Monthly Archives: May 2011

Out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerges our first patent

“The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged U.S. Patent No. 7,958,080 to be issued on June 7, 2011. Once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.”

Out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets emerges our first patent
Out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets emerges our first patent

Our first patent! We are hoping the coming apocalypse doesn’t cause any more delays at the Patent Office; we have been waiting a long time for this patent to get issued, and there are more in the pipeline!

So, why are we still learning typesetting?

Many, many years ago, as a young boy living in Delhi I had the good fortune of being a neighbor and friend to the then-elderly, since deceased, M. Chalapathi Rau, the publisher and editor of the newspaper National Herald which had been founded by Jawarharlal Nehru himself during India’s freedom struggle. (“M.C” or “Magnus” as he was known to his friends was a man of many talents and a true eminence grise who unobtrusively operated the levers of power in India.)

To help me research a school project, M.C. took me to his newspaper’s printing press, a vast, clanking space where I watched with great fascination the painstaking process of laying out moveable type by hand: a craftsman’s job that had remained essentially unchanged, at least in India, since the 19th century. I did my school project, thinking that this would be my first and last experience with typesetting…

At college, however, typesetting reappeared: in order to get a job, one had to have a beautifully laid out resume, particularly if one had no “professional experience” to list other than the insalubrious qualification of having toiled in the scullery of a campus dining hall for minimum wage. So, I dutifully learned the obscure commands that helped set fonts and margins using troff, the first document preparation software for Unix computers.

I prepared and padded my resume, bluffed my way into my first job, and assumed that that would be my last encounter with typesetting. Ironically, my first job was at AT&T Bell Labs, working on Unix-based applications.

Typesetting is closely tied to the history of Unix, and, indeed, provided the raison d’etre for Unix’s existence. In 1971, when Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (and others) at Bell Labs wanted to get funding for developing the Unix operating system, their business case was based upon the rather tenuous argument that developing this new operating system (Unix) would help them develop a better typesetting program (troff), which could be used by Bell Labs to file patents.

In those halcyon days, Bell Labs generously recognized and encouraged geniuses to explore their ideas, and, more mundanely, Bell Labs actually did need a better typesetting programs: since it’s inception in 1925 the organization had averaged one patent per business day (and collected about nine Nobel Prizes by the time I showed up as a very junior programmer).

So troff, the typesetting program, is responsible for the creation of Unix, which means that typesetting is the reason why Linux, cloud computing, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. all exist today!

Typesetting occupied a relatively small part of my workday until I started moving into management roles, which coincided with the widespread adoption of Microsoft’s Word software. Suddenly, most of my day was spent typesetting memos, performance appraisals, proposals, etc. I emphasize “typesetting”, rather than “writing”, because Microsoft Word remains, at heart, a typesetting program, not a writing program. It requires you to learn the same obscure catechism of tab settings, kerns and serifs, character and line spacings that those ancient typesetters at the National Herald had mastered as a craft.

And, yet, no one considers it strange that all of us highly trained, highly paid “knowledge workers” are required to master a craft that was first invented in China in 1040 AD!

The advent of the modern Web, starting with the release of the Netscape browser in 1995, has provided little relief: we exchanged one set of obscure keystroke combinations for another, equally opaque set of symbols (i.e. HTML). It is only in recent years that blogging tools, like the excellent WordPress software I use to pen this essay, has helped hide the typesetting and allow users to focus on the writing.

Between the release of the Netscape browser and the current robustness of WordPress came the advent of Google Docs. Google Docs’ primary innovation (or, more precisely, Writely’s primary innovation — remember Writely?) was to offer online editing; Google Docs did nothing to fundamentally alter the typesetting nature of word processing.

Google Docs continues to evolve, but as a persistent shadow of Microsoft Office. This makes sense from a business perspective, of course: it is easier for Google to get customers signed up if they can state simply that Google Docs works like the familiar Microsoft Office, and is a lot cheaper and easier to access. It would be much harder to get people to sign up for a Google Docs that seemed to fundamentally alien in comparison to that reliable reference, Microsoft Office.

And, so it continues… Centuries after the invention of moveable type, we remain trapped in its formatting conventions. At Kerika, we are starting to think seriously about making our embedded text editor (which is based upon Whizzywig) be the primary way for people to write for the Web. Kerika is all about creating and sharing pages stuffed with your greatest ideas and coolest content, and it’s high time we put aside typesetting. For good.

Nice discussion here.

What’s your best guess about the following? Was it written by a computer, written by a human in a different language and then poorly translated into English, or written by a steering committee with representatives from all the relevant business units and impacted stakeholders?

Nice discussion here. I want to join with you by giving my comments in your web page. First of all, your page and design of your website is so elegant, it is attractive. Also, in explaining your opinion and other news, frankly you are the best one. I’ve never met other person with special skills in my working environment. By using this comment page, you are great to give me opportunities for announcing some events. Secondly, I’ve checked your website in search engine result page; some of your website pages have ranked very well. Additionally, your topic is relevant with my desired one. Lastly, if you don’t mind, could you join with us as a team, in order to develop website, not only general web page, but also many specific websites we must create for our missions. From time to time, we, I and my team have great position for you to develop that.

Yup, we really are the best one. We hope this topic is also relevant with your desired one.

Safe house, honey pot, or just dazed and confused at the Wall Street Journal?

The Wall Street Journal is creating its own version of Wikileaks, call SafeHouse, where you are invited to

Help The Wall Street Journal uncover fraud, abuse and other wrongdoing.

What would they like from you?

Documents and databases: They’re key to modern journalism. But they’re almost always hidden behind locked doors, especially when they detail wrongdoing such as fraud, abuse, pollution, insider trading, and other harms. That’s why we need your help.

If you have newsworthy contracts, correspondence, emails, financial records or databases from companies, government agencies or non-profits, you can send them to us using the SafeHouse service.

“SafeHouse”, however, sounds more like a “honey pot” when you read the WSJ’s Terms and Conditions, which offers three ways of communicating with SafeHouse:

1. Standard SafeHouse: […] Dow Jones does not make any representations regarding confidentiality.

2. Anonymous SafeHouse: […] Despite efforts to minimize the information collected, we cannot ensure complete anonymity.

3. Request Confidentiality: […] If we enter into a confidential relationship, Dow Jones will take all available measures to protect your identity while remaining in compliance with all applicable laws.

OK, so as they say, “You use this service at your own risk.” But, here’s where things start to get puzzling:

You agree not to use SafeHouse for any unlawful purpose.

Huh?

If you upload or submit any Content, you represent to Dow Jones that you have all the necessary legal rights to upload or submit such Content and it will not violate any law or the rights of any person.

How can anyone provide confidential documents that belong to another organization without violating the rights of that organization?

Even if you put aside for a moment the absurd notion of a “SafeHouse” where you can post materials that belongs to others, without violating the rights of these others, or any laws for that matter, there is a more puzzling question of why the Wall Street Journal has decided to create their own version of Wikileaks in the first place.

An editorial from June 29, 2010 was entitled “Wikileaks ‘Bastards'” which effectively summarizes their views on anonymous leaking. The WSJ has been consistent in their stance: there are other editorials from April 25, Jan 21, Dec 31, etc., and even today’s editorial page notes that

…we have laws on the books that prohibit the unauthorized disclosure of government secrets. Those laws would fall hard on any official who violated his oath to protect classified information.

So why would they try to create their own version of a communication forum that they clearly despise? An editorial from Dec 2, 2010 provides a clue:

We can’t put the Internet genie back in the bottle.

Well, one place the Internet genie hasn’t yet visited is the Wall Street Journal’s main website: a search for “SafeHouse” there yields no results. Nothing to see here, folks, move along now…