mike's web log

Terms of venery, IT style

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 11:36:47 GMT

Everyone knows about a herd of cows and a clutter of cats and a murder of crows, right? These are called collective nouns or terms of venery. (The latter, more interesting, term refers to hunting, should you be wondering.) Many such terms are listed here, here, and on Melanie Spiller's site.

For fun the other day, we came up with terms of venery for the many species that can be found in the world of IT. Herewith our list. Can you come up with more?

A compilation of programmers
A unit of testers
A click of QA engineers
A spec of program managers
A package of builders
A deployment of SysOps -or- A distribution of SysOps
A bundle of network engineers
A row of DBAs
An interface of UX designers
A lab of usability testers
A snarl of IT admins
A triage of Helpdesk engineers
A pixel of graphic artists -or- A sketch of graphic artists
A meeting of managers
A retreat of general managers
A scribble of writers -or- A sheaf of writers
A revue of editors (haha) -or- A scrabble of editors
A project of interns
An oversight of auditors
A tweet of tech evangelists
A quarrel of patent lawyers

Contributors: me, David Huntsperger, Peter Delaney, Scott Kralik

Hurray, new & improved technology! What do you tell users?

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:02:44 GMT

Imagine that you're a music company in about 1984. For many decades you've been selling vinyl records, and then along comes this newfangled "compact disc" business. It's obvious to your company that this is the future, and your audiophile customers are all excited. But your everyday customers are confused: are you going to stop making records? Are they supposed to replace their enormous record collections with CDs? And what about the whole ecosystem that's grown up around records: record stores, stereo manufacturers, even furniture makers ... what do you tell them?

I've lived through similar scenarios in the software industry multiple times: the company devises a new technology—not just an update to your already successful releases, but a new approach. As with the record company, tho, it's rarely easy to simply pull the plug on your old stuff, since many of your customers are heavily invested in your old technology.

If you're the documentation person under these circumstances, you have a tricky job. If the new technology is sufficiently different, you can create a brand-new documentation set from scratch for the new technology. (The documentation sets for record players and CD players have very little shared information.)

But it's not always that clean a break. Consider a database product where the new technology is an innovative search syntax. Everything else about the database (storage, backup, etc.) is the same; you just have a new way for users to craft their queries. Moreover, the old query syntax still works.

Too often, what ends up happening is that writers add a section to the existing documentation that describes the new technology. This "solves" the problem. Hey, now we have two technologies! We've documented both of them!

But what do your users actually need?

[more]

Rocket Science for Beginners

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 10:31:33 GMT

The title of this entry does not, as far as I know, reflect an actual book title. But based on something I saw today, maybe it could. Here's an article I saw today on the ArsTechnica site:

Keep it secret, keep it safe: A beginner's guide to Web safety

I was initially interested, because although I am more-or-less conversant with the basics of safe browsing—using wifi safely at a coffee shop, for example—there are certainly other people in our household who might value some tips "for beginners" about how to use the web safely.

Then I actually read the article. Here are a couple of examples of advice for those beginners:

Clicking the browser's padlock icon while visiting Facebook, for example, gives us the most relevant information about the certificate and its encryption algorithms: the certificate has been signed by VeriSign and the connection uses TLS 1.1 with 128-bit RC4 encryption.

[...]

If you want to roll your own [VPN] server, you can use free software like OpenVPN (or, for Mac users, the VPN server included in the $20 OS X Server package).

Frankly, I'm not really sure how grateful my wife would be to learn these things.

Obviously, the issue has to do with the term "beginner." It's not actually clear to me who exactly the author had in mind as a beginner, but it's not my wife, or my kids, or a bunch of other people who are perhaps not quite ready to examine the certificate chain for the current session.

[more]

The case of the bouncing emails

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 12:19:57 GMT

Here's a way not to make friends and not to influence people: hand out your personal email address everywhere and then discover that the address is merrily bouncing people. Whoops.

I taught a class over the last couple of Saturdays and told folks they could send their homework to me at mike@mikepope.com. On Wednesday I got an email from a student telling me that the email address I had handed out wasn't working. (The student had managed to find me via a different channel, thank goodness.) I tried sending an email to the address I'd distributed, and sure enough, back it came.

The keeper of my domain (mikepope.com) is GoDaddy. As part of registering my domain and getting them to manage it, I'd gotten "free email forwarding" for the domain. When someone sends email to the mikepope.com domain (e.g., mike@mikepope.com), the message is forwarded to my other, "real" email addresses.

Some months ago, I started getting a steady volume of messages to my real email addresses that told me an email had bounced, often with the message "invalid recipient address." The strange thing was that these were bounces for emails that I had never sent. This turns out to be a well-known problem—spammers forge a From address on their spam mail (they don't want you to reply, they just want you to click the link in the email they send). Spammers use many, many different forged From addresses in their attempts to get around spam-detection strategies. Apparently the mike@mikepope address had fallen into the hands of just such a spammer.

[more]

Outlook! Stop sending messages on Ctrl+Enter!

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 18:34:24 GMT

If you're like me and you use Outlook and you're a bit of a sloppy typist, you've probably inadvertently sent messages off by fat-fingering Ctrl+Enter. By default, this keystroke performs a Send operation, and boy, can that be annoying.

Turns out there's an easy fix. (To Outlook, not to your typing.) I got this from someone on the web, I think it was. (Alas, I don't remember, so my apologies to whoever that was.) In Outlook, click File > Options. In the Options dialog box, click the Mail tab, then scroll down to Send messages and uncheck (Ha! Take that!) the option CTRL + ENTER sends a message. Here's a picture:

This works for Outlook 2010 for sure, and probably (?) for Outlook 2007. I can't speak for earlier versions.

Guard cat on duty

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 06:39:27 GMT

I'm working in a new job, and I was surprised not long ago to get an email from one of our senior developers that read something like this:[1]

To: [whole group]
From: [senior developer]
Subject: I love kittens because they're fluffy

This would be one of yer more wtf new-job moments. A few minutes later we got this:

To: [whole group]
From: [senior developer]
Subject: re: I love kittens because they're fluffy

I stepped out of my office for 30 seconds and I was in the office next door!

There was a reasonable explanation for all this, as it turned out, which involved security. Every company has security policies for computer use, of course, and larger companies might have dedicated IT folks who enforce such policies. One way they might enforce policies is to perform security audits of people's workspaces. For example, has someone written their password on a yellow note and stuck it on their monitor? Fail.

Another policy that the security folks might audit is the practice of locking your workstation when you step away from your desk. Obviously, if you walk away from an unlocked machine, anyone can jump on your computer and start hunting around for sensitive information.

Even a vigilant security audit team, however, can't watch everyone every minute. But I happen to work with a bunch of security-minded developers, so a protocol emerged that if they could catch you with your workstation unlocked, you were fair game to have a fluffy-kitten email sent from your computer. Our senior developer guy, in spite of his protestations, had been caught sneakily when he stepped out for the quickest of conversations.

[more]

Key remappings in Word

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 16:55:45 GMT

This is a blog post just to record the key remappings I do in Microsoft Word 2010. (It is probably not of interest to most people.)

I've found that it speeds up revisions tremendously to map keyboard shortcuts to the commands in Word that you use to find, accept, and reject revisions and comments. As a bonus, I don't like that the traditional Find key in Word 2010 is mapped to some sort of Navigation pane (where traditional Find is available under Advanced Find). So I map Ctrl+F as well. As I say, this is primarily for my own reference.

Task	Command	Key mapping
Display Find/Replace dialog box	`EditFind`	Ctrl+F
Find next revision or comment	`NextChangeOrComment`	Ctrl+Shift+F
Accept current change	`AcceptChangesSelected`	Ctrl+Shift+A
Reject current change	`RejectChangesSelected`	Ctrl+Shift+R

Decoding programming book titles

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:54:04 GMT

Time again for some Friday Fun. Ok, you know how they say that you can't judge a book by its cover? Well, I have a theory that you can make a pretty good judgment about a programming book by its title. See what you think.

The [Language] Programming Language
The Ruby Programming Language, The SQL Programming Language
The authors are really hoping you'll think that they've written their language's version of The C Programming Language, aka K&R. Not much chance that their books are a slim 250 pages like the original, eh?

[Language] in a Nutshell
Python in a Nutshell, VB & VBA in a Nutshell
Reference docs.

Programming [Language] or Pro [Language]
Programming Visual Basic 2008, Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework
[more]

It's a miracle, but it isn't perfect just yet

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:06:49 GMT

One of my tasks over the last few years has been to whittle down our collection of CDs, after of course ripping them. I use Windows Media Player for ripping, which has been quite satisfactory. In fact, more than satisfactory. I have fed innumerable CDs into my machine, and time after time, across a wide range of genres and for CDs going back 25+ years, WMP has blithely displayed the CD title and list of tracks.

This actually is quite amazing, if you think about it. I can start up a CD that I distinctly remember buying 27 years ago, and WMP figures out what it is and then goes out to ... somewhere ... to bring back album art and a track listing. (Try that with your vinyl or cassette tapes, ha.) When I was working my way through the pop/rock and jazz CDs, I don't think it ever failed to find the right CD and track listing. I think the only flaw I ever found was that it would retrieve CD cover art that was for a slightly different edition of the CD.

Now I'm ripping classical CDs, and here I begin to detect that this technology is not exactly, entirely perfect. What I'm realizing (after doing exactly zero research about this) is that WMP is leveraging a wee bit of crowdsourcing in order to come up with track listings.

For example, I put in a Dvorak CD that was an old Sony reissue on the "Essential Classics" label. WMP found the CD, no problem, but this is what it came up with for a track listing:

Oops. A DGG recording by Helene Grimaud was tagged by someone who I think must have intended to come back later and finish:

This RCA recording was tagged by someone who could not be bothered to repeat all of that stuff for every movement, good golly:

[more]

Dennis Ritchie, technical writer

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 08:54:01 GMT

Dennis Ritchie, the co-inventor of Unix and of the C programming language, died this week. There are many, many eloquent tributes to Dr. Ritchie, who was both a seminal figure in computer science and, it seems, a nice guy.

Among his accomplishments, as people note, was that Ritchie was an excellent writer. Here's the New York Times:

“There was a remarkable precision to his writing,” Mr. Kernighan said, “no extra words, elegant and spare, much like his code.”

Of course, this is most evident in what might be the most famous programming book, namely The C Programming Language, which Ritchie wrote with Brian Kernighan:

The book is widely regarded [more]

Twitter: the cocktail party of the web

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 11:41:34 GMT

The appeal of Twitter is hard to explain, and the non-Twitterati tend to think of it as an endless stream of banal observations about uninteresting activities. There certainly is that, and if that's what you're seeing from someone's tweets, by all means, don't follow them.

An O'Reilly whitepaper (PDF) from 2008 observed that Twitter might have gotten off on the wrong foot with its prompt "What are you doing?", which invited just the kind of uninteresting flow that Twitter critics complain about. As the article goes on to observe, a better prompt might have been "What are you paying attention to?", which would lead people to respond by posting tweets about events they're attending, work they're doing, or links to stuff they've found interesting on the web. (Twitter has since changed its prompt to "What's happening?", which probably is not a great improvement on the original, at least from this perspective.)

There's no "right" way to tweet. Still, people who are particularly good with Twitter can blend these types of consciousness in ways that are both natural and interesting. This leads to what the whitepaper refers to as "ambient awareness":

Twitter is more and more becoming a key player in the attention economy, distributing comments about what its users are paying attention to, what they have opinions about, and what they have expertise in.

Today I ran across a comment in a thread on the Language Log in which a tweeter (specifically Ben Goldacre, whose tweets were being sliced and diced mercilessly) made this offhand observation that I think captures this blend of the sublime and ridiculous:

[more]

Emoticonless?

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 05:56:40 GMT

Here's my unscientific and informal analysis of the use of emoticons online:

Email: Occasional, with incidence significantly higher in non-business email.
Facebook: Pervasive.
Twitter: Almost nil.

What is it about Twitter that discourages emoticon use? Or is it just the people I follow?

Browsers are smarter than ever

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 09:38:15 GMT

Google Chrome has many cool features, including the ability to translate pages on the fly:

Anniversaries in IT

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 09:58:14 GMT

There have been a rash of anniversaries in the last week or so for milestones in the computer industry.

30 years

MS-DOS: 27 July 1981
IBM-PC: 12 Aug 1981

More than one person has said that the deal that Bill Gates and Paul Allen made with Seattle Computer Products to buy what was originally known as QDOS and then rewrite it as MS-DOS was one of the best business deals ever made. See a slideshow: A Quick Look At The 30-Year History Of MS DOS.

Apple had shown that it was possible to create a "microcomputer" for a mass market. IBM saw that and used its leverage in the business community to put a computer in front of every information worker in the world.

From an interview that PC-Magazine did with Bill Gates 30 years ago:

It would be nice if there was a hard disk and I'm sure the independent vendors will come and put one of those in it.[1]

[...]

It's possible to do a much better machine in a lot of ways from a hardware point of view.

[...]

This machine will be significant because it will usher in a new generation of portable software. [...] I think five years from now the amount of software and the quality of the software on this machine will be incredible.

[...]

[more]

How Feynman learned to crack a safe

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 08:51:37 GMT

The physicist Richard Feynman worked on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos in the 1940s. This was the biggest, most secretive project in the country, and security measures were — at least theoretically — very tight.[1] Scientists were issued safes in which to keep their confidential papers. However, Feynman's restless drive to tinker and to work on interesting problems led him to ponder the puzzle of how to crack these safes.

Turns out that cracking a safe has some things in common with hacking someone's bank account in our present day: while the problem is theoretically hard, it helps tremendously to have some insight into human nature. Safes have some additional weaknesses by virtue of being mechanical devices. OTOH, they don't offer the problem we have today of trying to remember dozens of passwords.

In any event, the passage below (sorry about the length) is from James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Times of Richard Feynman and says something about the nature of security when you've got those darn humans involved. (This is edited slightly for length.)

[more]

More code misspellings

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 22:02:32 GMT

A little while back, I wrote a fun article (paywall) for the Visual Thesaurus site about "institutionalized misspellings" — spellings in technical material that no one originally caught and now we're stuck with. (Examples include HTTP_REFERER and SHStripMneumonic.) I mean, c'mon, how dumb, right?

To my astonishment, someone on my team today sent me something for editing that included some code, and they included this comment: "To prove I didn't misspell this name, here's the original code." Which pointed to a member named WebPage_SectionAleadyRendered. I went trolling through the source code to find this, and sure enough, buried among the resources was the misspelling.

But in this case, the story has, or will have, a happy ending. I checked with the developer lead, and this is something that can be changed without affecting the users who already have the product — it's an internal name, which is moreover used in only a few places to date.

I do still wonder about this. Someone, somewhere originally misspelled this, and it wasn't caught. Then the name was used in other places (possibly by the same person who created the resource), and it still wasn't caught. In our capacities as writers and editors, names like this aren't something we're explicitly called on to review, and we'll find out about them only if we happen to be documenting something where the name shows up.

So there's no formal process to catch these types of things. Perhaps it's surprising that we don't get typos in names like this more often.

Did you mean ... ? No.

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:12:38 GMT

I use the website for the King (WA) County Library system all the time. These days, whenever I hear mention of a book that sounds interesting, rather than run to a bookstore or Amazon, I'll put it on hold at the library.[1]

The library recently spent approximately one (1) fortune to overhaul their software. This didn't go terribly smoothly. In fact, at one point they had to roll out an ad campaign to reassure patrons that the disaster they'd deployed as the front end was being upgraded:

I've asked some of the librarians about this changeover, and have gotten some eye-rolling in response. However, presumably -- or so we agreed -- there were benefits to this overhaul that were not necessarily evident in, or even oriented toward, the customer-facing side of things.

As far as I can tell, tho, search is not one of the things that's been entirely solved. Let's start with a preliminary thought: the major search engines (Google, Bing) have established a search paradigm that basically lets you type in whatever the heck you want, and they will generally do a decent job of getting you close. An important aspect of this is that web-based search does not require you to understand the structure of the data you're searching. Even if the page (or other resource) you're looking for does categorize its content into neat categories, this is essentially irrelevant when you search.

It's therefore surprising, to me at least, that the new, improved library website harks back to the old-school categorizations that were established for card catalogs:

[more]

The best result of high taxes that you've ever heard

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 21:58:43 GMT

There's endless debate about whether raising taxes is bad for business. Unlike, I guess, many pundits and bloggers, I don't have the economic chops to get into that discussion.

However, I did recently run across an example of one quite unusual case in which extremely high taxes on a corporation, along with that company's strong desire to avoid paying those taxes, resulted in one of the great technological and commercial successes of the last, oh, 60 years. This I get from a fun little book named Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World by Sam Howe Verhovek, which I am zipping through.

This all pertains to Boeing. These days, Boeing's position at the apex of the commercial-aviation industry seems like one of those givens of the business world. However, it was not always thus. Consider the years after WWII. The war had been very, very good to Boeing, which among other things manufactured lots and lots of bombers. The end of the war, however, brought what was referred to (with some irony, I hope) as the "peace problem," and Boeing laid off 38,000 workers in yet another of its boom-bust cycles. Other manufacturers, like Douglas and Lockheed, also had a "peace problem," but in the late 40s, those companies did much better than Boeing did in commercial transport, where Boeing had something like 1% of the market.

Then came 1950 and the Korean War, and this is where the tax part gets interesting. Here's the setup:

[more]

Bye-bye Comcast, hello Ooma

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 15:28:20 GMT

When we moved into our current house about four years ago, we signed up for Comcast's triple deal — cable TV, Internet, and VoIP phone in a $99/month. This made sense compared to what we had been paying separately for these services. We had initially thought that we could go without a landline altogether, but at the time, service from our cell-phone provider was very spotty — the only safe place to make a cell-phone call was by standing in the middle of the kitchen.

Since that time, a few things have changed. One was that we decided that the TV we were paying for was not worth it. Our TV use was almost entirely movies through Netflix and DVDs we owned, and more recently via Netflix streaming. So we canceled our Comcast TV service, which still left us with the erstwhile broadcast channels coming digitally through our cable for free.

Oddly, this did very little to reduce our Comcast bill. We were somehow still paying just about as much every month as we had been back when we had TV in the mix. A friend of mine said he heard this from them directly: if you unsubscribe from one of their services, they charge you more for the remaining ones.

Then a few months back, Comcast raised prices across the board. I looked through the list and saw that this included the price of leasing a modem from them. This seemed silly in an era where you could buy your own (faster) cable modem, so that's what I did — I got a Motorola SB6120, which is DOCSIS 3.0 compatible. I reckoned that we'd recover that cost in about a year. When I called to get this modem provisioned with Comcast, though, they had an ace up their sleeve — the new modem does not support Comcast's VoIP phone service. Ah.

[more]

Grammar checker FTW

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 17:59:03 GMT

You can hardly swing a dead linguist without getting opinions -- negative ones, of course -- about the quality of advice offered by spelling and grammar checking in Microsoft Word. Here's a sample from Geoff Pullum:

But she is wise to the extraordinarily bad advice Word gives on spelling and grammar, and firmly resisted what could have been one of the worst cupertinos in the history of philosophy.

The issue with linguists (and editors) and Microsoft Word is that they focus on what we in our business call "edge cases." Submit to Word a term that's been so misspelled that it's not clear what was intended, or submit a particularly tricky grammar issue to it, and it might respond with an incorrect suggestion. So obviously the tool is useless. (Or, um, "extraordinarily bad.") The fact that Word catches 98+ percent of the bad spellings and grammar issues[1] that it encounters is never remarked on. It's not very interesting when a tool just does what it's supposed to do.

Me, I am highly dependent on these tools because in fact they do find all sorts of junk. (More spelling errors than grammar errors, but some of each.) And sure, it isn't always right, but that's why there's an editor. (Me.) Even so, it impressed me today. Here's something I wrote; for the highlighted word, do you know whether it's right?

When I get the nod from Bill, or from whoever he delegates the decision to, I’ll make the updates.

Word did. :-)

I will admit that it isn't always (as my wife likes to say) buttercups and roses. Here's a grammar-checker boo-boo from the Fail blog:

[more]

Energy wise

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 14:55:15 GMT

Most people, I think, do not have particularly precise intuitions about energy costs. I suppose that everyone understands that a 100-watt bulb uses more energy than a 60-watt bulb, tho I would also suppose that most people don't know what that means in the overall scheme of their energy use. My experience is that people don't know the wattage requirements for things they use all the time (kitchen appliances, for example), and especially that things that are designed to generate heat -- hairdryers, baseboard heaters, the (wasteful) American-style water heater -- are enormous consumers of electricity. And they have no idea what the consumption is of things that don't obviously emit heat or do so only incidentally -- the fridge[1], the big-screen TV, the computer tucked under the desk.

Many years ago (in the 80s, actually), I knew a contractor who did a lot of kitchen remodels. In the lingering awareness of the 70s-era energy crisis, he made these same observations and noted that if people had to feed, say, dollar coins into their electric stove in order to cook, they would be way more aware of how much juice their everyday activities were costing them, and probably a lot more judicious about their energy use.

It's asking a lot, I think, to say that people should all acquire sufficient technical education to be able to decode wattage requirements for everything in the house. Energy use is simply too invisible. So one solution is feedback. I mean, how many people do you know who would never dream of walking out of a bathroom or kitchen and leave the water running, yet will walk out of the same rooms but leave the lights on?[2] The difference is that running water provides some sort of feedback (aural) that something is on and flowing. Leaving the lights on doesn't have that same effect, so people don't intuit this flow (or trickle).

[more]

Handling version changes in documentation

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:12:27 GMT

Just wondering what sorts of examples people might have of documentation sets that cover multiple versions of the same product. In our doc set in MSDN, we basically republish each complete doc set, but updated for the new version with corrections and new features:

The advantage is you can go right to your version and be assured that what you're reading applies to you. The disadvantage is that the versions pile up (4 versions and counting), with a lot of overlap, which is inefficient in various dimensions.

Are you familiar with a doc set that handles versioning differently than this? (Conceptual or API reference or both.) If so, leave a comment with a link.

Thanks!

Straight into the vein

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 10:01:39 GMT

From a post on the O'Reilly Radar blog. I wonder if this is the year we'll start hearing about people who will try to return to the (digital) simple life and go off the (virtual) grid.

Email was the first electronic medium to raise my clock speed, and also my first digital distraction problem. After some "ding, you have mail," I turned off the blackberry notification buzz, added rationing to my kit bag of coping strategies, and kept on concentrating. Then RSS came along and it was like memetic crystal meth. The pursuit of novelty in super-concentrated form delivered like the office coffee service. Plus, no one had to worry about all that behind-the-counter pseudoephedrine run around. "Hey, read as much as you want, no houses were blown up in Indiana to make your brain buzz."

It was a RUSH to know all this stuff, and know it soonest; but it came like a flood. That un-read counter was HARD to keep to zero and there was always one more blog to add. Read one interesting post and be stuck with them forever. In time keeping up with my RSS reader came to be like Lucy in the chocolate factory with the conveyor belt streaming by. From my vantage point today, RSS seems quaint.

The good old days. I gave it up for good last year when I finally bought an iPhone and tapped Twitter straight into the vein. Yeah, I went real time.

Now I can get a hit at every stop light. Between previews at the movies. Waiting for the next course at a restaurant. While you are talking to me on a conference call (it's your fault, be interesting). When you look down at dinner to check yours. Last thing before I go to sleep. The moment I wake up. Sitting at a bar. Walking home. While opening presents on Christmas morning (don't judge me, you did it too). In between the sentences of this paragraph.

[more]

It's not if your computer crashes ...

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:03:33 GMT

We tend to think of emergencies in terms of if -- "If this [dire situation] comes to pass, be prepared." When it comes to computers, tho, if is definitely the wrong word; it is (always) when. In particular, it's "When your hard disk crashes, be prepared".

I'm thinking about this because a) I've been digitizing LPs at a steady clip, which has garnered me many gigs of .wav files[1] that I do not want to have to reconstruct; b) Jeff Atwood today recounts a bitter lesson he learned when his service provider lost a disk and took with it his archive of blog posts; and c) I had a hard-disk failure of my own last week.

Can you throw a rock and hit someone who does not regularly back up their data? Probably all you had to do was reach up and conk yourself on the noggin. Unless you've dedicated some time to a plan and unless you dedicate time to a regular routine, odds are that there is stuff on your computer that you would lose if it went kablooey in the next 60 seconds. My kids have each lost substantial collections of music when a hard disk went south, for example.

An aside ... one disaster that I am not generally prone to these days is losing a document while I'm working on it due to the computer freezing or the power going out. As I work on documents, I save compulsively (SHIFT+F12 in Word, for example) -- essentially, each time I lift my fingers off the keyboard, I just hit Save. Too often in the past I have lost hours of work on a doc simply because it was all still in memory. Not so much any more.[ [more]

"Linux Bug #1: Documentation"

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 21:52:49 GMT

I ran across an interesting article ("Is Bad Documentation Derailing Linux?") that floats the thesis that the lack of good documentation is hurting Linux acceptance. I don't use Linux (perhaps for obvious reasons?), so I don't have any first-hand thots on the state of docs for that product.

However, I do understand that good docs are an investment and that complete docs are practically impossible, even if you're paying a fleet of tech writers. As I've noted before, we have various reasons, some of them involuntary, to spend considerable effort on providing at least some docs for every last flippin' member in the .NET Framework. The count of a list of these members goes well into 6 figures.

At various times, folks I've worked with have done analyses of some open-source docs. There is much very fine work out there, no question. A comment that comes up, tho, is that the docs for OSS tend to cover cherry-picked topics -- there is excellent documentation for interesting features, but the quantity and quality tends to fall off as the scenarios get less mainstream. This is hardly surprising -- who wants to contribute to a community by slaving away at documentation that's obscure?

[more]