Jacques’ Brain Drain

There is a popular thread on the NaNoWriMo forums called “Why not Word”—which covers why people should or shouldn’t use MSWord for writing their November novels. It’s a good discussion, but this is my blog and I get to express my opinions a bit differently and a lot more freely here.

I don’t use MSWord to write because it is supremely unsuitable for the job.

It’s not because I dislike Microsoft as a company, or have a machine which is (for one reason or another) incapable of running word. It’s not because of its poor security record. It’s not because of its instability or its huge memory footprint. It’s not even because of the large vendor lock-in of its file format. These are all important issues, but they aren’t what’s important to me most of the time.

I don’t use MSWord to write because it is supremely unsuitable for the job.
Why? Simple. When I’m writing I need to focus on one thing – turning the ideas in my head into words on a page. This is already a difficult and demanding task. Whether I am doing creative work, or writing documentation I need additional distractions the way a swimsuit model needs an extra 50 pounds – which is to say not at all.

What do I need for writing? I need to be able to defer as many decisions as possible. Am I going to publish on paper or online? If I’m doing PDF, what color should the links be? What font should I use? What size? Single or double spaced? Should I format it for letter paper (US) or A4 (Europe)? What page layout should I use? How many levels of table of contents items should actually go in the TOC? Should the document be structured for the web? Can I get fries with that?

What I need is a way to write without having to worry about answering these questions right away. All of them will need to be answered at some point, but the longer I can put it off, the more information I have to work with and the less ambiguity I have about the requirements. I also need a pleasant GUI that makes it obvious what I’m looking at and how it’s structured so that I don’t have to think about the tool, only the words.

For this reason, I normally write using LyX. LyX is an editor for working with structured documents. Chapters are chapters – not 18 point bold Times New Roman with a leading numeric identifier. I don’t have to pay any attention to the format at all. I type in the words, with chapters, sections, tables and everything else identified by their structure. I tell LyX which lines are the headings (Chapter, Section, Subsection, etc) and the formatting happens automatically. Chapters are numbered automatically. Page references are tracked properly. Footnotes go in the right places. Most importantly, everything stays consistent no matter how much I cut, paste and move things around.

The big payoff from using this approach is that it separates the work of writing and typesetting. Because the document is structured to begin with, I can decide later how the structure should map unto the format. The appearance of everything is controlled by two style files, which can be edited with emacs – meaning that I get full control over the document’s appearance without changing the document itself.

When it comes time to create output, LyX uses the LaTeX typesetting engine. LaTeX only does typesetting. It doesn’t try to do anything else. Unsurprisingly, it does that one thing very well indeed, with clean and legible fonts, kerning, ligatures, automatic hyphenation and all the high end bells and whistles you could possibly want. It will even control placement of pictures and footnotes to produce good looking pages without a lot of manual intervention. When it’s done, I get nice printed output, Postscript, and PDF complete with internal and external hyperlinks, all from the same input – a simple flat ASCII human readable text file.

The only price I pay for this is that if I want to do something unusual, I need to write my own style files. These are plain text files with a few LaTeX command embedded in them. Even though this requires learning LaTeX, it’s well worth it, since I only have to do it once. After it’s been done, I can reuse that work with any other documents I write in the future.

Some would say that it’s possible to do style based editing in Word. Technically they’re correct – It is possible. Fundamentally, however, Word is not built to be used that way. Even if you did work using only style based methods, you still wouldn’t get automatic control of pictures and footnotes, kerning, or any of the other advantages of working with a document editor instead of a word processor. You’re also stuck with a difficult to read binary file format that only a tiny number of tools can work with – instead of a well documented 7 bit flat ascii file that can be handled by many, many different tools.
At the end of the day, it isn’t about prejudice against one company or another – it’s about getting the job done.

I’ve decided, for reasons which will seem odd to almost everyone, to do National Novel Writing Month this year. They just opened the forums today, and everyone there seems to be just bursting with energy and creativity.
I’ve tried writing a novel on my own a couple of times, but I think that I will be successful here where I haven’t been in the past because of the incredible support. The forums are just fantastic, and I think that’s going to make all the difference for me. Well… here’s to NaNo….

I recently received an email bashing an article because it was published in Rolling Stone magazine. It was a political article – the content of which is not important here. What is important is that it was well researched, all the facts were linked to footnotes, and the backing material was open to public scrutiny. Those are all signs of good reporting – good scholarship. Does that mean that the article was correct? No. It doesn’t. It does mean that it’s worth looking into.

On the Internet – the First Amendment gets interesting. Freedom of the press means something different if suddenly everyone has one. It’s scary – because there’s no gatekeeper. There is no-one out there to keep out the blatant and patent falsehoods, and protect people from the effects of those falsehoods. There are also no protections in place to keep people from finding out things that are true, but inconvenient. No protections, that is, but the trifling fact that few people are ever taught how to think, and most people (possibly for that very reason) never learn.

Research is easy. Type a few words into Google. Make a few trips to libraries. Read a few books. Most of the raw “facts” are easy enough to find. The problem is, raw facts are only the first step – the easy part. The painstaking (and painful) part is analysis. Analysis is the detailed work required to determine which facts are true, and which are false – and to give those facts meaning through context. The effort involved in reading between the lines and squinting, trying to find a pattern when you don’t have all the data. Looking at all the information you have, and knowing that some of what you see is true, some is merely false, some is deliberate deception of the part of someone with an agenda.

To make matters worse, the person with the agenda may be four of five steps removed from where you found your information. This means that you not only can’t trust your enemies – you can’t trust your friends either. Any piece of information, no matter where it comes from, may be false – may be based on in incorrect assumption or be the deliberate fabrication of someone with an ax to grind. What’s worse? So might this article.

Okay. Having said that, how do you tell truth from fiction? There are two really powerful tools for this job. The first is formal logic. The second is the scientific method. Formal logic is the premier tool for avoiding fuzzy thinking and misplaced assumptions. The scientific method is the best tool currently known for separating truth from fiction. They are designed to work together.

Formal logic and the scientific method are almost universally hated. Most religions want nothing to do with them. Politicians don’t like them at all. In fact, even in education they are given little more than lip service. Religion and politics ask for faith and trust. Logic and science ask for doubt. At least doubt is honest.

How do I know what is true? I don’t. You’ll hear me speak of “fairly certain”. You’ll see me dance with “almost sure”. I reserve the right to be wrong. I’m guessing. Why should anyone believe me? Don’t. Go check it out for yourself. Maybe I’m lying. Worse – I might be telling the truth.

Homework: What are formal logic and the scientific method? What is falsifiability, and why is it important? It has been said that questions are more important than answers. How could that be true? Name at least one way that it it false.

Bonus Questions: What’s the origin of this essay’s title? What recent Rolling Stone article is the most likely candidate for pushing my buttons? Why?

I installed a new site on one of my boxes using textpattern on Ubuntu 5.10. Because I routinely forget things, I figured I’d pastebomb my notes here so that I could find them again. Isn’t Google great….

Notes Follow

After a great deal of looking, I think I finally found a nearly perfect combination of software for web-based chat. In some ways it’s a bit of a throwback, but mostly, it’s really clean and user friendly.
On the back end, I installed the ejabberd XMPP/Jabber server. This beast is great. It required minimal work to get it installed on a Ubuntu or Debian box, had its owd distributed database, and was cluster ready if I need it later.In addition, it uses a web based admin interface which can make life easier when it comes time to do routine maintenance. On top of that, it takes very little in the way of server resources – which is very good.

On the front end, I’m using JWChat, a web based Jabber client. First, it’s a full Jabber client, with most of the bells and whistles. Second, it doesn’t use PHP, Java, or anything else on the server side. The only thing it needed was a bit of mod_proxy configuration to allow access to the http polling interface of ejabberd. After that, it uses AJAX and XML-HTTP request to do all the real work on the client side. While the server load is higher than you would get with a full-client setup, the administration is easier. In the end, it’s probably a wash. Its big advantage, though, is that it’s available from anybody’s borrowed PC with a web browser. It also works great in Internet cafe type setups.