entries from headings (which is OK for a first pass at indexing commands) that saved me a day’s worth of work.
I told you all that to tell you this.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Massachusetts adopting Open Document Format (ODF) for state government documents. Between than and now, OpenOffice 2.0 went into beta test; yesterday, OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) submitted ODF to the International Standards Organization (ISO) for consideration as an international standard for office document interchange.
The neat thing about all this is that the ODF format is easy to pick apart and fiddle with. Internally, content, graphics, and style information are separated and the whole thing is rolled up in a ZIP file. Content and style files use an XML format, which is important for two reasons: XML is plain text, and there are lots of utilities to work with it. So what does that mean? There are several Free programs that support ODF already (OpenOffice and AbiWord run on most computers, while Koffice also runs on Linux systems). But the really fun part is, given a document format both open and relatively easy to parse, you don’t need an office application to do things with ODF files.
In the computing world, when a group like OASIS sets out to nail down a standard, they form a Technical Committee (TC) of interested parties. In the case of the ODF TC, some of the interested parties include companies that make content management systems (or CMS... the alphabet soup is sloshing around quite a bit tonight!) — suffice it to say that a CMS allows you to store, retrieve, and process documents to make something new (kind of like putting basil leaves in a food processor and making pesto). Given the job of a CMS, it usually doesn’t just store a document as-is. In the case of an ODF file, the CMS would probably unzip it and extract just the content and metadata (data about the data) components. The graphics are already stored in the CMS. Let’s say I send a document to the CMS and come back for it a couple of months later. During that time, some of the artwork has been changed. The CMS grabs the original content and metadata, rolls in the updated graphics, and hands me an ODF file. Oh cool, I didn’t have to update the graphics myself!
Another handy utility might be nightly publishing runs. Sometimes, I’m working on a manual that’s getting change requests and bug reports coming in fast & furious. Some of the manuals I deal with have a lot of bitmap graphics, and can take nearly an hour to generate a PDF. Remember, I’m lazy... I don’t want to sit at work an hour overtime just to watch the computer make a PDF. In my theoretical ODF-based system, I simply send in the stuff I worked on during the day, and the CMS builds a new document and emails it (with a summary of what changed) to all the reviewers. The reviewers get fresh hot documentation every morning; I get to go home, sit on the porch, and write haiku before it gets dark.
With the manual finished, I have to send it to the translators. Currently, this involves gathering all the various files together and archiving them (and sending missing pieces or assuring them that the extraneous files aren’t important). In my dream system, I tell the CMS to give me an ODF document of the book. Boom, all the pieces get wrapped together, nothing gets dropped, nothing extra gets added, and I send one file to the translators.
I’m willing to put some effort into making this a reality. After all, I want the computer to do the work for me.
Current music: Groove Salad
Just before I took off for lunch today, the contractor who picked up the projects I was working on before the reorg motioned me over and asked me, “how did you do it? You put together the whole shell of this project, and I’m just hanging stuff on it. Especially the command-line stuff... how did you get so much of it done with nothing to work with?” Pulling miracles out of my, er, back pocket has been a lot of what I’ve done at the office for the last few years. I got deadlines, limited access (at best) to equipment, a little help from my boss when he’s not swamped with other stuff, very little in the way of specifications, and somehow I managed to maintain documentation for three entire product lines.
My secret is: I’m lazy.
Look, I sit in front of a computer all day. If I can get the computer to do something for me, especially if it’s something that needs to be done more than once, I’ll do it. For example, our original (now “legacy”) product line came with about 4000 pages of documentation scattered over about 20 different manuals. We provided a master index, a 110-page book of its own, as a way to let customers zero in on which manual(s) covered a particular topic. The first time I did the master index, it took two solid weeks of nothing else. This is one of those prime examples for automation: I had to build a book in FrameMaker of all the other books, tag each chapter in each manual, run the index, convert the tags to document references (for example, change “EG” to Engineering Guidelines), remove all but the first reference to any chapter, blah blah blah. To make a long story shorter, I wrote a handful of AppleScripts that eliminated literally 80% of the grunt work: instead of two weeks, I could build the master index in two days. Yesterday, I wrote a script that created index entries from headings (which is OK for a first pass at indexing commands) that saved me a day’s worth of work.
I told you all that to tell you this.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Massachusetts adopting Open Document Format (ODF) for state government documents. Between than and now, OpenOffice 2.0 went into beta test; yesterday, OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) submitted ODF to the International Standards Organization (ISO) for consideration as an international standard for office document interchange.
The neat thing about all this is that the ODF format is easy to pick apart and fiddle with. Internally, content, graphics, and style information are separated and the whole thing is rolled up in a ZIP file. Content and style files use an XML format, which is important for two reasons: XML is plain text, and there are lots of utilities to work with it. So what does that mean? There are several Free programs that support ODF already (OpenOffice and AbiWord run on most computers, while Koffice also runs on Linux systems). But the really fun part is, given a document format both open and relatively easy to parse, you don’t need an office application to do things with ODF files.
In the computing world, when a group like OASIS sets out to nail down a standard, they form a Technical Committee (TC) of interested parties. In the case of the ODF TC, some of the interested parties include companies that make content management systems (or CMS... the alphabet soup is sloshing around quite a bit tonight!) — suffice it to say that a CMS allows you to store, retrieve, and process documents to make something new (kind of like putting basil leaves in a food processor and making pesto). Given the job of a CMS, it usually doesn’t just store a document as-is. In the case of an ODF file, the CMS would probably unzip it and extract just the content and metadata (data about the data) components. The graphics are already stored in the CMS. Let’s say I send a document to the CMS and come back for it a couple of months later. During that time, some of the artwork has been changed. The CMS grabs the original content and metadata, rolls in the updated graphics, and hands me an ODF file. Oh cool, I didn’t have to update the graphics myself!
Another handy utility might be nightly publishing runs. Sometimes, I’m working on a manual that’s getting change requests and bug reports coming in fast & furious. Some of the manuals I deal with have a lot of bitmap graphics, and can take nearly an hour to generate a PDF. Remember, I’m lazy... I don’t want to sit at work an hour overtime just to watch the computer make a PDF. In my theoretical ODF-based system, I simply send in the stuff I worked on during the day, and the CMS builds a new document and emails it (with a summary of what changed) to all the reviewers. The reviewers get fresh hot documentation every morning; I get to go home, sit on the porch, and write haiku before it gets dark.
With the manual finished, I have to send it to the translators. Currently, this involves gathering all the various files together and archiving them (and sending missing pieces or assuring them that the extraneous files aren’t important). In my dream system, I tell the CMS to give me an ODF document of the book. Boom, all the pieces get wrapped together, nothing gets dropped, nothing extra gets added, and I send one file to the translators.
I’m willing to put some effort into making this a reality. After all, I want the computer to do the work for me.
Monday, October 10, 2005 No comments
Something you don't see everyday
I was getting my 3 p.m. joe to see me through the rest of the afternoon, and managed to get a whole cup for a change. As I was starting the next pot, the president of our division came in, said hello, then stooped down & picked up a couple of pieces of trash & dumped them in the wastebasket.
I guess that represents why I’ve stayed there for 7 years.
I guess that represents why I’ve stayed there for 7 years.
Tuesday, October 04, 2005 No comments
My ad hoc home office
I thought I’d start the day by describing my work-at-home setup before I get to work.
Last week, I said I work out on the screened-in porch/Florida room with the cats. I set at the windows, looking out over a very rough back yard that needs some serious log removal and weed-eating. The woods takes over about thirty feet away, so it’s a fairly narrow strip of yard I’m talking about.
I sit at an 80s-vintage typing desk, a steel frame with a pretty good composite veneer over who-knows-what for a working surface. I use two phone books to raise the iBook screen up to (almost) eye level... I suppose I ought to get one or two more to get it really right. The Boy’s old iMac “donated” its Apple Pro Keyboard & my MacAlly wheelie mouse (he likes it better than the Pro Mouse and I don’t use it that often) for the day.
The Force is strong with the litter box this morning. Daughter Dearest is supposed to scoop it at least every other day, and we’re lucky if she gets to it twice a week.
Time to start working, after I grab a cup of coffee... and a couple more phone books....
Last week, I said I work out on the screened-in porch/Florida room with the cats. I set at the windows, looking out over a very rough back yard that needs some serious log removal and weed-eating. The woods takes over about thirty feet away, so it’s a fairly narrow strip of yard I’m talking about.
I sit at an 80s-vintage typing desk, a steel frame with a pretty good composite veneer over who-knows-what for a working surface. I use two phone books to raise the iBook screen up to (almost) eye level... I suppose I ought to get one or two more to get it really right. The Boy’s old iMac “donated” its Apple Pro Keyboard & my MacAlly wheelie mouse (he likes it better than the Pro Mouse and I don’t use it that often) for the day.
The Force is strong with the litter box this morning. Daughter Dearest is supposed to scoop it at least every other day, and we’re lucky if she gets to it twice a week.
Time to start working, after I grab a cup of coffee... and a couple more phone books....
Tuesday, September 27, 2005 No comments
Working at home
Current music: Moody Blues - Say It With Love
I’ve sort-of fallen into a routine where I work at home on Tuesdays. Today it worked out even better than usual: Planetary Governor Bok-Bok asked school districts to take a couple of snow days Monday & Tuesday to cushion any Rita-related fuel shortages, so I didn't have to worry about getting the kids up and taking them to school. If that weren't good enough, I turned off the alarm so I could get a reasonable amount of sleep for a change.
Time to get some work done....
I’ve sort-of fallen into a routine where I work at home on Tuesdays. Today it worked out even better than usual: Planetary Governor Bok-Bok asked school districts to take a couple of snow days Monday & Tuesday to cushion any Rita-related fuel shortages, so I didn't have to worry about getting the kids up and taking them to school. If that weren't good enough, I turned off the alarm so I could get a reasonable amount of sleep for a change.
Time to get some work done....
Monday, September 26, 2005 No comments
Yuck
I didn't realize how dirty my keyboard wrist rest was at the office until I dripped a little water on it and tried to rub it off. I had to get some soap on a paper towel to clean it off.
Friday, September 09, 2005 No comments
The stuff I have to document...
One of the products I write about at work has a command-line interface (CLI) used for debugging and troubleshooting. Customers got wind of it, requested documentation, and that’s usually where I get involved.
One particular (or should I say peculiar) troubleshooting command is “ti_ts” — which starts a troubleshooting routine on some TI chips in the box. I tried to get them to change the name, to no avail. So on this development cycle, they added a “codesperms” command (which translates to “active codes per minislot’). I have a pretty good idea what the next oddly-named command will be, but don’t want to give them ideas just in case one of them stumbles across this blog....
One particular (or should I say peculiar) troubleshooting command is “ti_ts” — which starts a troubleshooting routine on some TI chips in the box. I tried to get them to change the name, to no avail. So on this development cycle, they added a “codesperms” command (which translates to “active codes per minislot’). I have a pretty good idea what the next oddly-named command will be, but don’t want to give them ideas just in case one of them stumbles across this blog....
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