How to find answers for things

Blog - The Writer's Life

Written by Sofie
Tuesday, 31 January 2012 00:00

 

I have a confession to make: it positively drives me up the wall when people continually ask me questions or to fix something or do something that they could easily do themselves if they'd looked it up on google. With the exception of my mother (because she's my mother, she has inbuilt biological overrides on my irritation circuits), people who constantly and repeatedly need me to hold their hand or tell them how to do very simple things make serious dents in my estimation of their intelligence. People who aren't prepared to think for themselves and try to find their own answers first* do not get a large slice of my patience.

* Caveat: people who come to me already having tried and failed to find an answer for themselves get endless patience. Failing is not a problem. Failing to try is.

Even more flabberghasting are the people who come to writing masterclasses who clearly haven't done the slightest bit of research about their intended profession. They've no idea what agents are, how copyright works, how to send their book to a publisher. I genuinely do not understand how someone could consider going in to a certain field or profession and not at least do some cursory research on it. How could you sit there, knowing your own ignorance on something that's important to you, and not attempt to rectify it?

I thought it was mostly the previous generation's aversion to the internet - and I can understand that. I remember the days before mobile phones and internet (just), and the technological world moves faster and faster each year. If you weren't born with wifi embedded in your skull like generation Y it can be very hard to keep up, and turning to a blank webpage that's supposed to magically answer your question is not a natural instinct. But I've been dealing with people of my generation and younger lately who do this all the time. We're building something with software X, and every ten minutes they'll come and ask me how to do task A, B, C or F with it. And I look at them and think what the hell do you do when you're by yourself and you want to know something?

Unfortunately I'm technically their manager, so it's not very professional for me to use the snarky answer I used to give my students: google is your friend. But I wish I could. Somewhere along the way, we're forgetting to teach people to think for themselves, and we've failed completely to teach them that they should.

I have observered however that there's a skill to googling things. There must be, because I've watched parents, friends, bosses, minions and students consistently fail to find anything useful on google, and quite often come up with the least reputable site results possible. So I thought if I explained a little of how the magic ouiji page works, people would find it easier to help themselves when they need answers. 

How to use google more effectively

There are billions of web pages out there. Some of them have useful information, some of them have propoganda, some of them have porn, gambling and cheap drug sales.  They're all out there, like a houses in an enormous city. 

Google has a phone directory for the city - they've sent out thousands of little robots (called 'web spiders') that look at each and every webpage and record what's in it. They don't record the whole webpage, because a map that's as big as the city it's mapping would be useless. Instead, they look at what words appear commonly in the text (ignoring things like 'the, an, a' etc) and use that to determine what the page is 'about'. They summarise each page by creating a little spreadsheet of each non-structural word and its frequency. (To those in the know: I know I'm oversimplifying, the finer detail really isn't the point, here.)

So google has a giant directory that tells it what each page is 'about'. When you type in a search query, it matches up the words in your query with its directory and tries to find the pages that have the words you used. Now, there's a little bit of extra processing - for example, words like 'write', 'writing', 'writer' and 'written' are so similar semantically that google considers them to be effectively the same word, and queries for 'writing' often return results for writers, written or write. It also does a little bit of magic to weed out pages that aren't useful (for example, pages that just copy other websites, pages that list lots of keywords without any actual content, etc), pages that haven't been updated in ten years, and pages that nobody links to (implying they're not a respected resource) but the end result is a list of pages that contain words from your search query. Any pages that have your search query phrase - that is, the words in the exact order you wrote them - will be given priority. 

Armed with this knowledge, it's much easier to write queries that will return useful results: you need to think not from the point of view of your question, but from the point of view of the answer you're looking for.  For a page to be (probably) useful to you, what words does it need to contain - ie, what is it talking about? How should that be phrased?

For example, a while ago I had a large number of PDF documents that needed to be refactored, paginated, sectioned and combined into one document. As I'm already skilled in InDesign, I was hoping I could use it to do the job, but I wasn't sure if InDesign could handle PDFs in the right way to do that. If I imagined the page I wanted as an answer, the most important words it would have had would be: PDF, InDesign, Edit, and probably also page numbers. So that's the start of my query.

However, I also knew that InDesign could be used to add page numbers to InDesign files, and this was most likely a more common procedure (meaning more web pages would be talking about that than talking about editing PDF files). Google can't really do semantics - it's purely a word-match and numbers game. Which means that if I added the term 'page numbers' to my query, because of the sheer numbers I'd be more likely to get pages talking about creating PDFs from InDesign files (after adding page numbers) than editing PDFs directly. A different semantic notion from the one I wanted, and one that google can't  separate intelligently - we have to use the right search combination to do it ourselves. So - better to keep it to PDF, Edit and InDesign.

This can be a difficult balancing act, especially if you're searching for something that you're not very knowledgable on. The general rule is that if a search term is making the query more specific and narrow (for example, from 'PDF' to 'Edit PDF' - that's more specific about PDFs) then it's probably going to be helpful. But if it's looking for related, but not more specific information (editing and adding page numbers are related concepts, but not necessarily more specific - as they mean very similar things, you'd use one or the other, but not both) then the term may actually send the query off in the wrong direction. It's best to use as few search terms as possible, and choose them carefully. 

Think of it like a venn diagram: using two circles that overlap a little is useful. But if you're using two circles where one circle is completely inside the other, then one of those circles isn't useful.

It generally works better if you can construct a phrase that you'd like to see in the answer (see above re: google gives priority to exact phrase matches)  - like "How to edit PDF files with InDesign", or "Can I edit PDF files in InDesign". If you have a specific how-to, or can-I question, posing the query as a question will almost certainly get you decent results, because of the how-to wikis and question-answer sites out there. 

It does take practise, but with time you'll learn intuitively what makes for a good search query and what doesn't. And then you're no longer reliant on your son / husband / daughter / wife / neighbour's kid for how to do things or fix things. Just don't tell everyone else that you know how to do it, or they'll all start coming to you.

Apparently you can copyright ideas

Blog - The Author Business

Written by Sofie
Monday, 30 January 2012 00:00

 

The old standard used to be that you couldn't copyright an idea, only the expression of an idea. So while I can't create a series about a school-aged wizard called Harry and his fight against the Dark Lord in a wizard school called Hogwarts, there's nothing stopping me from creating a series about a school of wizardry with some plucky young students who defeat evil magic by being brave, loyal, and generally Doing The Right Thing. This is something that artists of all kinds of survived on since the creation of copyright - similarity is fine as long as the actual works were created independently and originally.

That all just went out the window with one disastrous (and I feel the urge to say: idiotic) ruling by a judge in the UK: that works that are similar do infringe on copyright, even if the creation is wholly independent.

There was an original photograph of an iconic red london bus against a greyed-out london landmark. And then, someone else went and took another, very similar photograph at the same landmark, from a different angle, and greyed out the background in the same way. Same concept, two (similar) executions. The judge ruled that the second photograph was infringing the first as a derivative work, despite evidence presented that photos of red london buses on greyed out london landmarks are actually extremely common and worse, despite the fact that copyright is not about concept.

Taking a photo of a red bus at a london landmark and greying out everything but the bus - that's an idea. Other people can take as many photos of red buses with greyed out backgrounds as they want without infringing your copyright - what they can't do  is take your original photograph and (for example) invert the colours. That would be a derivative work. A similar execution of the same concept is not violating copyright.

Copyright is on the expression of a concept - the words you write, the picture you paint, the photograph you take, the notes you compose. A patent is what protects an idea - a method of doing something, for example. Copyright is automatic, patents have to be applied for, with fees and assessment of the validity of the patent taking many months. And there's a reason for that - because we've always recognised that awarding ownership of an idea is very dangerous - and in the case of culture and art, downright idiotic. Take this to its logical conclusion, and we can't have any more murder mysteries, romances, thrillers, political satires, science fiction, literature, or anything else that has already been done in some way, shape or form, which is pretty much everything, because it will violate somebody's copyright somewhere. Cory Doctorow has more to say on that notion.

I'm not kidding. If this is upheld, the legal ramifications are pretty much: no more art.

Building momentum

Blog - The Writer's Life

Written by Sofie
Tuesday, 24 January 2012 00:00

This week (well, last week) I tried to do the first 'serious' writing I've done in many months. Might even be over a year, I'm not sure of that - life very much got in the way last year with some huge events and changes. I've written short stories to hand to my writing groups for critique, but all other work has been planning and editing and plotting and scening; it feels like I haven't actually written in a long time.

And I'm quite rusty. Not in the "everything that I type is complete rubbish" way. I'm not feeling anything particular about the words on the screen (perhaps my brain has accepted that they'll probably change and they don't need to be perfect right now. Or perhaps it'll just start later down the track.) Just in getting myself to actually sit in the chair and type - and not sit in the chair and daydream, sit in the chair and browse the internet, sit in the chair and do something else - is a challenge. Most of the days when I was supposed to write, I didn't. And I wasn't even working on other projects, I was just moodling around. I didn't feel like doing it or any other project.

Creativity has natural cycles - highs when you're inspired by the idea and can't wait to create it, and lows when nothing particularly interests you, and you'd rather flop on the couch with a book or a movie, or navel-gaze out the window. If you can learn what triggers them, so much the better, but they're not always predictable or controllable. Sometimes you just have to go through them, and trust that your energy and inspiration will return.

 When I read Atchity's A Writer's Time, years ago, something stuck securely with me - starting things is always the hardest moment and takes much longer proportionally than the rest of the work. You need to build the momentum in the project that'll keep you going through the low areas that come with the creative process. And if you try to start something during a low time, which I seem to have done, it's all the more difficult to build that.

I don't think there's a magic secret here. If you know how to inspire your own creativity, you can possibly trick your brain out of it, but a lot of the time when we're in a low, we don't necessarily want to do that: creative highs take a lot of energy, and the low periods might well be required recovery time. But that doesn't mean you can't build momentum - you just have to accept that it's going to be slower, and accept what results you can achieve. Nibble away at your work and rewards yourself for small achievements. That's my plan, anyway.

iBooks Author EULA scandal

Blog - The Author Business

Written by Sofie
Monday, 23 January 2012 00:00

 

You can use iBooks Author to create app-books for the iPad with pictures, disability access, movies, etc (they're aiming mostly at textbooks, here). They're aiming to make the creation of "enhanced ebook" apps extremely easy, most likely in an attempt to combat amazon and the kindle brigade. You can sell the resultant app on the appstore, giving Apple it's customary cut of the profits, or you can give it away free. All good so far, and good news for authors looking for a new product line.

What people are crying about is the caveat: that you can't sell that app anywhere else but the iTunes store.

There seems to be a lot of ignorance flying around here, really. This sounds like a terrible precedent - a software EULA (that's the thing you click "I agree" to when you install some software) is controlling what people can and cannot do not only with the program itself, but with the output of what they create with it. Ohnoes! The world is doomed! No other software on the planet does this, this is like Microsoft Word telling you you can only sell your short stories to Microsoft!

Can you see my sarcasm? I certainly hope so.

It isn't a precedent at all. I can easily think of five pieces of software - creative software - sitting on my computer right now that forbid me from directly selling any output I can create. For example, a cartography program I have that forbids me from selling maps I create with it. They can be included in books or other works, but I can't sell just the maps themselves. Other software packages such as the Adobe Creative Suite have clauses that prevent you using them for commercial purposes if you only paid for the educational license. Icons and graphics I occasionally buy from places like iStockPhoto often come with licenses that allow me to do whatever I want with the image provided I don't sell anything that results from that. Simulation products (like a solar-system simulator) forbid me from using the resultant calculations or simulations or video for any commercial purposes.

This isn't anything new. And it isn't even anything particularly inconvenient: unless the iPad jailbroken, which isn't common, the only way you can put apps on an iPad is through the iTunes store. So you can't take the resultant app you've created and sell it in other places but there really isn't anywhere else you could sell it anyway. This software only creates apps that run on iPads. It can't create things to run on the Galaxy Tab, or the Motorolla Zoom, or the Kindle Fire. It can generate PDFs of the book, but they've never been the ebook format of choice anyway. So the rights they're "taking away" from you aren't really ones you could have exercised anyway, and if you really want to exercise them, all you need to do is this: use something else to create the ebook.

This isn't a rule that applies to all books sold through the iTunes store. It's a rule that applies specifically and only to books created using this free app. Don't like it? Make your app the old fashioned way, or hire someone to make it for you.

Then there's a lot of people gabbling about how this is a copyrights grab, which is nonsense - Apple is limiting the rights to the version of your content that you created with their product. The limitation is tied to the actual final product created with the software and nothing else. They have no claim whatsoever to the original content, and no argument if you create enhanced ebooks for android and kindle devices and sell those - you just can't use their software to do so (and the software isn't capable of that anyway). The claim ends with the actual final product - which is just like the publishing world anway. When the rights to a novel revert to an author, that author can't just order another print run using the publisher's typography, layout and cover - they have to get it typeset again, and get a new cover for it. They don't get the rights to the final product that their publisher made; only to the (edited, unless the contract is really miserly) content that was used to create it in the first place - the manuscript.

Then there's the argument that everything sold through the Apple store is vetted by apple - you may spend months creating something only to have it rejected by them, and then have no way to sell it. Well, pardon me, but if you're going to spend all that time working on it and not even investigate a way to create a similar product for the other markets (particularly when some of those markets are far larger and more successful selling this kind of product) then it's your own damn fault. Add to that that Apple doesn't typically reject things for no reason: they'll tell you why it didn't meet the standards, and you can resubmit. That process is pretty much there to keep out porn, malware and things that would undercut Apple's own products (and books are unlikely to fall under that category).

Really, this sounds like a lot of crying from people who don't spend all that much time with new software. I'm not even going to go into the complaint that it's in the EULA and not in a separate agreement. The EULA is where this kind of agreement should be. The End User License Agreement is there to stipulate, amongst other things, what you can and can't do with this software. If you don't agree after downloading the software, then don't install the damn thing. That goes for any new software you download. Complaining that you don't get to find out about this before you download it is just, well, naive. "You don't know about the agreement until after you've committed to the software" - it's a free app. That's really not much of a committment. Download more software and learn how that world works, because this isn't anything new.

Tutorials 101: How to write a tutorial

Blog - Technical Writing

Written by Sofie
Tuesday, 17 January 2012 00:00

Well, this risks getting terribly meta, doesn't it - a tute on writing tutes. But I've been teaching myself Dojo lately (it's a javascript toolkit. Just nod and smile, there won't be questions), trying to combine a book that's about six versions behind with web tutorials that are one version behind, and I've come to a rather disappointing conclusion: very few people on the internet know how to write a good tutorial. 

I suppose that's reassurance that my day job has a real purpose, but it's rather disappointing that the basic fundamentals of education and communicating information are lacking in so many otherwise-clearly-very-intelligent people. The way our current online-society is going, it should really be something taught in fundamental education: communicating your ideas clearly and concisely, how to think from the point of view of someone who knows nothing about what you're teaching them.

So here's my Tutorial Writing 101: Entertaining Subtitle. (I'd like to claim that as being all meta, but really I couldn't think of a good subtitle that didn't involve swearwords. It's been that kind of morning.) In the interest of following my own advice (below), to get the most out of this tutorial you need to have:

• a high-school level grasp of lanauge, (your language of choice, and English in order to read this. Duh.)
• an ability to empathise with people who know less than you (not sympathise. Emphathise. As in, put yourself in their shoes.)
• basic language and concept analysis skills
• something you want to write a tutorial about. 

Read more: Tutorials 101: How to write a tutorial