Monthly Archive for July, 2006

Page 2 of 2

Yay parenthood - summertime edition

Published on 11 July 2006 in Family and Observations. 2 Comments

summertime

Sleepovers; cool aloe on sunburns; the gentle breeze of a long bike ride; sweet, tart lemonade from a lemonade stand; leaning as far back on the swings as possible, staring at the clouds; violent thunderstorms with gusty winds that make the trees look angry; bathing suits, water sprinklers & wet grass between the toes; the deafening sound of a nearby cicada; skinned knees; scratching mosquito bites; running from the sultry, sweaty outside into the cool of the basement; the sharp smell of fresh-cracked peppercorns sprinkled on the hot charcoal; how good it feels to step into the soft grass after walking barefoot on the blazing heat of the patio brick; the smell of the lilac bush in May, and the lavender in July; the wonderful hot juice from a ripe tomato; corn so sweet your hands get sticky from shucking it; still playing tag at 9 o’clock; fireflies in jars; taking long afternoon naps in front of an oscillating fan; and the Milky Way stretching overhead like the backbone of the night.

< - Home

Can’t we all just get along?

Published on 11 July 2006 in Humor. 1 Comment

Non-racist dogs

♬ ♩ eboneeee and ♪ ivoreeee♫ ♩

UPDATE:
… or maybe we can’t, after all. (Oh yes, I went there.)

monkeyShakesHead
Tsk, tsk, tsk.

< - Home

Flare, RoboHelp, and FrameMaker (updated)

Published on 10 July 2006 in Visual/Technical Communication. 8 Comments

Originally posted 6 July 2006, see below for 10 July update

Ever since I posted the article on the new toys from MadCap (and it was linked from MadCap’s press center- thanks, guys, I was honored) - I’ve been getting lots of “what about Adobe and RoboHelp?” feedback. If you haven’t heard, Adobe has entered damage control mode over the RoboHelp (RH) fiasco.

At the WinWriters UA conference a couple of months ago, Adobe tried mending some fences by promising renewed dedication to RH. Joe Welinske has written a very comprehensive article that summarizes Adobe’s commitment to RH development via an interview with Adobe’s Michael Hu.

I urge you to read that article, and then read this rebuttal, written by Mike Hamilton of MadCap.

As Hamilton points out, parts of the interview with Hu are puzzling. For instance, he is quoted as saying:

Hu: Now we are reallocating resources to products like FrameMaker that have been under resourced. Also, the support for XML is a big feature of FrameMaker that was a bit ahead of its time. We waited for the XML market to mature and become popular. Technical publications is where the promise of XML will be greatly realized. We’ve increased resources on FrameMaker significantly.

…which is great news (even if it’s a complete contradiction of everything leaked from Adobe for the past five years). However, later in the interview, Hu is asked about Frame’s role in RH:

JW: Macromedia shelved the RoboHelp for FrameMaker product in 2004. Since you own FrameMaker it would seem to be a natural candidate to be revived.

Hu: We continue to endorse the products from Quadralay as the best solution for FrameMaker users. Quadralay also has excellent consulting support and training. That being said, Adobe will respond to customer needs and will evaluate the opportunity for RoboHelp for FrameMaker.

So… it seems to me that Adobe has promised to continue development of RH, while still really recommending the FrameMaker/Quadralay route to online documentation. It’s puzzling. I also wonder what Quadralay thinks about Adobe’s RH plans.

Another interesting part of the interview:

Hu: We have a company-wide pool of knowledge for browser support at Adobe. It is something we deal with all the time and in a timely fashion. The development team is aware of IE 7 issues. There is definitely a learning curve, but we have had a team involved with RoboHelp since acquisition. We are confident we can deliver a new release by applying a lot of resources to it.

Does it seem odd to hear that Adobe is “applying a lot of resources” to IE7, when RH is currently breaking left and right in IE6, and spotty in Firefox, Safari, and Opera?

Finally, Hu takes a swipe at the folks over at MadCap:

Hu: We have a wealth of knowledge about RoboHelp. We aren’t starting from scratch and trying to figure out what to build first. Looking at Flare, you need to know what you are investing in. Adobe is a brand users know they can trust. Migrating to another tool also affects productivity and requires a lot of new training.

…to which Mike Hamilton responds (edits and emphasis mine):

Adobe seems to be trying to push the idea that MadCap can’t be trusted since we are “new guys� without a track record… the way that I see it they are the new guys… It was the old RoboHelp team that were the innovators in this industry. It was the RoboHelp team that introduced the technologies and concepts [in the tools]… Now the core of that very team that provided all of that innovation is now at MadCap Software. No, it is the Adobe folks that need to prove something here… It is a bit like a wealthy aristocrat buying Rembrandt’s paint pots at an auction and then claiming that because he has Rembrandt’s paint pots he will be able to now create new Rembrandt masterpieces. It is not the paints that are important, it is the artist that matters, and in this case the artists are here at MadCap Software. Adobe has simply purchased the old RoboHelp paint pots.

As a long-time loyal RH user, and one who has converted to Flare, I look forward to seeing how this will all play out. It will be interesting to see what Adobe can bring to the table, with it’s near-bottomless resources. If nothing else, a little healthy competition could only benefit users.

Credit & copyright of quoted content: Joe Welinske, WritersUA, and Mike Hamilton, MadCap


UPDATE:


10 July 2006
Do actions speak louder than words?
Reports are starting to surface that RH’s activation servers are down, and Adobe/Macromedia tech support is not able to provide any help. One user complained:

In fact, I just installed RoboHelp after reformatting my hard drive and cannot activate RoboHelp because their activation server is down. When I called them to ask how long it would be down, they told me they could give me no answer. I tried asking for a time frame: a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, a few months? Neither of the tech reps I talked to would give me any time frame…

…the people I talked to seemed to know nothing about RoboHelp other than its title and the fact that they didn’t know when the activation server would be up again. Honestly, I don’t know how much they knew about RoboHelp, but the impression they gave me was one of complete incompetence, and I couldn’t get them to transfer me to someone more knowledgeable.

It should be noted that former RH developers, now at MadCap, predicted last year that this very issue would occur. That prediction was included in part one of my UX&A presentation series (Note the last bullet):

Slide from UX&A presentation - part one
Click to embiggenate

Time will tell how serious Adobe is about RH.

UPDATE
11 July 2006

Jason Eberwein of Adobe has reported that Adobe has fixed the RH activation server issues. Good news, and fast work, too!

< - Home

Men of the Scarlet and Gray

Published on 6 July 2006 in Sports. 0 Comments

sportsMonkey

As you may have surmised by now, theMonkey is a rather large fan of tOSU football Buckeyes. Therefore, it was a great honor to be approached by my friend, el Kaiser, and invited to be a regular writer for his new sports blog.

I present to you: Men of the Scarlet and Gray.

MotSaG is an Ohio-themed sports site, and will feature articles and information on amateur and professional athletic sports that occur anywhere from “toward the Lake” (Erie - north) to “toward the River” (the Ohio - south).

Much of the content will be tOSU-centric, hence the blog’s name. “Men of the Scarlet and Gray” is a line from the legendary Buckeye Battle Cry, the most famous and renowned fight song in Division I-A football.

So… if you:

  • know what a real buckeye is, and have a recipe for candy ones
  • think all professional football teams should wear orange
  • subscribe to a newspaper that covers national/international news on one page while devoting twelve pages to sports
  • can pronounce “Olentangy,” “Bellefontaine,” “Cuyahoga,” and “Tuscarawas”
  • know what should be “knee-high by July”
  • understand the following sentence: “Ha-ha, ol’ Sweater Vest is 4-1 against four-loss-Lloyd”
  • know that the best brats are boiled in beer until 75% done, then finished over an open flame
  • are interested in any sports that take place in cities or communities close to I-71 and/or State Route 3…

then stop on over to MotSaG. My moniker over there is (what else?)sportsMonkey.

In the meantime, enjoy this video of the best player in college football, and allow yourself to get excited about the ’06 season.

< - Home

A series of tubes

Published on 5 July 2006 in Humor. 0 Comments

Tube's full
Oops… the interweb tubes are full of monkeys

You may have noticed that I don’t do political content here at monkeyPi. If that’s your thing, jump over to Technorati and you’ll find thousands of political blogs.

HOWEVER, this is (largely) a humor blog, and therefore I couldn’t pass on the opportunity to post this hilarious analysis of how the Internet works, according to the distinguished congressperson from Alaska:

There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.

We aren’t earning anything by going on that internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to discriminate against those people.

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says “No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet”. No, I’m not finished. I want people to understand my position, I’m not going to take a lot of time.

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.

Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it’s not using what consumers use every day.

It’s not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.

The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a viloation of net neutraility that hits you and me.

‘Nuff said.

Link

< - Home

UX lecture - part three

Published on 4 July 2006 in Visual/Technical Communication. 3 Comments

Here is part three of my UX&A lecture series. This presentation covers the basics of andragogy, the science of communicating information to adult learners.

Click on the title slide below to launch the presentation.


(Note: you will need the Flash plugin to view the presentation.)

View part one and part two of the series, which discuss current/future UX&A trends and XML, respectively.

< - Home

What’s Up for July 2006

Published on 2 July 2006 in Astronomy. 2 Comments

Early summer evenings don’t offer much in terms of pristine, dark skies. The late sunsets, long twilights, and hungry mosquitoes scheme to prevent us from having a relaxing evening underneath the stars.

However, these few weeks offer an excellent opportunity to observe the marvels present in our own neighborhood. So grab the bug spray, a lawn chair, and your telescope (or decent pair of binoculars), and spend the month getting re-acquainted with your neighbors in the solar-system.

Continue reading ‘What’s Up for July 2006′