The Golden 80s

The Greenpeace campaign to "to turn IT industry leaders into climate advocates and solution providers" is interesting. It looks like a serious effort, unlike the PR-led corporate environmentalism.

As another World Environment Day arrives, we in India think about when can we live in a pollution-free city. Anil Agarwal , the late Editor of environment magazine Down to Earth, asked the right question, When will India be able to control pollution? Ten years down the line, there is no convincing answer. Our cities continue to rot and we have stopped to care about the environment . We continue to engage in meaningless marathons, ramp shows, and awareness drives. Because these are the most easiest things to do. In Bangalore, school students staged a drama on the Bishnois , bellwether IT company Infosys held an awareness drive (the most cliched sleaze act conducted in the name of environment by the government and others), and others decided to plant saplings (nobody knows which species) and so on. In the media, journalists wrote stories that still reflected the "doomsday" scenario cultivated following the Rio Summit in 1992. A few of these articles often contain dispara...

I was reading Keith Solty's blog for a few days. I realised that if you are following a blogger, you should read the posts right from the start. By doing this, you will get a better sense of the person, topics, interests, and so on. It is easier to connect with the blogger if you follow the blog from the start. I did find Keith's posts very informative.

I was working with lots of tables last week. Information scattered on many pages was rearranged and put on tables for more clarity. Because I was focusing on tables for most part of last week, I decided to dig a bit about tables and their structure. Broadly, there are two types of tables: Formal and informal . The formal tables are the ones we are familiar with and often encounter in user manuals . Tables that have proper titles and column headings belong to this type. Information in these type of tables can stand on its own. These tables are usually placed closer to the text. I feel the common look-up-a-value table is a an example of a formal table. Informal or in-line text tables do not have columns or titles. They are part of the text and are self-explanatory. For me, they look a bit odd in documents. Decision tables allow the user to take a decision and distance tables show data or values related to categories. Structure of a Table A table is identified by a brief and a desc...

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next-Emerson (found in The God Delusion by acclaimed scientist Richard Dawkins). Georges Perec's novel, The Void , is written without the letter "e". Man is a wretched creature and death is a certainty- Thomas Bernhad Ella Minnow Pea is a novel written by Mark Dunn. Letters start missing from the chapters in this novel. All excess is ill, but drunkeness is of the worst sort. It spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans men-William Penn Cladogenesis is the way evolution proceeds-by an elaborate and complex series of branching events or episodes of speciation .

When did the word “green” came to be widely associated with the environmental movement? In Century of New Words, John Ayto cites examples from 1971. The adjective was used to refer to environmentalists, who were “green” in their approach. In the 1970s, the colour green was associated with the protests against nuclear power stations in Germany, says the author. It was in the early 90s that I came across this word. The Earth Summit at Rio in 1992 was the driving force. Words like “ hotspots ,”“sustainable development,” and “recycling” became the buzzwords of the decade. Other terms that become hits included global warming, greenhouse effect, nuclear winter, renewable energy, bioremediation , acid rain, pollution, smog, oil pollution, biodiversity, and extinction. Newspapers splashed several “green” stories and ran campaigns to caution people against the impending environmental doom. Green organisations and politicians brought green issues to the public arena by pitting development again...

I feel like thrashing my desktop or banging my head against the wall on seeing the following words in user documents and emails: On approval or once approved Bolded Revert back Impacted The problem with the first word is if the user has to do an action after a particular step or authorisation, I can write, "After xyz task, ...". Why should the word "once" be used? In the printing industry, the word "bold" stands for "boldface". It is a character or type set in boldface. According to a printing glossary , "Bold is a type that appears darker than the next type of the same typeface." The adjectives are bolder and boldest, and not bolded . Technical writers can use make bold or set to bold instead of bolded that gives a puking sensation . The same applies to impacted . Even though, this is a popular , I will substitute it with another word or rewrite the sentence. I do not know who discovered the expression "revert back" as...

I chanced upon this article on the BBC website . While I have not yet seen the film, the article as well as the responses were interesting. I did not understand the word dog in the movie title. Nor did I understood why that particular word appeared or was approved as the movie title. History has many examples. When Kapil Dev's cricket team started winning matches against the much feared teams in the Prudential World Cup in 1983, they were called Kapil's Devils . Similarly, Gavaskar and Sachin were called as Little Masters . May be I am wrong or I am reading too much into things.

Slate picks up the best of 2008. New York Time's 10 Best Books of 2008. Salon's best books of 2008. Time magazine selects Roberto Bolano's novel as the best in 2008. Lastly, the best from the bible of literary criticism, TLS .

The following classification of newspaper headlines is based on my journalism notes. They are from the point of page layout. Flush Left -Headlines that are aligned to the left margin of the page. Step -A headline of two or three lines with the top one flushed to the left and the last one to the right. Inverted Pyramid -Headline arranged in the form of an inverted pyramid. Hanging Indention -Headline flushed to the right of the page, except the first line. Kicker -Headline of two parts with one line in a smaller font size and in a different type family than the others. Overline -Headline with a smaller supporting line aligned to the middle at the top. Underline - Kicker in reverse. Hammer -A kicker reversely arranged.Usually a Hammer has two or three words with bigger headline at the top. Combination -A headline that combines any of the above types. New Pattern -Headlines that combine new patterns and artwork.

"By writing books, the individual becomes a universe. And since the principal quality of the universe is its uniquness, the existence of another universe constitutes a threat to its very existence."

I read the The Art of Fiction by David Lodge in the early 90s. I was very much impressed by the book, which gave an insight into the world of literature. I did keep notes while reading the book and today I decided to put a list of books recommended by the author in various chapters. The books include the following: Defamiliarisation -Villete-Charlotte Bronte. For more on defamiliarisation, click here . Interior Monologue -Ulysses-James Joyce Intrusive Author -Adame Bede (George Orwell), Howard's End (E M Forster), As Good as Gold (Joseph Heller) Suspense -A Pair of Blue Eyes (Thomas Hardy) Skaz -The Catcher in the Rye-J D Salinger. Skaz Epistolary Novels -Pamela and Clarissa (Samuel Richardson), Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen), The Trick of It (Michael Frayn) Mystery Novels -Wilkie Collin's novels, Heart of Darkness(Joseph Conrad), The French Lieutenant's Woman (John Fowles) and Mrs. Bathurst (Rudyard Kipling). Names -The author says that names are never neutral in fic...

If you believe that the IT industry is a 'clean' industry, it is time to be bitten by the reality. Read the following intro in a newspaper: "While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2. Boiling a kettle generates about 15g," says a Times report.To read the report, click here . While the Americans have started to think about car-pooling and green fuel, what are we doing here? We are ashamed to take the public transport. Is not it? "We are so used to our comfortable way of life. It is much easier for us to drive ourselves to work instead of tacking 10 minutes on to our commute by taking public transportation. It is much easier for us to do things on our own schedule, instead of offering to carpool with friends or co-workers and maybe being slightly inconvenienced by waiting for five minutes," says an article in The Republican .

In discussions, I hear the words "user stories" and 'use cases" used interchangeably. This wikipedia link details what exactly a user story is. Wiki explains User Case .

Geoff Hart rips apart the myths in technial writing. Great post.

Technical writers all over the world are debating on how new approaches and processes can dramatically improve the quality of the documentation produced. A few suggest that Usability testing, even with limited resources, can add value to the documentation you produce. Other suggest moving documentation to the Web 2.0 model for ease of use and adopting agile documentation. There are people who cite Google's example of comic documentation when they released their new browser, the Chrome. Daniel Brolund suggests User Guide driven documentation where a snippet of the user guide describing a new feature is prepared. This is an interesting idea in that the techncial writers get a chance to become involved in the documentation process at the initial stages of software development itself. Click here to read Daniel's post.

Google while unleashing its new browser Chrome, has created another great stuff. It's a comic book about the browse. Check it out at http://blogoscoped.com/google-chrome/2

I was left wondering with this question as I read the following articles: Finding the name behind the gmail address A Question of Programming Ethics

Cloud computing is nothing but utilizing supercomputer power to perform complicated tasks over the Internet. (I understood this much thanks to Business Week . The article says “Cloud computing aims to apply that kind of power—measured in the tens of trillions of computations per second—to problems like analyzing risk in financial portfolios, delivering personalized medical information, even powering immersive computer games, in a way that users can tap through the Web. It does that by networking large groups of servers that often use low-cost consumer PC technology, with specialized connections to spread data-processing chores across them.” Express Computer throws more light by saying that “The key feature of cloud computing is that both the software and the information held in it live on centrally located servers rather than on a end-user’s computer.” “…The architecture behind cloud computing is a massive network of ‘cloud servers’ interconnected as if in a grid running in parallel, ...

Like the greatest practitioner of the art, Thomas Mann, Daniel Kehlmann is a master of irony, deftly subverting the expectations of the reader, writes Daniel Johnson about Kehlman's novel Measuring the World. Read the article in The Telegraph .