Monitoring the Quality of CSS

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) has gotten far more complex since it was introduced in the 1990s. I've used it on my web site and in various tools over the years, most recently with WebWorks ePublisher 2018. The latest update to that tool introduced SASS (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets), which makes large projects much easier to work with but adds an extra layer of abstraction to deal with.

Not being a programmer, I wasn't aware of the existence of linters, tools that check the syntax and quality of programming code (which CSS is certainly now). As it turns out, there are linters for CSS.

We call these mistake-preventing programs "linters." JavaScript has several good ones. ESLint, in particular, has been working wonders, showing us all just how helpful a good linter can be. But in the realm of CSS we have not been so fortunate. We've had very limited options: the Ruby-based, preprocessor-specific scss-lint and the older CSS Lint.

But that was before the advent of PostCSS. Among other things, PostCSS provides the means to build more interoperable CSS tools. It can parse any CSS*-like* syntax into an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) for plugins to analyze and manipulate. And with custom parsers, PostCSS can handle even non-standard, technically "invalid" patterns (like //-comments).

The conditions are ripe for a mighty new stylesheet linter — powered by PostCSS and inspired by the best features of scss-lint and ESLint.

I've been working with a few collaborators on this project, and I'm writing now to introduce you to the tool we've developed: stylelint.

I wish I'd known about this when I was working on my last WebWorks project. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why my CSS wasn't doing what I thought it should be doing.

And more powerful CSS tools are being developed.

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve the way we write CSS: OOCSS, BEM, SMACSS, ITCSS, utility-first and more. But where other development communities seem to have progressed from just linters to tools like SonarQube and PHP Mess Detector, the CSS community still lacks tooling for deeper inspection than shallow lint rules. For that reason I have created Project Wallace, a suite of tools for inspecting and enforcing CSS quality.

At the core, Project Wallace is a group of tools that includes a command line interface, linter, analysis, and reporting.

That probably would have been overkill for what I was doing but it would have been interesting to play around with nonetheless. And the web developer who helped me out with one of the projects I worked on certainly would have liked it.

Featured Links - September 15, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• I Made Amazing Images of Galaxies and Nebulas in Minutes Using This Idiot-Proof Automatic Telescope. It's not really a telescope (no eyepiece) but very cool nonetheless.
• Trump 2020: Be Very Afraid. He's already on the campaign trail and his opponents are floundering.
• Library of Congress releases 11,700 freely usable photos of "roadside America," taken by John Margolies. The weird underbelly of the US. 
• Influential photographer Robert Frank passes away at 94. One of the great photographers has left us.
• Water vapor has been spotted on a “habitable zone” planet 110 light years away. Does water mean life? Maybe. 
• A New Way to Measure Cosmic Distance Could Help Solve a Frustrating Inconsistency About the Universe. Gravitational lensing helps here.
• Howl in Delight at Some of the Best Astronomy Photographs of 2019. Not sure I'd howl, but they are very good.

We're Toast 12

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Climate Change and Environment

• Climate change could more mercury in seafood. The threat of mercury in seafood was curbed with regulations, but climate change could drive levels back up.
• Arctic Permafrost Is Thawing Fast. That Affects Us All. One of the scariest climate-related articles I've read in a while.
• A Supercharged Marine Heat Wave Is Roasting the Pacific. Is this why salmon are so scarce this year?
• The Amazon Has Seen More Than 100,000 Fires This Year, Causing Spike in Air Pollution. Bolsonaro fiddles while the Amazon burns.

Politics

• The Global Machine Behind the Rise of Far-Right Nationalism. This is the real World War III and we're losing it.
• The Decline and Evolution of the School Librarian. Cutting librarians is being penny wise and pound foolish.
• Tensions at the US southern border are putting scientists and their work at risk. All bow down before the mighty wall.
• Donald Trump's Bad Tweet Is Tearing NOAA Apart. Now he's going after the weather service. Is nothing safe from this idiot?
• How Britain Plunged Into Its Worst Constitutional Crisis in 400 Years. I am boggled at how anyone could support Brexit after the Yellowhammer revelations. 

Technology

• Scammer Successfully Deepfaked CEO's Voice To Fool Underling Into Transferring $243,000. This will not be the last time we see this technology being used for scams.
• A Breakthrough for AI Technology: Passing an 8th-Grade Science Test. I know a lof of adults who would flunk that test. 

Neal Stephenson Interview

I've been reading Neal Stephenson ever since being gobsmacked by his first novel, Snowcrash. It's been an interesting ride. His books are mostly interesting and almost always infuriating, because even after more than 25 years, he still hasn't learned how to end a novel.

He has a new novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, which is sort of a sequel to Reamde, and which I'm probably not going to read (based on reviews by reviewers whose opinions I trust).

More interesting is this long interview with him in Reason magazine.

Is Dickens an influence on you?

Oh yeah. He's totally an influence, as a prose stylist and as someone who's—I mean, we think of Victorian novels as a kind of stodgy old-school way of writing, but he was all over the map in terms of nutty, random things that he would put into his books.

The novels of Robert Heinlein. Are they still readable today, or are they simply of their time?

Well, they're certainly of their time, but I find that, of all of the science fiction writers that I read when I was a kid, his stuff has stayed with me more than others. He had this knack for capturing little moments, little human interactions, and images that produced really vivid memories in my head that are still with me.

No, You Can't Have My Hyphens

According to the Digital Reader, the Associated Press has revised its guidance about using hyphens in compound modifiers.

We updated our hyphen guidance this year to say no hyphen is needed in a compound modifier if the modifier is commonly recognized as one phrase, and if the meaning is clear and unambiguous without the hyphen.

Personally, that rankles. I'll stick to using hyphens in modifiers for consistency and to avoid the possibility of confusion. 

Biohackers Implant a Hard Drive

I can't resist posting about this story – biohackers have successfully implanted a hard drive into a person's body. They modified parts scavenged from a Raspberry Pi.

Pegleg v2 is built on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, and as portable computers small enough to be inserted under your skin go, it’s relatively large. It’s 2.56 inches long, 1.18 inches wide, and 0.196 inches thick—about the size of a Hershey’s mini chocolate bar. 

To make Pegleg v2, Laufer and his team removed from the Raspberry Pi both Micro USB connectors (one for power, one for data), the Mini HDMI connector, and the camera connector. They then soldered on a second Wi-Fi chip to enable it to transfer data to another Pegleg and allow other devices to connect to it, as well as an induction coil to enable it to be powered by a wireless battery resting in a contiguous sports armband or pants pocket. They enabled Bluetooth for future functionality, inserted a 512GB microSD card for storage, and updated the firmware. Finally, they coated the hacked device in a biocompatible acrylic resin to prevent it from interacting with the recipient’s body and to diffuse the heat it emanates. 

Shades of Johnny Mnemomic, eh? I don't think this will become widespread until drives and networking components become much, much smaller. For a more likely future, see the "smart dust" in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness on the Sky.

Kobo Libra H2O Review

Readers outside of Canada may not realize that the Amazon Kindle has a serious competitor, namely Kobo. They've just introduced a new ereader, the Kobo Libra H2O aimed squarely at Amazon's premium Oasis ereader.

Good E-Reader has published a detailed review of the Libra H20, and it looks quite appealing. It features a high-resolution 7" screen, has page turn buttons, and is waterproof.

On the software front, Kobo offers integration with the library ebook download service, Overdrive, which is owned by their parent company, Rakuten, and Pocket for downloading articles from the internet directly to the ereader. Kobo has always offered more typographic controls than Amazon's Kindle and they've added a new feature that I find especially appealing, namely a large-print mode.

There is a large print mode in the beta features, along with an internet browser. Large print mode will change the entire UI and most of the text based features of the software experience and make the fonts larger. This is great for people who wear glasses, have vision disorders or just are getting a little bit older and the eyes aren’t what they used to be. 

That and the 7" screen might be enough for me to consider getting a Kobo Libra H2O.

It will be available starting September 15 in Canada and the US. The Canadian price is $199, which is $60 more than the Kindle Paperwhite, but $130 less than the Kindle Oasis.

Can You Write a Novel as a Group?

As a technical writer, I was used to working in a group of writers. Sometimes there would also be editors and project managers to help us. While writers might have individual documents that were considered theirs, it was always understood that the work was a collaborative effort.

That's very different from the way novelists usually work, alone until the novel is finished, when it goes off to a publisher (assuming the writer has a contract), at which point editors will get involved. Rarely writers will collaborate, but it's not very common. In the science fiction genre, the most successful collaborators are probably James S. A. Corey (Ty Franks and Daniel Abraham) with the Expanse series and Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle with several best sellers.

But what about writing a novel as a group? Technically, it's now easier than ever with modern software tools. And writers' groups are fairly common now. So why doesn't it happen more?

That's one of the questions raised by this article in the New Yorker.

The pleasures of collaborative fiction writing can seem so bountiful that one might begin to wonder why anybody would choose to do it alone. The varied methods of working as a group—a mixture of talking it out in person (what the Wu Ming collective calls “free-form improv”) and writing in solitude between meetings—give people with different creative temperaments equal chances to contribute. Many of the co-authors said that brainstorming with their collaborators was a safe space in which no idea was too ridiculous and no suggestion would be disregarded. In place of the loneliness and perpetual self-doubt of the solitary writer, they had camaraderie and encouragement from others.

Many of them described being spurred to write better after reading a co-author’s excellent scene. They all felt accountable for doing the work, turning up at meetings, not letting the others down. When the group gets writer’s block, they see it not as evidence of weakness and failure but as a sign that they’re on the wrong path as a group. They cultivate an attitude of “upward compromise,” accepting that they need to do something radical to get the creative juices flowing again—“make it crazier,” or delete everything, or use an “uncanny element, or a plot device that no one else would.”

This all seems perfectly natural to me. I'm not a fiction writer, nor have I ever joined a writers' group, but given my background, it's something that would be more natural to me than most writers.

Peck's English Pointers

Some time ago I posted that I had found The Canadian Style online. It's published by the Translation Bureau of  Public Works and Government Services Canada. It looks like my tax dollars are going towards more good things as the Translation Bureau has also published Peck's English Pointers (2nd Edition).

Since 2010 Peck's English Pointers, by Vancouver-based editor and writer Frances Peck, has educated and entertained language buffs with its lively articles and quizzes spanning grammar, punctuation, mechanics, usage and clarity.

The updated second edition features 19 new articles along with 11 new practice quizzes. Like the existing articles, the new ones take a light-hearted yet rigorous look at some of the most perplexing errors, weaknesses and puzzles in written English. The new topics range from mainstream—subject-verb agreement, bullet points, gender-neutral writing and effective emails—to esoteric—subordination, braces, and the little-known comash and interrobang.

With their up-to-date rules, amusing examples and practical advice, these fresh articles join current favourites on who and whom, which and that, hyphens and dashes, plain language, usage woes and grammar myths.

It's divided into five secions covering: Grammar, Punctuation and Mechanics, Usage, Clarity, and Trends and Q&A. In its light tone, it reminds me of the wonderful Dreyer's English. The online interface is somewhat dated, but the content more than makes up for it.

More Controversy About Literary Awards

I posted previously about the controversy surrounding the Campbell award (now Astounding award) for best new SF writer. That's not the only literary award recently to be the source of some controversy.

This article from File 770 reports on the controversy surrounding the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master award, the James Tiptree award, and the Hugo awards. All of these have had their own little squabbles recently. I hadn't heard about Linda Fairstein and the Mystery Writers of America. It does raise some questions about the separation between art and the artist, even more so perhaps than the Campbell award controversy.

When I heard about Linda Fairstein’s problems with the Mystery Writers of America, I got into an semi-argument with a bookselling friend about what should happen to her. He stated, unequivocally, that her actions in her life should have nothing to do with her work as a writer. 

And, In a fair and a just world, that would happen. But, as we have seen repeatedly over the advent of the internet and social media outlets, there are people out there who would vehemently oppose the most harmless and innocuous you could come up with, including kittens. knitting and lawn bowling. 

I told my friend back then that while it was more than likely that Linda Fairstein probably did deserve the MWA honor, people, her peers, critics, and the public at large and the tidal forces of social interaction she helped foment were going to deny her because of her past actions and her adamant defense of them. 

And then there's what happened with the Nobel award for literature last year,  which will no doubt be in the news again in a few weeks when this year's award is scheduled to be announced.

The History of Unix

Those of you who didn't grow up in the mainframe era of computing may not be aware that Linux, currently the dominant server operating system, is actually a spin off from a much older operating system, Unix. What I didn't know, until I read this article, was that Unix was the offspring of an older and failed operating system called Multics.

Cancellation of Multics meant the end of the only project that the programmers in the Computer science department had to work on—and it also meant the loss of the only computer in the Computer science department. After the GE 645 mainframe was taken apart and hauled off, the computer science department’s resources were reduced to little more than office supplies and a few terminals.

As Ken Thompson, another programmer working on the project, wryly observed for the Unix Oral History project, “Our personal way of life was going to go much more spartan.”

Luckily for computer enthusiasts, constraint can at times lead to immense creativity. And so the most influential operating system ever written was not funded by venture capitalists, and the people who wrote it didn’t become billionaires because of it. Unix came about because Bell Labs hired smart people and gave them the freedom to amuse themselves, trusting that their projects would be useful more often than not. Before Unix, researchers at Bell Labs had already invented the transistor and the laser, as well as any number of innovations in computer graphics, speech synthesis, and speech recognition.

It's hard to imagine what modern computing would be like if Unix hadn't been developed. (Actually, I can imagine it quite well: I worked at IBM for a couple of years.) Sadly, we no longer have Bell Labs; the world might be a better place if we did.

Featured Links - September 8, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• A Boy's Extreme Picky Eating Left Him With Permanent Blindness. Eat your veggies, people!
• A bug in SpaceX' communication system kept the company in the dark about potential satellite collision. They had better fix this before launching more Starlink satellites.
• How a Drive-In Megachurch Became a Catholic Cathedral. From the Crystal Cathedral to Christ Cathedral.
• Here's a Cheaper Alternative to the Kindle Oasis. Yes, Kobo ereaders are a viable alternative to Kindles. 
• How Microcracks Underminded San Francisco's New Bus Terminal. An engineering detective story.
• 42 is the sum of three cubes. I want them on a T-shirt. 
• A story about a cockroach infestation and 1,000 baby praying mantises. It's the funniest thing I've read all year.

Tips on Using PDFs with Google Drive

Google Drive and Google Docs have some useful features for working with PDF files. I never paid much attention to that when I was working at the TSX because I had the full version of Acrobat. Now that I'm a penniless retiree, I have to scrape by with cheaper alternatives, so it's good to see that Uncle Google is looking after me.

This article lists several ways you can work with PDFs using Google Drive and Google Docs. Note that some of the tips involve using third-party add-ins.

Documenting Software Architecture

For most of my career at the TSX, I reported to the director of architecture. That's an odd placement for a technical writer, but it made sense considering the way the development groups were structured. As well as giving me a good view of the overall development picture, I got to work with software architects on some of their documentation.

Learning about software architecture at a high level will help most technical writers understand how the systems they're documenting work and fit into the larger world. The article, Document Software Architecture, by Herberto Graca, will give you a good overview of what software architecture is and the various ways it can be documented. Based on my own experience, I'd rate it quite highly.

17 Tips for Google Maps for Android

I use Google Maps a lot. It's especially handy in the car, now that we have a vehicle that supports Android Auto, and we can get real-time traffic information. But it can do a lot more, as this set of 17 tips for Google Maps for Android shows.

Some of these tips are obvious and will likely be known to most users. But some of them are for new features (like augmented reality walking directions) and there are several that I didn't know about at all.

Development of the Energia-Buran Program

The Soviet Union's Buran shuttle only made one flight. It was derided in the West as a copy of the US Space Shuttle, but in reality it was far more than that.

The Twitter thread linked above is a history of the development of the Energia/Buran program with many images and details that I haven't seen before. If you're interested in the history of the Soviet space program, you'll want to read it.

Samsung Galaxy Tab A: First Impressions

I've been using an Android tablet for several years, mostly as an ereader. My first tablet was a Galaxy Tab 10.1" and the second an Acer. Both suffered from the same problems: an older version of Android and lack of horsepower. I finally gave up on the Acer, which was running Android 6, when most of the apps I wanted to use became too slow or refused to run outright because Acer wasn't upgrading the OS.

So last week I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab A (2019) 10.1" tablet from Costco. The price was right, just under $300, and the deciding factor was that it came with Android Pie.

My first impressions are positive. Setup was straightforward. I was able to transfer many of the settings and information like contacts from my Google and Samsung accounts. Given that the tablet only has 2 GB of RAM, I didn't try to load all of the apps from my phone, rather installing only the minimum set that I figured I would use on the tablet. Kudos to Samsung for not installing a bunch of bloatware (Acer, are you listenning?).

The 10.1" screen has a 1980 x 1200 resolution, which given my nearsightedness is perfectly fine. Colours are vivid and there's lots of contrast. The tablet has an octo-core processor and seems adequately fast, although having only 2 GB of RAM might be a problem for some users. Performance is zippy enough, though it's perhaps not as speedy as the Galaxy S4 tablet that I was using at the TSX. There's 32 GB of internal storage and I added a 32 GB micro SD card.  Samsumg rates the tablet for 13 hours of viewing, and that's probably reasonable, as I was able to use it for three or four hours a day for three days before it got down to 30 percent.

The Android 9.0 on the tablet is essentially the same as the Android 9.0 on my Galaxy S8 phone. It's not a specialized tablet OS, like the Android 4.4 and 6.0 on my previous tablets. I'm keeping an eye on updates though, as my phone has been updated to the August 1 security patch, but the tablet is still running the May 1 patch.

My main purpose for buying the tablet is to read magazines from the various library download services, PDF files, and ebooks, and it serves that purpose quite well. (I am planning a blog post about reading magazines online).

So if you're looking for a reasonably priced tablet that's running a current version of Android, the Samsung Galaxy Tab A is definitely worth considering.

And, no, I'm not interested in iPads. They're overpriced and the less connection I have to Apple's ecosytem, the better.

Fall TV Shows and Movies Worth Watching

There will be a lot of new TV shows and movies coming out this fall. Rolling Stone has a guide to the best of the upcoming TV shows. Out of the 33 they list, there are a few that I'll probably take a look at:

• Country Music (PBS, September 15), it's Ken Burns; that's good enough for me.
• Criminal (Netflix, September 20). With David Tennant. 
• Evil (CBS, September 26). X-Files meets the Catholic Church.
• Godfather of Harlem (Epix, September 29). With Forrest Whitaker.
• Nancy Drew (The CW, October 9). My wife will want to watch this. 
• The Mandalorian (Disney, November 12). Star Wars live action.
• The Crown (Netflix, November 12). For all the royals junkies. 
• Watchmen (HBO, October). I hope it's better than the movie.
• His Dark Materials (HBO, Fall). Maybe. 

If movies are more your thing, Gizmodo has a guide to 49 (!) horror, sci-fi, and fantasy movies coming out this fall. My standards for watching these are a lot higher than for TV shows given the cost of attending movies these days, but some of these might get my dollars:

• Memory: The Origins of Alien. Maybe the TIFF Bell Lightbox will screen this.
• Gemini Man. With Will Smith.
• Terminator: Dark Fate. He's back. 
• Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. More Star Wars.
• Cats. I liked the musical a lot. 

Featured Links - September 3, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• Why hurricane maps do a terrible job of communicating the danger of a hurricane. Worth knowing if you live in a hurricane-prone area. 
• How to Spot If Gmail Has Been Hacked. Posting this for future reference, just in case.
• The Idiotic Reason That Egg Companies Are Turning to Plastic Packaging. I won't buy eggs if they're packed in plastic.
• Fall TV Preview 2019: 33 Shows to Watch Now. There are a few that look worthwhile. 
• Check If Your Mobile Carrier Is Throttling Netflix With This App. I ran it and it looks like Rogers is not throttling anything.
• The Cosmic, Psychedelic, Glow-in-the-Dark Art of Alex Aliume. I really like this. 

No Labour This Weekend

It's the Labour Day long weekend, the last long weekend of the summer. I am taking it off to do summer things like mowing the lawn and possibly visiting the CNE. See you on Tuesday.

Can an App Make Bike Lanes Safer?

Can an app make bike lanes safer? That's the question raised by this article, which describes an app called Safe Lanes that's being used in San Francisco to report violations directly to the city.

On the surface it seems like a good idea. But there are concerns about privacy issues.

Amidst this burgeoning landscape of technology designed to maximize opportunities for urban narcing, a bike-lane-defender app stands out as a beneficial means of evening the balance of power between cyclists and drivers. But does it also get us one more step down the slippery slope to a self-surveillance society?

“There’s been this cultural shift of normalizing that it’s OK to be taking photos and videos of other people in public,” said Rachel Thomas, the founding director of the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco’s Data Institute, and the co-founder of the online coding school fast.ai. The illusion of privacy in the public sphere may have always been an illusion, but with many more eyes and lenses trained on the streets, the age-old practice of “being seen” can evolve quickly into being shared, and being stored. And perhaps being unfairly tried and convicted in the court of public opinion.

Formatting With Styles In Word

If you're using Word and not using styles, you're wasting a lot of time and increasing the chances that you will introduce flakiness, if not outright corruption, into your document. I spent a lot of time at the TSX trying to get people to use Word's paragraph and character styles to format their documents. Occasionally, I succeeded.

The Parlour, a blog for editors, proofreaders, and writers by Louise Harnby, has a good article that covers the basics of using styles in Word. It covers the following topics:

• What the Styles tool is
• The properties you can influence
• How to access the Styles tool
• Why it’ll save you time to use styles
• 3 ways to create a style
• 2 ways to modify a style
• How to assign a style to an element of text
• Troubleshooting
• How heading styles help you navigate

It's one of the better articles I've seen on the subject, succinct and illustrated with annotated screen captures. I wish I'd written it. 

Also, I just discovered Louise Harnby's site. There's much here of interest, including her podcast about editing. She includes transcripts if you don't have time to listen to the podcast, something that I wish more podcasters would do.

Best Monitor for Development Work

There's an interesting message thread on Slashdot about what is the best monitor for development work. A few years ago at the TSX I was using two monitors, a 19" Dell monitor with 4:3 aspect ratio turned sideways into portrait mode and a 22" Samsung monitor with 16:9 aspect ratio as a secondary monitor. Having a monitor in portrait mode was great for working with Word and FrameMaker and it wasn't tall enough that I ran into problems with the screen looking odd at the top and bottom.

However, it's now almost impossible to find a 4:3 monitor; they're all 16:9 or 16:10 and optimized for gaming and graphics. I'm using a 4K 28" 16:9 ThinkSmart monitor now, running it at half resolution (1920 x 1080) which gives me fonts and UI elements that I can see comfortably. But it's less than ideal for text work, although I can get two windows side-by-side in Word if I wear my reading glasses. I did try it in portrait mode but it's just too high to be comfortable.

So what to do if you're a developer and want lots of text lines on your screen? The Slashdot thread offers many options, including one I hadn't thought of, using a modern television instead of a monitor. Modern TVs are cheap and work well in high-resolution modes, although some posters point out that you need to be careful with the cheaper models.

Campbell Award To Be Renamed

At the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin earlier this month, there was some controversy around the John W. Campbell Award prompted by remarks from this year's winner, Jeanette Ng.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine has announced that the award is to be renamed to The Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

Though Campbell’s impact on the field is undeniable, we hope that the conversation going forward is nuanced. George Santayana’s proverbial phrase remains as true today as when it was coined: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We neither want to paper over the flaws of those who have come before us, nor reduce them to caricatures. But we have reached a point where the conversation around the award is in danger of focusing more on its namesake than the writers it was intended to recognize and elevate, and that is something nobody—even Campbell himself—would want.

I think this is a good thing. I like that the award's name refers back to the genesis of the genre without referring to one controversial person yet still has a tie to Campbell, who despite his faults, had a major influence on science fiction and fantasy.

Case Nightmare Blonde

No, this post isn't about a noir detective movie. It's about Brexit. Namely, it's SF author Charlie Stross writing about the dire political situation in Britain and what might happen. The title is a reference to both Stross' ongoing Laundry Files series and British PM Boris Johnson.

It's pretty grim reading.

So I guess I don't need to give a detailed run-down of political events while I was travelling, save to say that we're now getting into 1642 territory constitutionally, with the unelected Prime Minister declaring his intention of asking the unelected monarch to shut down parliament so that he can force through an unpopular policy that everybody was assured was not a possible outcome of a referendum that was only upheld by the courts because it was non-binding (so the foreign interference and straight-up vote rigging couldn't be held a violation of election law). He's also proposing to pack the House of Lords with unelected pro-Brexit members just in case the HoL tries to to throw a spanner in the works.

Reminder: the legal wellspring of British authority is the crown-in-parliament (i.e. the powers of the monarch, as vested in parliament after the king picked a fight with that body and lost, comprehensively). This is an end-run around British sovereignty. It's a bit like, say, a US President packing the supreme court and then issuing an executive order suspending the 14th amendment (with a manufactured court rubber stamp): procedurally suspect and ethically outrageous. BoJo is gaming the British Constitution on a scale never seen before; if he's allowed to get away with this then, never mind Brexit (and a no-deal Brexit would be very, very bad in its own right), it means the end of British constitutional governance and a shift towards rule by executive decree implemented via the Civil Contingencies Act and/or Henry VIII Orders. In other words, a dictatorship.

It's looking more and more like we won't be going back to London next spring. 

Advice on Writing Alternate Histories

Alternate histories are one of my favorite genres of fiction. I've been enjoying them ever since reading stories by Poul Anderson, Andre Norton, and the master, H. Beam Piper, when I was a teenager.

I've known Michael Skeet almost as long and he's written a few. I was an advance reader for Dixie's Land, which he's published, along with it's sequel, High Risk, on his blog. He also has two published novels, A Poisoned Prayer and A Tangled Weave, which are alternate history fantasies.

He's just published a blog post with some advice for aspiring writers of alternate history stories. It's worth reading, even if you aren't an aspiring novelist, as it might give you an idea why some stories just don't work.

It's a cascade issue, pure and simple. Each change I introduce, while world-building, increases the likelihood of other changes. Which in turn increase the likelihood of—well, you get the idea. In order to try to make the alternate history backdrop still recognizable to readers (which, I'll argue, is one of the primary appeals of—and hence goals of—the genre) the author has to willfully ignore this cascade effect.

The problem I have with this is that it's just too artificial. Yes, alternate history is at some level an artistic con job. But that doesn't mean it has to be obvious. And if you posit a Roman Empire that has survived for 1500 years longer than the real thing did (I'm talking about the Empire in the west here) and yet in terms of its basic structure it hasn't changed at all in that period... well, let's just say that the history of government and administration just about everywhere else disagrees with you.

Writing Effective Image Descriptions for Screen Readers

Web sites like Twitter and Facebook and tools for web design let you add descriptions to your images so that they can be read by screen readers and other assistive devices. RobotHugs, who is a user experience designer in Toronto, has written a Twitter thread on how to make these descriptions more effective.

There's some good advice here. For example, "you generally don't have to say 'image of' or 'photograph of'. Just describe what the image is conveying - what the user is intended to get out of seeing it."

Tweet: Don't worry TO, It's going to get better soon!!

Unhelpful description: Toronto weather forecast

Helpful description: Forecast for Toronto temperatures, showing -18 Celsius today improving to -1 Celsius by Tuesday."

This is definitely something I'll have to keep in mind in the future, especially on Twitter.

 

Featured Links - August 25, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• China Aims Straight for the Moon. Unless SpaceX' Starship is wildly successful, the next person to step on the moon will probably be Chinese. 
• How To Host Your Personal Website for Free Through the Magic of AWS S3 and Cloudflare. Something I should think about doing.
• 6 Reasons to Use LinkedIn Beyond Searching for Jobs. Some useful tips here.
• The near crash of Air Canada Flight 759. It was almost one of the worst disasters in aviation history.
• Why isn't Facebook taking Yellow Vests Canada seriously? A good question. 

Eleven Science Books

I usually have at least one non-fiction book on the go, and it's usually a book about science or technology. I just finished Midnight in Chernobyl, for example.

From Endpoints, here's short reviews of eleven science books that might pique your interest. One book, Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem, is actually a science fiction novel (and a good one) with a lot of science content.

We're Toast 11

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Climate Change and Environment

• Trump Administration Guts the Endangered Species Act. If this keeps up, the human species will be on that list.
• 'Unprecedented': more than 100 Arctic wildfires burn in worst ever season. Huge blazes in Greenland, Siberia and Alaska are producing plumes of smoke that can be seen from space
• Bizarre Happenings in the Far North: Lightning, Tropical Moisture, and More. Climate change is savaging the arctic. 
• Arctic permafrost is thawing fast. That affects us all. A good wide-ranging article from National Geographic. 
• What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today. Sixty years after the bomb tests, the islands are still uninhabited by humans, but plants and wildlife thrive.
• There’s No Free Lunch With Climate Change. "A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change underscores the hard choices we face on land use and global warming."
• The Fake Backlash to Fake Meat. "Food activists angry about the processed nature of new plant-based meats are missing the point."

Politics

• How Climate Change Is Becoming a Deadly Part of White Nationalism. These nutters think that survival is only for whites. 
• You Should Be Scared of Nuclear War Again. I sure am.
• Are the Proud Boys Done or Are They Just Getting Started? Will we see more right-wing violence leading up to the 2020 election?
• Trump 2020: Be Very Afraid. The thought of it is already ruining my sleep.
• Science division of White House office left empty as last staffers depart. Idiocracy in action.

Technology

• How the West Got China's Social Credit System Wrong.
  "It occupies a spot next to 'Black Mirror' and Big Brother in popular imagination, but China’s social credit project is far more complicated than a single, all-powerful numerical score."
• Who Will Pay for the Huge Costs of Rising Seas? Time to sell that Florida beachfront time share, eh?

Saving the Grocery Store

Since Friday is now our ususal grocery shopping day, I thought that posting a link to this article would be appropriate. Although it's about one small US grocery chain, there's enough information in the article about the grocery industry, to make it a worthwhile read for anyone who's interested in where they get their food. I found it completely fascinating.

A cursory glance might suggest grocery stores are in no immediate danger. According to the data analytics company Inmar, traditional supermarkets still have a 44.6 percent market share among brick-and-mortar food retailers. And though a spate of bankruptcies has recently hit the news, there are actually more grocery stores today than there were in 2005. Compared to many industries — internet service, for example — the grocery industry is still a diverse, highly varied ecosystem. Forty-three percent of grocery companies have fewer than four stores, according to a recent USDA report. These independent stores sold 11 percent of the nation’s groceries in 2015, a larger collective market share than successful chains like Albertson’s (4.5 percent), Publix (2.25 percent), and Whole Foods (1.2 percent).

But looking at this snapshot without context is misleading — a little like saying that the earth can’t be warming because it’s snowing outside. Not long ago, grocery stores sold the vast majority of the food that was prepared and eaten at home — about 90 percent in 1988, according to Inmar. Today, their market share has fallen by more than half, even as groceries represent a diminished proportion of overall food sold. Their slice of the pie is steadily shrinking, as is the pie itself.

By 2025, the thinking goes, most Americans will rarely enter a grocery store. That’s according to a report called “Surviving the Brave New World of Food Retailing,” published by the Coca-Cola Retailing Research Council — a think tank sponsored by the soft drink giant to help retailers prepare for major changes. The report describes a retail marketplace in the throes of massive change, where supermarkets as we know them are functionally obsolete. Disposables and nonperishables, from paper towels to laundry detergent and peanut butter, will replenish themselves automatically, thanks to smart-home sensors that reorder when supplies are low. Online recipes from publishers like Epicurious will sync directly to digital shopping carts operated by e-retailers like Amazon. Impulse buys and last-minute errands will be fulfilled via Instacart and whisked over in self-driving Ubers. In other words, food — for the most part — will be controlled by a small handful of powerful tech companies.

I should note that the article is extensively hyperlinked to much background information; for example, how it's expensive for Costco to open new stores and why they keep doing it.

Windows Update Causes Some VBA Code to Fail

The latest Office Watch newsletter is reporting that a recent Windows update is causing some VBA code to fail. This affects all Office applications. So if a macro or an add-in suddenly starts failing for no apparent reason, this could be the cause.

The culprit isn’t Office, but the version of Windows that it’s running on.  After the 2019-08 Cumulative Update KB4511553 is applied, some VBA code will stop working.  The patch bug is in Windows 10, 8.1 and 7 plus Windows Server editions (list below).

Not all VBA code is affected. Only code with an empty parameter being passed as a Variant  or a null array is passed.  That’s hardly unusual and should not cause an error.

Since the patch that caused the problem was part of a security update, fixing it may be a bit complicated but Microsoft is aware of the problem and working on a fix.

Google Docs Live Edits Now Works on Assistive Devices

Google has made an improvement to the Live Edits feature in Google Docs. It now works with assistive devices like screen readers and Braille printers.

Users can access this live edits update by going to Tools under Accessibility settings, turning on screen reader support, and checking “Show live edits” in the same menu. A gradual rollout started on Tuesday, with a full rollout beginning on September 10th.

It's good to see Google paying attention to accessibility features, something that too often gets neglected by developers.

An SF Award Controversy

As I noted in Monday's blog, the winners of the 2019 Hugo Awards were announced Sunday afternoon. I watched the webcast and was somewhat taken aback by the winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Jeanette Ng, who started her speech by calling Campbell "a fucking fascist". Needless to say, this was somewhat controversial.

Had it been me receiving the award (which technically is not a Hugo), I don't think I would have started my speech that way, although I might have referred to Campbell's politics and controversial ideas. Ng did say that the field has moved on from Campbell's tutelage, and she is certainly right in saying that and that it's a good thing.

If you want a better idea of what Campbell was like, see the book Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee. Based on what I read in the biography and what I've read of Campbell's own writing (both as an author and an editor; I've probably read hundreds of his editorials in Astounding/Analog), calling him a fascist is accurate (though he was not a Nazi supporter).

For more about this see Cory Doctorow's comments on Boing Boing.

So when Ng held Campbell "responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists," she was factually correct.

Not just factually correct: also correct to be saying this now. Science fiction (like many other institutions) is having a reckoning with its past and its present. We're trying to figure out what to do about the long reach that the terrible ideas of flawed people (mostly men) had on our fields. We're trying to reconcile the legacies of flawed people whose good deeds and good art live alongside their cruel, damaging treatment of women. These men were not aberrations: they were following an example set from the very top and running through fandom, to the great detriment of many of the people who came to fandom for safety and sanctuary and community.

And this from John Scalzi:

 And what I think is: Hey, you know what? Campbell, aside from everything else he might have been, was a racist and a sexist and as time went on pretty deeply way the hell out there, and from his lofty perch he was able to shape the genre into what he thought it should be, in a way that still influences how people write science fiction — for fuck’s sake, I write science fiction in an essentially Campbellian manner, and it would be foolish for me to suggest otherwise.

Do those bigoted aspects about about Campbell make him an actual fascist? Well, I wouldn’t have characterized him as such, but then never thought to think of it in those terms, so there’s that. Now that I have been made to think of it, I know that the people and organizations I would have unhesitatingly called fascist actively incorporated the mechanisms of American racism into their worldview. It’s not exactly a secret that the actual Nazis looked to the United States’ “Jim Crow” laws for inspiration and justification for their own racism and, ultimately, genocide. American racism — the racism that Campbell both actively and passively forged into the structure of the science fiction genre — is at the very least an ur-text to fascism, and of course racism is so deeply ingrained into fascism today, and vice versa, that you couldn’t separate the one from the other without killing both, which, incidentally, is a very good idea.

Both authors, incidentally, are past winners of the Campbell award.

And a late addition, here's a Twitter thread from N. K. Jemisin, winner of the Best Novel Hugo award three years in a row.

::rubs eyes, sighs:: White supremacy *is* fascism. End of day, the goal is to empower an authoritarian caste-based system of governance, in part by scapegoating black& brown "enemies of the state." For fuck's sake, people, we're *living* it; come on, keep up.

Why Plant- and Cell-Based Meat Production Makes Sense

I've been in a couple of discussions with people recently about the benefits of plant-based meat substitutes. Some people don't like things like the Beyond Burger because the list of ingredients is so long and seems intimidating, or less healthy than plain meat.

I'm not going to get into the woods over the details of a specific product. What's more important is to consider the effects on the overall environment of plant-based meat substitutes compared to animal farming. Looked at it from that point of view, there's a clear winner, and it's not meat.

One of the strongest selling points of plant-based and clean meat is the efficiency of production: the conversion of inputs to outputs is vastly more streamlined than cycling calories through an animal. Lesser appreciated, but perhaps more economically compelling, is also the improved market efficiency: far less time and waste and far greater responsiveness to consumer demand for a range of products and species.

The article lists three key areas to consider:

• Supercharged timesaver: No pregnancy, no birth, no raising, no slaughter
• Solving the carcass balancing problem
• Adapting swiftly to shifting demand across species

Barack Obama's Reading List

I don't know if Barack Obama's summer reading list is as influential as it was when he was president, but it might be, considering that the current occupant of the White House is unlikely to come up with a similar list. (I'm willing to take suggestions on what they would be - leave a comment and if I get enough, I will publish them).

In any case, Obama's list is wide ranging and interesting. Of special note, there's this:

Exhalation by Ted Chiang is a collection of short stories that will make you think, grapple with big questions, and feel more human. The best kind of science fiction.

With the death of Ursula LeGuin and Gene Wolfe, Ted Chiang is probably the best living writer of science fiction, at least in the short form. It's nice to see him getting the recognition he deserves.

16 Invasive Species You Shouldn't Buy

It's a good idea to use native plants in your garden as much as possible. We have planted some milkweed, for example, in the front and back yards to attract Monarch butterflies (it works).

Here's an article that lists 16 invasive species, that are not native to North America, and can spread and cause problems if you plant them. You're quite likely to find some of these at your local garden centre.

Most of us gardeners assume that the people that run our local garden center are knowledgeable and know exactly what they’re selling – and for the most part, that’s true.  But what happens when some of the most commonly sold plants also happen to be some of the most invasive?

Due to the globalization of our society, it’s become very easy to get plants from different areas of the world, grow them, and sell them to gardeners everywhere.

English Language & Usage on Stack Exchange

StackExchange is one of the biggest sites for developers on the Internet. So it figures that there would be a site for English language and usage questions. It's billed as "a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts."

I've never used Stack Exchange, so I don't have a feel for how useful it can be. Looking at some of the questions, I get the impression that it would be a useful if I had a question for which I needed a quick answer, but I would probably be more likely to post that on the Editors Association of Earth Facebook page.

The 2019 Hugo Award Winners

The winners of  the 2019 Hugo Awards were announced at the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin yesterday. The awards ceremony was live streamed and proceeded without any major glitches. Locus Magazine the full list of winners with runners up. These were the fiction award winners:

Best Novel

• The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)

Best Novella

• Artificial Condition, by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)

Best Novelette

• “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again,” by Zen Cho (B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, 29 November 2018)

Best Short Story

• “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies,” by Alix E. Harrow (Apex Magazine, February 2018)

Best Series

• Wayfarers, by Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton / Harper Voyager)

Detailed results, including the voting breakdown (the Hugos use a preferential voting system) are available on the Hugo Awards web site (PDF link).

Every once in a while a novel comes out that everyone gets behind and it wins all the major awards. This year it was Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars.  It also won the Nebula and Locus awards earlier in the year. In a nice touch, she had it presented to her by a real astronaut, Jeanette Epps.

I've read The Calculating Stars and was glad to see it win the Hugo. I've not read any of the short fiction nominees. I would have liked to have seen Astounding win the award for Betst Related Work (see my review here).

Featured Links - August 18, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• Our ideas about what early movies looked like are all wrong. Some early films were shot in a format that has negatives close to the size of IMAX and they look incredible. 
• The Best Way to Clean Windows 10: A Step-by-Step Guide. I need to follow some of this advice.
• Frank Goes In Search of Old Printing Equipment. Fascinating video, my dad would have used some of this. 
• Why You Should Use Windows Defender's Ransomeware Protection. I didn't realize that this is off by default. 
• Revealed: how Monsanto's 'intelligence center' targeted journalists and activists. Another psychopathic corporation runs amok. 
• SpaceX Clips Dragon's Wings After Investigation. No soft landing using the Draco engines.
• A Recession Is Coming (Eventually). Here's Where You'll See It First. Remember this article and refer to it often.

1944 Retro-Hugo Award Winners

The Retro-Hugo Awards have been instituted to honour classic science fiction. They're voted on by members of the World Science Fiction Convention, who also vote on the contemporary Hugos. This year, the Retro-Hugos were for 1944. As posted on File 770, the winners were:

Best Novel

• Conjure Wife, by Fritz Leiber, Jr. (Unknown Worlds, April 1943)

Best Novella

• The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Reynal & Hitchcock)

Best Novelette

“Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” by Lewis Padgett (C.L. Moore & Henry Kuttner) (Astounding Science-Fiction, February 1943)

Best Short Story

• “King of the Gray Spaces” (“R is for Rocket”), by Ray Bradbury (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1943)

Best Graphic Story

• Wonder Woman #5: Battle for Womanhood, written by William Moulton Marsden, art by Harry G. Peter (DC Comics)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

• Heaven Can Wait, written by Samson Raphaelson, directed by Ernst Lubitsch (20th Century Fox)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

• Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, written by Curt Siodmak, directed by Roy William Neill (Universal Pictures)

Best Professional Editor, Short Form

• John W. Campbell

Best Professional Artist

• Virgil Finlay

Best Fanzine

• Le Zombie, editor Wilson “Bob” Tucker

Best Fan Writer

• Forrest J Ackerman

A Little Project

Back more than 30 years ago, along with Michael Wallis and Lloyd Penney, I published an SF fanzine called Torus. I still have the original pages from that tucked away in my filing cabinet, but I have been looking for the original computer files. I finally found them on a 25-year-old CD-R which was readable, much to my surprise. (I am still perturbed by the fact that the only copy of these files I can find was on a backup disk, and not squirreled away in the Backup section of my hard drive).

Most of the files are from Ventura Publisher, but are readable in NotePad++, and contain almost all of the article content in a text blob in the middle of the binary content. I should be able to extract the text easily.

Why am I doing this? I want to collect all of the interviews (there was one in most issues) and publish them as a free ebook. I am going to do this as a learning exercise. And it would be good to have the content out there for people to read.

After that, I will probably scan the originals and publish PDFs of the 10 issues. But that may be a while.

5 Tips for Improving Your Technical Communication Skills

Neal Perlin, who is a well-known technical communicator and MadCap Flare trainer, has published an article, 5 Tips for Improving Your Technical Communicaiton Skills. The advice is solid, especially the second and third tips:

• Learn to use our authoring tools more effectively
• Learn the technology behind our authoring tools

I think that many people underestimate the "technical" side of technical communication. One of my managers at the TSX did; in a performance evaluation meeting, he said "I didn't realize how technical your job is". This was especially true in my case, as being a lone writer there, I was my own IT department, among other things. I would never expect the help desk to be able to solve my FrameMaker problems. 

The article is worth reading and thinking about.

Even Cameras Are Not Safe from Malware

Most modern cameras now have WiFi to make it easier to transfer images between the camera and a computer. The protocol they use to transfer files is not secure and can be easily hacked to install ransomware on the camera, which would likely also infect the PC it's connected to. The attack will also work over a USB connection, which almost all digital cameras have had since they hit the market.

From an attacker’s perspective, the PTP layer looks like a great target:

• PTP is an unauthenticated protocol that supports dozens of different complex commands.
• Vulnerability in PTP can be equally exploited over USB and over WiFi.
• The WiFi support makes our cameras more accessible to nearby attackers.

In this blog, we focus on the PTP as our attack vector, describing two potential avenues for attackers:

• USB – For an attacker that took over your PC, and now wants to propagate into your camera.
• WiFi – An attacker can place a rogue WiFi access point at a tourist attraction, to infect your camera.

In both cases, the attackers are going after your camera. If they’re successful, the chances are you’ll have to pay ransom to free up your beloved camera and picture files.

If you have a camera with WiFi, you should keep an eye on the manufacturer's website for firmware updates. Unfortunately, unless your camera is fairly new, you are probably out of luck.

(I guess I should set up another category for items like this: Why We Can't Have Nice Things. )

Why Is the Triple Double So Hard?

Last week, US gymnast Simone Biles did an incredibly difficult gymnastic skill, a triple double. I am not a gymnast, (I was excused from gymnastics in high school after knocking myself out on the vaulting horse.) nor athletic, but I can appreciate it when someone pushes the boundaries of what the human body can do.

This Twitter thread, by Suzanne F. Bosell, is the best article I've seen so far on Biles' achievement. It explains the history of the gymnastic skill, using video clips to show what she and other gymnasts were doing, and compares it to male gymnasts who have been doing the triple double for a while.

For a different take on it, here's an article from Wired that looks at the physics of the skill. This is something I can actually understand (my minor in university was math and physics). And despite what it looks like in the videos, she was only in the air for 1.18 seconds!

Upgrading WebWorks ePublisher

I was a happy user of Quadralay's WebWorks ePublisher throughout my career at the TSX. It is a reliable tool that is highly customizable and Quadralay's support is first rate. ePublisher has a small but dedicated community of users on the wwp-users Yahoo Group. One of them, Nadine Murray, has just updated her guide to upgrading WebWorks ePublisher.

Quadralay has designed ePublisher to allow users to customize almost all aspects of the program. Some customizations are relatively straightforward and can be managed easily through the program's interface; other customizations are more complex. These customizations can be lost when upgrading to a new version. Quadralay is aware of this and have included tools in the interface to manage them. However, the process can be confusing.

Nadine's guide is a solid supplement to Quadralay's own documentation and should be helpful to anyone customizing ePublisher (which, based on my experience, would be most users).

Open Corrupted Word Files In Libre Office

Microsoft Word is much more stable than it used to be. Starting with Word 2007, Microsoft introduced the DOCX file format, which is essentially a ZIP archive of files, most of which are based on XML. It's much less likely to get corrupted than the older, binary DOC format. But nothing is perfect, and occasionally a Word file will go south.

This happened to someone on the Editors Association of Earth Facebook group. When they tried to open the file, they got an XML parsing error. The backup file was also corrupted, and Google Docs wouldn't open the file.

However, they were able to open the file in Libre Office. Everything appeared to be OK except that their change tracking was lost, but they were able to recover that using the document compare feature with an earlier version of the file.

Based on my own experience with Word, I suspect that the corruption originated with Word's the track changes feature6. I've found that it sometimes fails to work, especially in large documents with complex formatting or many tables. Using the document compare feature is more reliable and safer.

So if you use Word, it's probably worth keeping a copy of Libre Office on your computer just in case.

Creating Low-Bandwidth Web Sites

I got my start on the Internet in the very early days of the Web (even before the Web, actually) using a 56K modem. So the size of the website mattered - a lot. Now, with broadband connections it's not as big of an issue except for mobile users who may be limited in connection speed and have a data cap they have to worry about.

For Smashing Magazine, Chris Ashton surfed several popular sites on the Internet to examine how they would work for a user on a tight (50 MB) data budget. He was able to develop several guidelines that web developers should keep in mind to ensure that their sites work well for low-bandwidth users.

Technical writers who are developing web-based documenation should also find this article useful, although the tool they are using may limit the amount of optimization available to them.

Interview with George R. R. Martin

The World Science Fiction Convention will be held in Dublin later this week and George R. R. Martin will be attending. The Irish Times has an interview with him in which he discusses the changes in the science fiction field since he started publishing in the 1970s.

Martin has been publishing science-fiction and fantasy stories since the 1970s, but he has been reading them a lot longer. “I started out as a little kid in Bayonne, New Jersey, reading comics,” he says. “I think I was 11 or 12 years old when a friend of my mother’s gave me a Robert A Heinlein book as a Christmas present. I adored it. I had an allowance of $1 a week, and suddenly I was buying 35c paperbacks instead of three or four comic books. And I never looked back.”

What made those genres so attractive to him as a child? “I grew up in a blue-collar family,” he says. “My father was a longshoreman. We lived in a public housing project. We didn’t even own a car. We didn’t go anywhere. We lived on First Street, and my school was on Fifth Street, so my world was five blocks long, and there was always this urge in me, maybe from reading, to see the wonders of the world – and, of course, the wonders of other worlds. Science fiction could take you to different planets and other periods of time. It was so much more expansive than just those five blocks where I lived my life, and I loved that sense of wonder that the great science-fiction stories had, and still have.”

Update: The Guardian has another interview with Martin, with more discussion of Game of Thrones and the effect it's had on his life.

Featured Links - August 11, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• How to Fix an Unexpected Store Error in Windows 10. Just in case I ever encounter this serious error.
• Going big: catching a Saturn V first stage with a helicopter. I don't recall ever hearing about this proposal. It would have been awesome!
• What does it mean to be working class in Canada? I made the same transition as the author of this article, and she is also from my home town, so it hit home.
• Notre Dame came far closer to collapsing than people knew. This is how it was saved. A detailed account of the fire with a superb use of photos and graphics from the New York Times.
• A new 3D map of the Milky Way flaunts our galaxy’s warped shape. Once again, astronomers use Cepheid variable stars to map the galaxy.
• Domino's Could Fuck Up the Internet for People With Disabilities Because They Won't Just Fix Their Website. This could be an important case for people with disabilities.

Choosing the Right Authenticator App

Yesterday, someone cloned my wife's Facebook profile. It got taken down quickly, but the incident prompted me to check my Facebook privacy and security settings. One of the changes I made was to set up two-factor authentication (2FA), using Google's Authenticator app.

I used that option because I've had it on my phone for a while and have it set up on my Google account. But is it the best choice?

Ed Bott, who knows far more about Windows and computer security than I ever will, has written an article for ZDNet on how to choose the best authenticator app. He discusses Google's and Microsoft's apps and a third-party app called Authy.

Adding multi-factor authentication (often called two-factor authentication, or 2FA) to high-value online accounts is probably the single most important security precaution you can take. It takes just a few minutes to set up, and the result is a layer of protection that will prevent intruders from intercepting your email, stealing funds from your bank account, or hijacking your social media.

In this post, I describe the most basic form of 2FA, which uses an authenticator app installed on a mobile phone to provide a secondary form of proof of identity when necessary. In that case, the two factors are the classic "something you know" (your sign-in credentials) and "something you have" (the mobile device that you've configured with a shared secret). The combination of those two factors sets the proof-of-identity bar high enough that your average thief won't be able to get over it.

If you haven't set up 2FA for at least your critical accounts like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, this article offers good advice on why you should and how to do it.

The Killing Star

Some time in the 1990s, I read a science fiction novel by George Zebrowski and Charles Pellegrino called The Killing Star.  It begins with a relativistic projectile attack on Earth that wipes the planet almost clean of life. Some humans survive and the novel goes on to explore how they find the source of the attack and discover why it happened.

I have been wanting to reread the book for some time, but my paperback copy has long since disappeared, and oddly, it's not available as an ebook. Fortunately, there is an audiobook edition, and I've been listening to that.

The book makes an interesting point, which may also be a solution of sorts to the Fermi Paradox. The reason we haven't detected any aliens may be because as soon as one race develops relativistic technology, the safest course of action would be to wipe out any other races. So either there aren't any aliens left, or they're hiding silently in dark vastness of space. 

Let's hope that's not the case, because we've been blasting radio and television signal into space for over a century. There are a lot stars in a 100-light-year distance from Earth.

And that's not the only problem. The Breakthrough Starshot initiative proposes to launch relativistic probes, albeit very small ones, at nearby stars. As this article points out, even a chip sized object travelling at relativistic velocities could cause catastrophic damage. Could we inadvertently start an interstellar war in the name of exploration?

It's a scary prospect and one that the proponents of the Breakthrough Startshot project should be thinking about.

The Case for the Slow City

Speed kills. That's especially true if you're a pedestrian unlucky enough to get hit by a car. If the car is moving at 33 mph. (53 km./hr.), you have a 50 percent chance of being seriously injured. At 25 mph. (40 km./hr.), that falls to 25 percent. It doesn't seem like much of a difference in speed, but the energy of the impact depends on the square of the velocity, something that most people don't take into account when judging speed.

That's led to a "slow cities" movement to reduce traffic speeds and hence traffic injuries and deaths. There are other benefits, as discussed in this CityLab article.

Speed kills is a more abstract sense, too. Building urban roads that can handle a large number of vehicles traveling at 35 miles per hour and up means making them wider, with fewer curves. High-speed highways and street-level limited-access urban thoroughfares famously do a host of bad things to those who live nearby or underneath these big hostile barriers. What’s less discussed is what they’re doing to the people inside the cars. In his recent book Building and Dwelling, the planner and urban scholar Richard Sennett writes about how going faster in cities has lead urbanites to value “space” over “place.” 

The article ends by mentioning the possibility of autonomous vehicles, which would be much safer and easier to operate if they were running at a lower speed.

The Benefits of Space Technology

As far back as the Apollo era, there have been discussion of the benefits of space technology and the spin-offs from space exploration (remember Tang?). It's pretty clear now that we can't abandon space; although there are complaints about the money spent on specific programs, we depend on things like GPS, weather and communication satellites, and remote sensing.

The paper, "How space technology benefits the Earth" lists 29 benefits from space exploration and development, grouped into three catagories:

• Space activities having a positive impact today (such as Earth observation for weather and climate)
• Space activities that could have a positive impact in the next 5 to 20 years (such as communications satellite megaconstellations)
• Space activities that could have a positive impact in the more distant future (such as widespread space manufacturing and industrialization)

It's a pretty comprehensive list, although we may not live to see some of the acitivities mentioned in the third category.

The HTML Handbook

The HTML Handbook is another in a series of handbooks written by the prolific Flavio Copes.

There's a lot of documentation about HTML on the Internet, so why would you need this handbook? After having a look through it, I'd say it's a good introduction to HTML for beginners who want an overview of how HTML works without getting into a lot of fussy detail.

If you need the gnarly details about a specific tag or feature, take a look at the W3Schools HTML Reference.

D.A. Pennebaker Looks Back on Monterey Pop

Film maker D. A. Pennebaker died recently. He's best known for his rock documentaries, especially Monterey Pop and Don't Look Back.

Rolling Stone interviewed him in 2017 but for some reason, the interview was never published. They've now put it up on their web site. If you have any interest in classic rock or great music documentaries, you'll want to read it.

During the talk, he was humble (“Have a nice lifetime,” he said at the end of the call, “I’m in the middle of writing myself, so I know what you’re going through”) and he acknowledged the long road it took for the film to be recognized as a masterpiece of cinema verité. At the time of its release, it got a showing at the Venice Film Festival and was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry in 2018. In between those achievements, Penny made films about Little Richard, David Bowie, John Lennon, Depeche Mode, Bill Clinton, and many others. But it was on Monterey Pop that he radicalized the way music films would be shot in the decades that followed, with tight close-ups and quick cuts.

“I wanted [Monterey Pop] to have that feeling of freedom that you get when you get a lot of really good musicians or good anybodys and let them do what they do well,” he said. “You get a wonderful feeling of freedom that anything could happen and will be good. That’s what I wanted, that feeling. So I just let it happen.”

When he looked back on the era of psychedelia and free love half a century later, it was still with an awe that he got to be a witness to it. “It’s a world that I really didn’t know that well,” he said. “To know that world and the people in it, you have to go out in the gigs. You have to be there, riding shotgun to the concert. And I didn’t do that. But I did just film the people.”

Word's Calculator Tips and Problems

The Office Watch newsletter has pointed out a feature of Microsoft Word that I wasn't aware of – its built-in calculator. I've used formulas in Word for years, mostly to add numbers in table columns, but I did not know it had calculator features.

However (as always with Word), there are many quirks and some things don't work as you'd expect. The handiest feature is that as well as displaying the result of a calculation, it copies it to the clipboard. But don't include an = sign as it breaks the calculator.

Note that to use the calculator, you'll have to install it to the Quick Access Toolbar. It won't become active until you enter a formula and highlight it.

I am suprised that I didn't know about this. Thanks to Office Watch (which is a great site) for pointing it out.

9 Tech Jobs You Can Get Without Coding - NOT!

The article Coding Ins't For Everyone: 9 Tech Jobs You Can Get Without It is optimistic at the very least. Based on more than 25 years experience working in technical writing and software development, I can state without coding experience, you will limit your career in most IT fields.

The jobs the article lists are:

• Design
• UX or UI specialist
• Business analyst
• Project and program management
• System admin and general IT jobs
• Technical writing
• Marketing and sales
• Tech journalism, blogging, and media
• Software and games testing

Looking at them in more detail:

• UX or UI specialist: Most UI development now is done with highly sophisticated code frameworks. Even if you can't program, you need to know the limitations and boundaries of the toolset you are using.
• System admin and general IT jobs: I've never met a system administrator at anything above the most basic level (tape monkey), who couldn't program at least shell scripts and JavaScript.
• Technical writing; Being able to code will expand your job options greatly. You don't need to be an ace programmer, having some programming experience will greatly increase your credibility with developers. Being able to write macros in Word or ExtendScripts in FrameMaker will make you much more productive.
• Software and games testing. I'm not familiar with games testing, but almost every QA person I know has some coding skills, even if it's just being able to write shell scripts to analyse log files. Most automated QA tools require some programming to set up. 

Almost every job in IT or software development will require a  degree of coding skills once you get past the junior level. even if it's just being able to write scripts or macros to run your tools more efficiently. 

Accessible PDFs in Microsoft Word

According to the Office Watch newsletter, Word 365 now reminds you to create accessibility tags when you create a PDF.

Word is getting reminders for accessibility before making a PDF.

When Word makes a PDF version of a document, it includes accessibility tags. These tags help screen readers (spoken for blind and the visually impaired) and also adjusting the PDF for small and large displays.

When saving a PDF (File | Export or File | Save a Copy) there’s a reminder to check accessibility before making the PDF version.

In older versions of Word, the option ot add accessibility tags is a check box in the Settings tab of the PDFMaker add-in, where it's likely to be missed.

Featured Links - August 5, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• United Launch Chose SLS Pork Over Real Technological Progress. The post does a good job of detailing the waste of the US space program before SpaceX shook things up.
• I assure you, medieval people bathed. Yes they did, with paintings to prove it.
• Tainted Pork, Ill Consumers and an Investigation Thwarted. Sickening. 
• Tweets Can Be Ephemeral, but Your Likes Are Forever. I have over 3,000 likes and would like to clear them, but it appears not to be possible (or at least easy). 
• Disassembling the Sony FE 135mm f/1.8 GM. If you've ever wondered why camera lenses are so expensive, this will give you an idea. 

Another Long Weekend

It's another long weekend in the Great White North, and it looks like it's going to be a nice one. So I'm taking the weekend off from blogging. Unless something earthshaking happens, I'll see you again on Tuesday.

Tracking the Photographic History of the Environment

Scientists have been using photography to document the history of glaciers and other natural features for some time. But not everything has been formally doucmented. Yet there's a significant number of historic photographs that can be used to document changes since they were taken, if the original location can be determined - something that's much easier with modern digital photography and mapping techniques. 

And Canada has a big part to play in this research.

Unlike most of Europe and the U.S., Canada was still largely terra incognita in the late 19th century. Eager to build railways opening up the land to mining and settlement, the government sought to map thousands of miles of rugged terrain at an unprecedented rate. Laying down chains to measure distance on the ground — the standard surveying technique of the period — was far too laborious, and it was practically useless for plotting elevation in a mountainous region. As the government grew impatient, a surveyor named Edouard Deville proposed trying out a method invented in his native France: With the help of an optical device called a theodolite, which measures angles, a surveyor could translate a comprehensive set of panoramic photographs into an accurate topographic map.

 Deville and his successors succeeded, charting most of Canada between the 1880s and the first decades of the 20th century. Once their maps were complete, the photos were no longer needed. The heavy glass-plate negatives were set to be destroyed, but they ended up misfiled in an Ottawa warehouse (perhaps intentionally diverted by a far-sighted civil servant). Higgs’ grad students found them while investigating gaps in the Jasper prints, exploring equivalent photos from a neighboring park. The whole collection numbered 120,000 images, neatly preserved in 300 large boxes.

Higgs couldn’t let the opportunity pass him by, and he immediately started retaking some of the photos. “We’ve done around 8,000 repeat images over the past 20 years,” he says. The large-format film camera has been retired, supplanted by digital photography. Google Earth and GPS technologies get the photographers to the right spot, typically within a meter of where the original surveyor once looked through his lens. On the ground, the rephotographers — mostly students now — often see remnants of the original surveys, including fabric from century-old flags.

How to Be a Better Writer

There's a lot of advice for writers out there on the Internet. Some of it's good; most isn't. This article by Gareth Branwyn is one of the good ones.

I have been a writer my entire adult life. I am self-taught. But I have had the pleasure of writing for some top-notch, cutting-edge magazines and dailies. I have written ten books. I’ve worked at Wired, Details, Esquire, The Baltimore Sun, Mondo 2000, and Make; I have worked with some truly impressive and inspiring editors and authors. I always try to learn from those around me, and so, over the years, I have picked up some very useful tips and tricks on the art and craft of writing. Here are some of the ideas that have changed my work life and my approach to writing. I’d love to hear some of yours.

I'm not familiar with Branwyn's work (although given the magazines he's written for, I've likely read some of it), but the advice he offers makes a lot of sense, and dovetails with advice from other writers whose advice I trust.

I should note that the advice he offers applies to a wide range of writing; some of it will be appropriate for technical writers, despite the narrower focus of their work.