Whatever Happened to Editors at Publishing Houses?

Doesn't anybody edit books before they're published anymore?

I've been spending a few weeks polishing up my technical skills, and so I've been reading a series of books on a particular subject. One of the books is A Baker's Dozen: Real Analog Solutions for Digital Designers. The book is a beautiful compilation of knowledge, wisdom and tips on the subject of analog circuit design. It's written by one of today's leading experts on the subject: Bonnie Baker, currently vice president or director of something important at Microchip. Baker is great, and I have a soft spot in my engineering heart for Microchip, and so I'm enjoying reading the book and digesting its contents.

There's just one problem with the book. It is very poorly edited.

I'm only into the third chapter, but it seems like I've had to add a handwritten correction to every other page of the book. Only one correction so far is a technical error (she got the two's complement notation for -2 wrong). All the rest are errors involving:

• spelling errors
• typographical errors
• homonyms and homologues
• word usage and sentence structure problems
• grammar mistakes
• awkward phrasing or misuse of common idioms
• noun-verb disagreement ("is/are", for example)

This is not the only technical book I've encountered with an editing problem. It seems like most, if not all, of today's technical books have serious editing problems. Sometimes they're total disasters, like those written by Myke Predko (don't take my word for it; go read the reviews on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com), but more often they're books like this one, where the technical content is (mostly) accurate, but the writing appears ... um ... "sloppy" isn't fair to the writer ... more like poorly edited.

It simply looks as though the editor wasn't doing his/her job. If I had to guess at what happened, I'd say that the publisher assigned a non-technical editor to Baker's book, and the editor was so bamboozled by the technical content that she completely forgot about her own ability to manage the basic mechanics of writing.

It's also possible that Baker told her publisher she wanted to edit the book herself. In a world of word processors and automated spell checkers, I feel that this is becoming increasingly common, especially among engineers who think that with the right manual or tutorial and a week to study it, they can become an expert on any subject. (This is the "any engineer can become a ..." syndrome. You read it here first, folks.)

But folkloric wisdom points out the problems with being your own expert: The taunt "Physician, heal thyself" shows up in the Bible, and a more modern proverb asserts that "Any lawyer who chooses to represent himself has a fool for a client." Authors shouldn't be their own editors.

Or maybe Baker's publisher, tight on cash (or just plain tight), had laid off too many editors and assigned this book and five others to a junior editor or intern with a one-week deadline. The junior editor had to let something slide, and this was it.

Or maybe Baker's editor was a raging incompetent, whose own literary skills are not very far above those required for modern high-school newspapers and yearbooks.

Good editors, like good schoolteachers, are worth their weight in gold. They're an overworked and underpaid bunch, and they may feel like we expect too much of them, but a good editor can make the difference between a "good read" and a waste of paper. My editors have always done a fantastic job, making a huge difference in the finished product.

You can't just jack into a port on the matrix and download the skills necessary to become an editor. It doesn't work like that. Every author should have a competent professional editor. Lacking a competent professional editor, every technical author should have an author whose writing they admire, and who is not a member of their technical profession, to go through their manuscript and fix their writing.

(If you want a more mainstream example of the difference a good editor can make, then look at the quality of language in Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October and compare it with the quality of language in the Tom Clancy's Op Center books. Clancy didn't write the Op Center books; he just lent them his name. He should have lent them his editors. The Op Center series is overburdened with horrendous language errors, which repeatedly bring the story to a screeching halt and ultimately cause the reader to throw down the book in frustration.)

I would further suggest that every technical author should ask a colleague whom they view as a competitor, or with whom they share a mild animosity, to review their manuscript for technical errors. Who is better qualified to find errors in your work, than someone who doesn't like you in the first place? Asking esteemed colleagues and best friends to check your work is great, but your greatest asset as an author will be someone who will root like a truffle hound for your mistakes.

It helps to have a good example. In this exercise in personal improvement, I'm saving the best book for last. Horowitz and Hill's The Art of Electronics is not only a technical treasure and a bible among electrical engineers, but it's also beautifully written, an example of how well English prose can be turned to instruct in even the most technical subjects. It's always worth reading and rereading, not just for the technical education, but for the exquisite turns of phrase.

What was once a "program" is now an "app"

Observe, with me, the interesting progression of terminology in the software industry.

(For those who are not computerly inclined, here's a quick definition of basic terms. Way back in the dawn of digital time, computers were composed of hardware and software. Hardware is all the tangible, physical parts of a computer: the metal case, the printed circuit board and all the little components on it, even the wires that connect everything together. Even soft plastic parts are still tangible, so we still call them "hard" ware.

Software is all the intangible stuff that makes computers run -- the programs. They're not tangible or physical, so they can't really be called "hard" ware. But since they're as essential to the computer's functioning as the hardware, they had to be called something -- hence, "soft" ware.)

Today we consider all the synonyms for "software":

• program
• software program
• firmware
• code
• suite
• application
• app

Back when computers were brand new, they used to run programs. A program was a series of instructions that the computer followed to complete a task. The earliest computers had to be programmed, or fed instructions, by flipping a series of switches on the front panel. (After flipping the switches hundreds of times just to enter one program, and still getting it wrong, engineers decided they needed to invent a different way to program a computer -- in a hurry. That's how we ended up with mass storage devices.)

Even in the early days of home computers, people called them programs. One program fit on one floppy disk, and to use the computer, users ran the program.

As computing tasks got more complicated, programmers started including other things on the disk: data files, libraries, configuration files, and additional programs to be run automatically by the main program. Since users weren't just running a single program anymore, programs began to be marketed as software -- an interesting, and not at all inappropriate, reuse of the generic term.

I still crack up when I see a marketing department or a magazine writer refer to these things as software programs. It's a hilarious redundancy.

Some software is critical enough to the computer's operation that it's stored in a memory chip inside the computer. Because this software is stored in hardware, it's neither hard nor soft, so the pros call it firmware.

We've come a long way from the days of flipping switches. Today you can use one programming tool on one machine to write programs in many different programming languages, for many different systems. This has led programmers to start referring to the stuff they produce as code. There's source code, object code, assembly code, byte code, high-level code, low-level code, compiled code, interpreted code, Mac code, Linux code, Windows code, ... and it's all just programs and programming.

Somewhere along the way, software vendors began to combine separate programs into agglomerations that were (supposed to be) more powerful than the individual programs. These were referred to as suites. For a while, everyone was selling an office suite. Adobe has a lock on the best graphics suite in the world. Other companies sell animation suites, CAD suites, audio/video production suites, gaming suites, and in a beautiful recursion, software development suites.

Also somewhere along the way, someone said, "We're not selling programs, we're selling applications." After that, what was formerly known as something else became known as an application -- still just a collection of programs and related software items.

With the introduction of very smart handheld devices such as the iPhone, someone said, "Since these devices are small, the term for the software they run should also be small." So an application became an app, as in "There's an app for that."

Ah, but the term app got away from its creators. First it spread to non-iPhone handhelds, and then to non-handheld hardware, and finally to browsers. Now any software that runs on any kind of computing device is an "app".

But when you distill it down to its essential parts, it's still just a program.

Paint.NET: Another Alternative to Photoshop

Everybody likes Adobe Photoshop, and for many good reasons. It's simply the best tool there is for image creation and manipulation. It's used by professionals and amateurs alike.

Well-financed amateurs, that is. Photoshop is expensive, and Adobe doesn't give discounts.

I've been on the lookout for alternatives to Photoshop for years. I got turned onto PaintShop Pro back when it was just PaintShop, and it was a freebie that came with one of my printers. PaintShop Pro changed owners several times, and it's currently part of the Corel product family.

The open source community developed a free editor called "The GIMP," originally for X Windows, but later ported to MS Windows. It has a kooky interface, but once you get used to it, it's as good as Photoshop and PaintShop Pro.

PaintShop Pro and The GIMP have served their user communities well for many years, providing their users with nearly all of the functionality of Photoshop, without the high price.

In 2004, two students at WSU created a new alternative to Photoshop, as part of a senior programming project. They released it into the wild, and it spread rapidly. Everybody who used it liked it, and it was compared favorably to Photoshop, PaintShop Pro, and even The GIMP. It's called Paint.NET. It is fast, powerful, and an absolute joy to use. It only runs on Microsoft Windows systems, but it does a great job of utilizing the .NET framework and the power of C#.

Paint.NET is currently at version 3.5.5 and can be downloaded for free from http://www.getpaint.net/index.html . The GIMP can be downloaded for free from http://www.gimp.org/ .

(PaintShop Pro can be purchased directly from Corel for $99.99. Photoshop can be purchased directly from Adobe for $699.00.)

Three New Superpowers! Good or Bad? Please Comment.

My first entry at Zyzmog Galactic Headquarters talked about the conflict between my fascination for, and my rejection of, new technology. I'm often heard to exclaim, "I love living in this century!" There is a lot of exciting stuff going on, and I enjoy being both a spectator and a participant in the onrush of technology.

At this point in the 21st Century, technology has granted us three superpowers that didn't exist a short time ago. Many high school students can remember the days when they didn't have these superpowers. Let me list them for you.

The three superpowers in the early 21st Century are:
1. Infinite mobility.
2. Infinite access to information.
3. Infinite connectivity.

Infinite mobility means the ability to go anywhere in the world -- and even into orbit. If you have enough time (and money), you can travel anywhere you want. In the pages of Outside, National Geographic Explorer, Men's Journal and other magazines, you can read about fantastic voyages made, not by diplomats, politicians, soldiers or spies, but by ordinary people like you and me. You can watch TV stories about those voyages on the Travel, Discovery, and National Geographic channels.

Infinite mobility probably reached its peak in August 2001. It's still possible to travel anywhere; it's just more difficult now. Okay, North Korea is still next to impossible to visit. And some places are dangerous to travel to, but this superpower gives you the ability to travel there and get into trouble if you're stupid enough.

Infinite access to information means that nearly the entire assembled body of human knowledge is now at our fingertips. The popularization of the Internet, followed by the invention of the World Wide Web, and finally the introduction of search engines like Google and knowledge bases like Wikipedia, have done for modern man what Gutenberg's printing press did for mankind in 1440. For one thing, they have fundamentally changed the way I conduct both business and research. Even in closed societies like China and Iran, anybody with enough desire can get access to this universal fount of information. The One Laptop Per Child initiative is an effort to make this power not just infinite, but universal.

At first, we were worried that this infinite access to information would lead to infinite dissemination of falsehoods and lies. Granted, there's a lot of that out there, and there always will be, and now it's even more accessible than when its dissemination was confined to mimeographs and backwater printing houses. But the social experiment that is Wikipedia shows us that a public knowledge base can be self-correcting and self-policing, over time.

Some oppressive governments, pseudo-religious groups, and other entities that live on power and paranoia may try to squelch this infinite access to information, but they have not succeeded yet, and they will not succeed. The genie is out of the bottle.

Infinite connectivity: I'm certain there are still people on this planet without an email address. You're not one of them! Even more ubiquitous than an email address is a cellular phone. In some families, even children as young as 8 or 10 have a cellphone with all the, um, bells and whistles (sorry). In countries that cannot afford the infrastructure and costs associated with what we now call "land lines," it seems as if everyone has a cellular phone.

Last year, the new computer buzzword was cloud computing, and its herald was the netbook, a minimalist computer that keeps all of its programs and data in the "cloud" instead of on a local hard disk. The trend towards cloud computing continues this year.

Then there's the phenomenon known as social networking. One day social networking, though out of style, will define this decade the way shag carpet defined the 1970s and sideways ponytails defined the 1990s. Today, though, social networking provides an important service by allowing people to maintain and to renew social and family connections. Facebook was not the first social network, but it is currently the biggest fish in the pond. The pocket-sized social network known as Twitter was hot for a while in 2008-2010, but it seems to be fading fast, a flash in the fad pan. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

This infinite connectivity does have a dark side, though: people will always know where you are. Your cellular service provider can track your location, either through your phone's built-in GPS, or through triangulation of your phone's position relative to two or three nearby cellular towers. The GPS capability in the newest phones can be remotely activated without the user's knowledge. Radio navigation, or triangulation, has been used by sailors and aviators for 100 years.

Another facet of this dark side: in this digital age, the right software and the right Internet connections can allow anyone to track your every move in cyberspace. By assembling all of your comments on Facebook and on blogs, all of your private (or so you thought) emails, and all of your search patterns, they can write a story of your life so detailed, so graphic, and so honest that it will scare you. All of this increased connectivity means that if you're not careful, your words and your deeds, good or evil, can (and will) be shouted from the rooftops. In some ways, this infinite connectivity leads swiftly downhill to complete and total loss of privacy.

--

So I want to know: what do you think? Does your having these three superpowers make your life better, or worse? Alternatively, does humanity's possession of these three superpowers make the world better, or worse? Please tell me what you think, and why.

All comments on this blog are still subject to moderation. This is just to keep the kooks out. Most comments will be approved instantly, and the rest (as long as they don't sound like they're from kooks) will be approved within 24 hours. Please avoid foul language and personal attacks, and stick to the subject at hand.

Political extremism and lengthy partisan diatribes are frowned upon and may also be rejected by the moderator. (Whew! Have I become one of those "power and paranoia" entities? I hope not. I just want to encourage a civil and rational dialogue.)

E' il mio gioco; le regole, le faccio io.

Shopping for Shoes, by Men

I went shopping with my sweet wife last Saturday. She needed a new purse, and so we went to the purse department at Kohl's, where she spent a long time looking at all the different purses. I love my wife, and I enjoy shopping with her, but like most men, after a while the endless comparison shopping gets tiring. I got tired of the purses in a hurry.

I needed a new pair of dress shoes. I have a pair of Giorgio Brutini loafers that I really like, and I wanted to find another pair just like them. They're good-looking and they're extremely comfortable. So I headed over to the shoe department, where a large banner advertised a 50-percent-off sale on every shoe in stock.

I zeroed in on the men's dress shoes. I walked down the aisle until I noticed a pair of very familiar shoes: black loafers with a woven leather accent and two tassels. I picked up one shoe and said, "Hello, Giorgio."

The shoe replied, "Actually, my name's Croft."

Then the other shoe chimed in, "And my name's Barrow."

Then they said in unison, "We just look like Giorgio."

Then they added, "And we're on sale."

I said, "That'll work."

I found a box with my size and tried them on. They fit fine. I put my old shoes in the box and walked Croft and Barrow over to show my sweet wife, who was still looking at purses.

Saturn: How General Motors Screwed Up a Good Thing

This posting started out as a request for somebody to write a book with this title. I didn't intend to write a posting about it. I can imagine that Saturn: How General Motors Screwed Up a Good Thing, written by an industry insider, would make the nonfiction bestseller list.

Actually, a more appropriate title might append the word Again to the title, as GM has screwed up several times in the last few decades.

Moreover, GM has screwed up so many times that their mishandling of Saturn Corporation might end up being a single chapter (or three chapters) in a book with a simpler title: How General Motors Screwed Things Up.

General Motors Corporation have accomplished a lot in their corporate history. They are responsible for bringing many automotive innovations to the mass market, for use by the common man. And indeed, they have led the way with innovative features in their more elite market segments, such as the Corvette and the haute-luxury end of their Cadillac line.

But GM have had more than their share of screw-ups, too, one of which was their mismanagement of Saturn.

Saturn Corporation was an innovative way to run a car company, and the Saturn was an innovative product line. After the initial model release in 1985, Saturns attained popularity quickly, because they were perceived as something newer and better than the same old stuff Detroit had been churning out. But GM required Saturn Corporation to sell their models at a loss in order to build market share, so the subsidiary didn't show a profit (did it ever?). They could have jacked the price up to par or to a slim profit, and people would have paid the extra -- the cars were that good. But they didn't.

When it started in 1985, Saturn offered a different kind of car and a different kind of car-buying experience. The public loved the car, the no-haggle, no-pressure showrooms, and the customer-comes-first-and-we-treat-you-like-royalty service departments. As a result, the public bought lots of Saturns - and two bad things happened.

("Bad" depends on your point of view. These things were only bad from the point of view of other GM divisions, which, being much bigger, older, and more heavily invested than Saturn, had the ready ears of the executive suite and the boardroom. You'll see where this is going shortly.)

First, Saturn sales cut deeply into sales of existing GM product lines. That's no surprise, considering the unequivocal junk that Chevrolet, Oldsmobile and Pontiac were turning out in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Second, Saturn employees adopted a "snooty" attitude (GM's word, not mine) towards other GM employees. That's because Saturn employees, being nonunion, had to work hard for their success, and they had a lot of success to show for their hard work.

GM could have (and unequivocally should have) learned a lesson from both of these phenomena. They could have figured out why the public preferred the Saturn SL2 over the Chevy Beretta, for example, and either redesigned the Beretta to match the SL2's quality and features, or killed the Beretta, cut their losses, and consolidated their product line. Likewise, they could have taken a page from Saturn's playbook on no-haggle pricing and real customer service, and transformed GM's showrooms and service departments from a demeaning and distasteful experience into something enjoyable. Instead, they punished Saturn for their success. Rather than raise the rest of the corporation to Saturn's level, they lowered Saturn to the level of the rest of the corporation.

GM closed the dedicated Saturn factory at Spring Hill, Tennessee, and required all Saturn vehicles to be built on the same production lines as other GM cars, by the same people that built the other GM cars. Guess what happened to product quality? Yep: Down the toilet.

Then, rather than allow Saturn designers to design their own cars from scratch, GM imported designs from their European brand, Opel, and rebadged them as Saturns, thereby eliminating the uniqueness of the brand and the designed-in quality that had characterized the earlier models. Believe me, the public noticed the drop in quality, and while sales momentum held for a while based on the brand name, eventually sales dropped because the cars had become average.

(But the GM product line didn't completely regain its lost market share. Any idea who picked up the slack? It was Toyota, a resurgent Honda Motor Corporation, and a newcomer from Korea called Hyundai.)

The upshot of things was that while GM undercapitalized Saturn, they continued pouring money into crap like the Pontiac Aztek (and the entire Pontiac and Oldsmobile product lines) and excesses like the Cadillac Escalade and the Hummer product line.

Then, when the division was stumbling along, half-starved, without a loyal fan base, without direction and without the qualities that made it unique, GM announced that they were getting rid of it because it was no longer profitable. The executives and the board of directors at General Motors were directly responsible for meddling and mismanaging Saturn to death.

Happy Equinox

The vernal or spring equinox is a happy time of year. I think it's worthy of its own celebration -- no wait, it does have one. But that celebration depends on an arcane calendrical reckoning, related to phases of the moon and other such nonsense, whereas the equinox itself depends solely on the earth's position relative to the sun.

I love being outside at 6 a.m. on the day of the equinox (or 7 a.m. according to Daylight Savings Time) and seeing the sun peek over the horizon, down at the end of the east-west street near our home. It's like my own private celebration of the event that really heralds the beginning of spring. If I ever have a house again, I'm gonna build a Stonehenge in my back yard, with markers for the solstices and the equinoces.

So what if it snows after the equinox? Who cares? The daylight hours are rapidly increasing, the flowers and trees are budding, the birds are back in all their joyful cacophony, and the hills (well, the parts that aren't white) are turning green. It's a time of joyful anticipation, hope, and wild hormones.

Happy vernal equinox, everybody.