The Next Christmas Album You Need to Buy

It may seem strange to talk about a Christmas album right now. In fact, trying to buy Christmas music right now is like trying to buy home heating oil #2. The refineries have stopped making heating oil, switching over to gasoline for the summer, and they won't go back to heating oil until September. In the same way, this is the wrong season for retailers to be putting Christmas music on the shelves and advertising it. All of their Christmas CDs are in the warehouse, where they will remain until Thanksgiving.

Or Halloween.

Or Labor Day.

Unless you're an online retailer. Then it's Christmas all year long.

But I digress. (I'm allowed to do that. E' il mio gioco; le regole, le faccio io.) Let's talk about Christmas music.

Last December, I heard a music review on National Public Radio, of a new Christmas album by Sting, called If On a Winter's Night... . (Yes, the ellipsis is part of the title.) The reviewer played clips of some of the songs, and talked about a few of the tracks, enough to make me want to buy the CD. So I did.

I think I played it once last winter, and not even all the way through. But it's been sitting on my shelf for six months now, and I recently decided to try it again. It's much more listenable the second (and third) time around.

If you're in the mood for Nat King Cole's The Christmas Song or John Denver and the Muppets' The Twelve Days of Christmas, this album just won't do it for you. It's a very introspective album. Each song invites the listener to go with Sting, deep into the emotions and the thoughts that are the underpinnings of The True Meaning of Christmas.

There's no catchy Winter Wonderland in this album, and no Beach Boys harmonies. Even Natalie Cole's beautiful rendition of Mary, Did You Know doesn't dig as deep as the lyrics on this album, and Natalie's Mary does dig deep. Each song on this album takes one emotion, and examines it in the light of the season, to a depth (sometimes a surprisingly dark depth) that may make the casual listener uncomfortable.

But don't listen to the album casually. Allow yourself the luxury of really getting into it. And take time to read the accompanying booklet.

The music, both the composition and performance, are superb. Because it isn't tied to the rhythms of the traditional carols like Silent Night, or the contemporary jingles like Winter Wonderland, the music is as deeply introspective as the lyrics, and the music matches the lyrics in magical ways. Besides that, Sting takes advantage of the opportunity to showcase his musical talent, to do some virtuoso things that you won't hear on commercial radio.

It may be too deep, too dark, for you. Borrow it or sample it before you decide to buy. Don't plan on playing it at a Christmas party. It's not that kind of music. It will kill the party in a hurry. But on a winter's night, when you're home alone or with the one person in the world who understands you, put it on and allow Sting to pull you in to a different kind of Christmas experience.

That Didn't Take Long: McChrystal is Out, Petraeus is In

This morning, President Obama announced that General David Petraeus would be taking General McChrystal's place as the head military guy in Afghanistan by General David Petraeus. General Petraeus did a great job turning the Iraq war around, and had been serving as the head of the U.S. Central Command, which includes Asia and the Middle East. Petraeus will actually be stepping down one level to fill the Afghanistan slot.

David Petraeus is a highly regarded officer and an extremely intelligent person. He has figured out how to work with, or maybe around, all the civilian meddlers and egomaniacs in Washington. This may work out satisfactorily after all.

But I'll bet you good money that no reporter from Rolling Stone will be invited to accompany Petraeus anywhere -- or any other military leader -- ever again.

Keep General McChrystal; fire some of the civilians instead

A Rolling Stone reporter got a chance to interview General Stanley McChrystal, currently (but maybe not for much longer) head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The reporter, Michael Hastings, was supposed to fly home after two days, but then the volcano in Iceland blew its top, and the reporter ended up following McChrystal and his staff across Europe and all the way to Kandahar and back to Washington. The two-day trip turned into, what was it, 28 days? Longer?

(NPR aired a telephone interview with Hastings today. That's where I got those facts from. Hastings sounded a little stressed out -- he lashed out unnecessarily at Michelle Norris, the NPR interviewer. He's back in Kandahar, and I think that maybe he needs to come home.)

The result of spending 28 days with the general and his staff, with his "notebook in one hand and tape recorder in the other," as he said it, was that he saw the general and his staff let their hair down a few times, and it became clear in those unguarded moments that the military leaders in Afghanistan do not have a lot of respect for the civilian leaders in Washington.

Now, we could debate whether that's right or wrong, and whether the military leaders are supposed to, as Oliver North said, "salute smartly and charge up the hill" or whether they're allowed to have (and voice) their own opinions. I don't want to debate the rightness or wrongness of the general's behavior.

Political reality being what it is, he's toast. But firing him would be the stupidest thing those civilians in Washington could do right now. McChrystal has pointed out, without actually saying it, that Afghanistan has out-Vietnamed Vietnam. It's a war run by the civilians in Washington, an appalling number of whom have never held a gun or stood in a uniform. That was one of the big mistakes of Vietnam.

Let the warriors run the war, for Pete's sake. Nobody in the White House right now knows how to fight a war. The president surrounds himself with experts, he says, but they're the wrong kind of experts. There is no Colin Powell, no Norman Schwartzkopf, to provide the perspective of Someone Who's Been There.

McChrystal was absolutely right when, in January, he stood up to Vice President Joseph Biden when Biden wanted to put more UAVs and fewer troops into Afghanistan. And the contempt for the civilian leadership, which unfortunately leaked out during the reporter's stay, and which was also unfortunately published for all the world to see, is a contempt that those civilian leaders have earned.

Would it have been better if McChrystal had enforced the discipline among his staff so that they kept all of that contempt bottled up while the reporter was around? The contempt was real, and to hide it for 28 days would have been dishonest.

If McChrystal is fired for this episode, it will be because he was honest. And once the political leadership of this country starts firing people because of their honesty, we're in trouble.

You may not believe me. You don't have to. But I was right about the banks, I was right about the car companies, and I was right about the post-Nov-2008 Democrats. I'm right about this, too. You'll see.

Postscript: Hastings said (to quote NPR) that he "remembered being shocked by the general's candor and outspokenness during interviews, but he did not anticipate his article would cause the hullabaloo it has." That's baloney. He entitled his article "The Runaway General," indicating that he knew exactly what kind of reaction the article would get. After spending weeks witnessing the honesty of a great man, Hastings resorted to a lie to try and weasel out of taking responsibility for his own words.

Save us from inept politicians and spineless reporters.

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.