The Golden 80s

How To Predict A Failing Hard Drive 10 Awesome Safe For Work Websites To Overcome Lunchtime Boredom A portal on tax related affairs and laws in India Free Data Recovery Software http://www.longreads.com/ to read long articles. Track anonymous and missed calls with Phone2location .

As a user, would you bother to visit this website again? If you do not recognise it, the site belongs to The New Indian Express, one of the popular English dailies in India.

It is a fact that albums released by Joe Satriani are good. Or no albums by this virtuoso guitarist is bad. The latest album, Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards , is simply perfect, melodious, and technically excellent. Right from Premonition, through keyboard laden Pyrrhic Victoria, bluesy Littleworth Lane, rocking Light Years Away, and The Golden Room with an Indian sound, the album is a listener's pleasure. Like all his previous albums, the songs are simply beautiful, but more world music oriented stuff with a tinge of dance music thrown in the right measure. The album is an intelligent shift towards international music, and drifts away from the 80s harder and heavier sound. If I compare Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards with his previous stuff such as Surfing With The Alien, Flying In A Blue Dream, and The Extremist, then I feel disappointed. Gone are the lighting fast solos, power chords, and exploding riffs. Satch is no more a metal-friendly act. He has abandoned the "m...

Is it Walk in, Walk In, or walk-in? The word, walk-in , appears as a noun and an adjective in Merriam Webster online .  I could not find the word without the hyphen. The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary website showed the hyphenated word only. As you know, the word means someone who walks in to a place without an appointment. Typical examples are walk-in customers for a bank, walk-in interviews for fresh graduates, and walk-in patients in a hospital.

As technical writers, most of us get a chance to review documents prepared by colleagues or writers from other teams. While a few may be reluctant to do reviews, it is a fact that the reviews provide technical writers with an opportunity to participate in the quality control process of user and technical documentation. If the team has a technical editor, he or she may be left with enough time to do a thorough review of documents. A process will be in place to plan and complete editing. If one of the team members take up the taks of editing, the edits mostly will be a mix of “copy-editing” and “technical editing". A“production edit” can also be done on the draft versions of the PDFs created to ensure that everything is all right before it is send to the customer. The limiting factor indeed is time. The first step in editing is to read the entire document once. It is indeed a quick read just to get an idea of what is it all about. Such a reading does give me a...

How different is copy editing from the editing you do as part of your technical writing? Some might feel that it is nothing compared to what is done in technical writing. Others might say a lot can be carried from newspaper copy editing to technical editing. Others might say both are miles apart. I can't help from saying that there is an awful lot of misunderstanding about a copy editor's work in newspapers. On the internet, one of the best quoted or linked source of what a copy editor does is at The Slot. Click here to read The Slot's article on What Exactly is a Copy Editor .  Here, I don't intend to pass judgements on which one is more challenging and complex, or which one is easy. Let me put my perspective what a copy editor (sub editor in Indian parlance) does. Firstly, it is neither a "mere" editing job, nor a proofreading job. It is job with lots of responsibility, pressure, and requires syncing with the editorial team, the reporting team, the grap...

One of the words that technical communicators should have in their vocabulary is Engage. Because the word also means to "become involved." In reality, many technical writers refuse to get "actively" involved with the project teams and refuse to accept responsibility for mistakes on their part. A few even consider themselves as "individual contributors" in a team. Technical writers cannot sit before the desktops and imagine that everything—information, reference documents, software build, and so on—will reach them automatically. They cannot simply shift the blame for incorrect information or missing information in their documents to someone else. For technical writers of any level, engaging themselves with the project team is the most crucial aspect. This may require lots of legwork, casual chat, and intent to even befriend a few team members. The primary benefit of such an interaction is more or less complete documentation of the software and feature...

Pictures of the just concluded Commonwealth Games in Delhi.  Very few photos of Indian winners anyway. Adobe Dreamweaver's tutorial on building a first website. More here . This PDF on Introduction to XML and Structured FrameMaker 7.x gives a good overview of concepts. Alcatel-Lucent opens regional delivery centre in Bangalore, says CNN-IBN . A science story that was too premature to be published: IISc scientists make progress on new thyroid drug The Sunday Times on the literary feud between Noble laureates, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.  30 lakh mobiles disconnected over verification. Oct 16 was World Food Day . "United Against Hunger" is this year's theme. Nothing great in this list of top 50 guitar riffs of the decade.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a markup language that allows you to define and structure data using tags and attributes. The capabilities of XML can be extended by creating new tags. Data can be structured and validated easily. XML documents works cross-platform. In XML, there is clear separation between data or contents (XML document) and presentation. The presentation is specified by the Stylesheet. Processing Instruction (PI): The XML declaration statement that begins the XML document. Tags (< >): The name that identifies the piece of information. Element s: Basic units that identify and describe data. A Root element contains all other elements. Elements that contain other elements are parent elements. Elements contained in Parent elements are Child elements. Conten t: Data represented by the elements. Attribute s: Provides additional information about elements and includes a name and value pair. Elements and attributes are the building blocks of DTD. Entit...

Tips to circle text or object for emphasis in PowerPoint . Which kind of technical writer are you? Robohelp tutorials on You Tube. More about Immersive Journalism . HTML, CSS, and Java Script videos on Google . How to avoid risks posed by tabbed browsing . Adobe TV for technical communication. Getting started in technical communication . Things non-technical users do not understand about software. Earth-Like Planet Can Sustain Life, says Discovery . The Social Network : Ecosystem vs. Egosystem. A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices .

Swinge - A verb meaning meaning thrash or punish. Obama wants to keep them for all but the rich; the doves think they should be continued for everyone and the hawks say they should not only be abandoned but accompanied by swingeing tax rises. . The following terms impressed me very much: Pluralia Tantum - A word meaning nouns that have only plural forms. Thanks to Richard Nordquist . Singulare tantum - Nouns that appear in singular form only. The following are extracts from an Prospect magazine article: "...Psychoanalysis was born 113 years ago when Freud applied the term “psychical analysis” to his treatment of disturbed patients....CBT, now the NHS treatment of choice, was developed in the 1960s by American psychoanalyst, Aaron T Beck." The End of Science (1996) is a book written by John Horgan, a staff writer for Scientific American.

1. Water molecules in Antarctic fish "dance a more ordered" dance due to the presence of anti-freeze proteins in their body, said a news report . The technique used to study this is called "terahertz spectroscopy". Spectroscopy is a method by which an object's properties are studied by the way it disperses light passed through it. This is just like passing sunlight through a prism. When light is passed through a prism, it breaks into its constituent colours. By studying the constituent colours, scientists can know more about an object's properties. Terahertz spectroscopy uses frequencies in the range of 0.3 THz to 10 THz. This frequency is invisible to the naked eye and can penetrate matter. In this study, Terahertz spectroscopy was used to study the interaction of water molecules with the anti-freeze proteins. 2. "...Universe was formed because of laws of physics and not divine intervention, " said acclaimed scientist, Stephen Hawking . He has add...

The Environment was back in the news because of an oil spill at the Gulf of Mexico and the release of a report by US president Obama's cancer panel of the link between chemicals and cancer. Oil spills cause irreparable damage to fauna and flora, and people who depend on these resources for livelihood. The recurring episode shows that we have not yet learnt the right lessons from Exxon Waldez . The report prepared by Obama's cancer panel says that, "...Approximately 41 percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, and about 21 percent will die from cancer...". The panel, in its 240-page report, suggests strengthening of research into environment chemicals and cancer. The chapter, Environmental Exposures Related to Modern Lifestyles, is a great read on how humans are being exposed to environmental carcinogens daily. After carbon footprint, the digital footprint is also affecting the environment or is going to affect the environment i...

I have a fascination for terms and jargons. My eyes lit up when I feel that the connotation of something I read is more than skin deep. Commonplace books: I saw this word in a post titled, The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book . Wikipedia defines the words as "Commonplace books (or commonplaces) were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into book." Echo Chamber Effect: Echo Chamber effect is used to describe how media outlets follow stories reported by a major media outlet.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting- Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Beauty, the last triumph possible for man who can no longer hope- Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel . We live in an age of conspiracy theories, some people preferring to believe that nothing is ever what it is but an elaborate plot by powers elsewhere- From Malcolm Bradbury 's Doctor Criminale. The sea is a symbol of collective unconscious because unfathomed depths lie concealed beneath its reflecting surface- Carl Jung in Dreams Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end up by destroying the Earth- Albert Schweitzer

I watched the recorded version of the Author-IT Dynamic Assistance Platform webinar. It was interesting to read Steve Job's article on Adobe Flash , and also to know that Ozzfest 2010 would have Girls Girls Girls! fame Motley Crue and Rob Halford. Another article says technical writes can be good scientifc writers( not sure), while The FrameMaker Five turned out to be written for FrameMaker 9. On a day I bought a few Indian philosophy books, there comes a list of science fiction detective novels in New Scientist . The week also saw the Indian parliament passing a bill to establish a national green tribunal in India. According to Business Standard , this is "the first serious attempt in the country towards environmental rights."

The barbaric act of Hartal was enacted by Marxist-led political parties in my home state of Kerala , in the name of protest against high food prices. The Word MVPs site I frequent regularly has an interesting and long article on Conditional Cross-Reference Labels for Numbered Headings , while PowerPoint earned some flak from the US military. Alternet ran an excellent article on the deleterious impacts of industrial agriculture on the environment and Bangalore daily Deccan Herald published a dubious article supporting GE crops. It was refreshing to read about the rise of new generation of British poets (I am currently reading poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy's poems anyway) and an interview with well-known science fiction author Ray Bradbury , who has never been to college. Noted defence analyst K Subramanyam writes on Communication intelligence in the backdrop of the phone tapping allegations by opposition politicians in India.

The debate on whether "and/or" is correct or not refuses to die down. It was pleasing to see an entry on 'and/or" in the Chicago Manual of Style FAQ site (Look at the March Q&A section). In the March Q&A, CMOS says, "... and/or “can often be replaced by and or or with no loss in meaning." For multiple choices, CMOS says use or . . . or both . Despite knowing this, we make mistakes, right?

What is the plural form of phenomenon? School kids will tell it is phenomena. But what happened to " phenomena " in this newspaper report? Pachauri said: "Given the variations in the ocean currents, wind patterns and related sedimentation as well as other phenomenons related to the weather..." The news report also has other usage issues. "The six-member Pachauri Committee, tasked to examine the possibility of cutting a canal through land mass between Dhanuskodi and Rameshwaram,..." Tasked to? When Task is used as a a verb, 'with' follows it. It can be "tasked with" and not "tasked to". The third paragraph has a spelling mistake in "environemntally", that too on World Earth Day!

Can the legendary 5 Ws' and one H, widely used in journalism, applicable to technical writing as well? I had this doubt after I viewed a presentation titled, How to Write . Let us look what 5 W's and One in journalism. It means: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Does who, when, and where matter for a scenario where a user is operating a software? I have my doubts. Anyway, this is an interesting point and I will keep it in my mind whether 5Ws' and One H can indeed be a guideline for technical writing. In journalis, the inverted pyramid style evolved due to space constraints in a newspaper. For a newspaper, space is a very important thing, because ads occupy some amount of space in a newspaper page. Moreover, the technique was also useful to readers who want to get all the necessary information by reading the first paragraph or lead. It is difficult to apply the same in the strictest sense to a user manual. While space is finite in a newspaper, it is not so for a user manual....

Agile Development : Software development based on an iterative and incremental approach. Regular feedback and frequent changes effected to plans to develop a software. See Agile Manifesto for more. API : Short for Application Programming Interface. According to Webopedia , An API is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for developing software products. Application Server : A software (set up in a centralised location) used in intranet/internet environment to query databases or for business processing. Batch Process : A process that runs a series of commands or processes. Build : Generally, a pre-release version of a software program. There will be many builds that will be tested before the final product is shipped to the customer. Burndown chart : In Agile software development, this chart tracks sprint progress so that project managers can decide which items must be removed from the sprint backlog and moved to the next sprint. CSV File : Short for Comma Separated Value file, which ...

It was sad to read that India's efforts to launch the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle(GSLV D-3), powered by indigenously developed cryogenic engine, failed to succeed. Read the report in the Times of India .

The following minds do not find space in newspapers and magazines published in India: Agnes Helle r - Hungarian philosopher Héctor Abad Faciolince -Colombian novelist, essayist, journalist, and editor. He has studied Medicine, Journalism, and Philosophy. Claire Denis , the well-known French film director. Uladzimir Arlou becomes first laureate of “European Poet of Freedom” award. French philosopher Elisabeth Badinter Geert Lovink -media theorist, net critic and activist. Javier Cercas , writer and Professor of Spanish literature. Rosa Monter o is an award-winning journalist and author of contemporary fiction. Manuel Rivas is a Galician writer, poet and journalist, and founding member of Greenpeace Spain. Michal Hvorecky is a Slovak author and winner of many prestigious awards. Robert Pinsky is a well-known American poet, and the poetry editor at Slate. Krzysztof Varga -Polish writer and journalist. Jonathan Safran Foe r is an American author best known for his novels Everything ...

Hurt Locker means a state of intense physical or mental pain, says the MacMillan dictionary. Hurt Locker won the Best Movie Oscar this year.

Here's a new screencasting tool: http://www.screenpresso.com/index.html. For Windows XP users, Microsoft.Net Framework is required.

I have attended meetings that often discussed and questioned how the product I document on access or query the database at the implementation level. While a few of these 'technical' discussions do not make much sense, it usullay creates a sense of curiosity to know a little more on the topic. It was with much interest that I read, Is the Relational Database Doomed? , an excellent piece on relational databases and alternatives. I cannot help myself from telling that this is a great piece of 'technical writing. Great post!

Rolling Stone report on GNR live was an interesting news to read. It was 1989 when I first listened to 'Sweet Child of Mine' through the Voice of America.

1. The goof-up over Himalayan glaciers is nothing new as far as Indian science is concerned. Anybody, who is a bit acquainted with Indian universities, knows what happens in the departments and labs. But the absence of official action against those who disgraced India in front of the world Himalayan glaciers is a bit hard to digest. And, even more, I did not understand what this lead to a story on CNN-IBN really meant. Poor journalism anyway. "The Rajendra Pachauri-led Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that claimed that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 owing to climate change and global warning was made without any scientific basis." The problem with this sentence is that it is both wrong and confusing. It must have been rewritten to clear the ambiguity caused by the word 'that'. 2. From Coredump , I went to Wall Street Journal to peer at the salaries technical writers get in the West. Looks good. 3. Should I watch Avatar or n...

I've not discarded my old university notebooks, as I cannot forget the glorious days of my post graduate studies. It looks as if I'll never get back those golden days, when only knowledge and discovery mattered and nothing else. Today, I opened one of those notebooks. The funny thing is a few of these notebooks are a collage of lectures of different subjects. There is no continuity in the notes. In the first few pages, it lists the following types of volcanic rocks: Andesite, Apanitic, and Basalt Next, it lists the texture: Glassy, Vesicles, Porphry, Pegmatite, Plutonic rocks, Phaneritic, Gabbro, Ultramafic Diorite, Granite, Rhyolite, Obsidian, Country or Wall Rock, Concordant, Pipes and Necks, Dykes and Sills, Laccolith, Lopoliths, Stock and Batholith, Extrusive, Chilled Margins, Xenoloiths, Clastic sediments A brief note on sting rays is written in pencil. This is followed by pictures and descriptions of the following animals: Sardine, Echeinesis, Cynoglossus , Mullet (there ...

Trevor Butteworth writes an excellent piece on the need for a slow media movement, to restore the grandeur or decency of good old journalism. He says, "The idea of consuming less, but better, media--of a "slow word" or "slow media" movement--is a strategy journalism should adopt." http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/29/media-newspapers-internet-opinions-columnists-trevor-butterworth.html