I’ve spent the past 2 weeks on and off reading ‘Bugs in Writing’ and have definitely learned about some mistakes to avoid in writing. In order to fix these mistakes, it is best to do a lot of your own writing so you can find them and eliminate them. I will try to write a brief note about some common mistakes here. I haven’t asked the author for permission, so I will try to do it here in a very general and concise manner.

#1. Avoid using passive voice. Passive voice just means that when you say something about the world or some event that happened, make sure you identify ‘who or what’ was involved. The ‘who or what’ is commonly referred to as an agent.

For example,

Wrong:
The tea was made.
The program was written.
The computer was dropped.

Correct:
Mark made the tea.
Jane wrote this computer program.
Christopher dropped the computer.

#2. Speak directly to your reader. Never address your audience as the reader or refer to yourself as the author. You should speak directly to your reader. You should refer to her as you. If you are the sole author of a book, use I and if you have co-authors, use we. In addition, avoid using one, as in One should realize … or One has written.

#3. So, So that and Such that. Just remember the following:

So means therefore
So that means in order that
Such that means in such a way that

#4. Two or more. Use the terms between, each other, either, and a couple to refer to precisely two entities; and you should use among, one another, any one of, and several to refer to more than two entities.

I will add some more tips later on, but probably not many. The problem is that I haven’t gotten permission from the author and several of the tips have examples that are best quoted verbatim from the book.

I know I haven’t updated this blog for a while … in fact I frequently abandon it for a few months while I carry on with life’s struggles. Keeping up with my job, finding time to spend with my beautiful wife, all the while attempting to keep current with the fast pace of technology growth.

Starting today, I will try and change that. You see, in order to motivate myself to keep this blog updated I have decided to set myself a goal and complete it. I will keep updating this blog not only with my progress, but will also write about what I have learned as I go along.

So my first goal will be ‘to improve my writing skills’. I have enjoyed writing stuff for a long time now and friends have occasionally told me that ‘you could be a really good writer’. Well I’ve finally decided I should give it a shot.

To be honest, I’ve never been good at grammar, and people find that hard to believe. I’ve simply developed a good ear for what ’sounds right’ based on my perusal of several newspapers, magazines, novels and books over the years. Learning a lot of vocabulary while preparing for my SATs and reading ‘lots’ has really helped.

The first book I’m going to try and read and understand is going to be Bugs in Writing, which I bought several years ago, but never got around to reading. It is written mainly for people who come from a scientific or technical background and hence is perfectly suited for someone like me. Each chapter aims to analyse and fix a single ‘problem’ and you can read each chapter in whatever order you like.

With that, I bid you farewell. I believe my next post is going to be about ‘passive/active voice’. Exciting times indeed

Fedora 7 is released!: I really liked the last Fedora release, but I believe it was slightly plagued by problems with some of it’s package management utilities. I have already installed this release and am quite impressed. Wireless now works with WPA out of the box and their new re-spinning feature is something I will try out someday.

XML Parser benchmarks: I have always had my own suspicions of which XML parser model would be faster (Sax or StaX), but I’m glad to see this benchmark done by the O’Reilly folks.

Fear and loathing at Cupertino: Jeremy Allison’s terrible experience while trying to prepare a talk for his Apple WWDC presentation. Jeremy works on Samba, along with Tridge, who they all call “the smartest man in Australia” Jeremy works at Google now. Smart man.

We have just come back from a brilliant trip to Switzerland! The weather was awesome throughout our trip. We spent most of the time in Lucerne, where we stayed at the Hotel Drei Koenig. On our first day we decided to wander around Lucerne’s Old Town and see as much of it as possible. We ended up quite dreadfully tired and in the evening we just went back to the hotel and simply crashed.

We went on a trip to Mount Titlis the next day. Mount Titlis is one of the highest mountains in Switzerland, at 10,000 feet. I must admit to feeling quite terrified at that height. I was feeling quite disorientated.

The next day we made a long hiking trip up Mount Rigi-Kulm. To get to the start of the hiking point, you have to take a cruise along the river, then a trip up the mountains by train, before you get to your starting point. This is the day of our trip which I think we enjoyed the most.

We spent the rest of the trip in and around Lucerne and on the last day we made a day trip to Zurich. This allowed us to catch our flight straight from Zurich Airport back to London. All in all, a wonderful and highly recommended to anyone interested

Wow, I finally passed my driving test about after 3 or 4 tries! It is quite difficult to pass in this country, they can fail you for very simple mistakes like forgetting to turn your indicators off when stopping or taking off.

In any case, I’m glad I finally passed, now I need to learn about cars and what to buy, etc. I’ve just never been into cars, but I feel I might become an avid car enthusiast. I do like to tinker with technical things, the more geeky the better

I helped out yesterday at the Greater London Linux Group’s meeting, held at my old alma mater, the University of Westminster in New Cavendish street. It was a blast going back after so many years, I met one of my best teachers, Sean Tohill who always had an open mind and a keen intellect. The whole event was organised by Simon Morris.
A lot more people than we had anticipated turned up for this meet! There were easily more than 100 people that showed up. Simon had installed SLED 10 on several desktops there and I got Debian running VLC on a big projector screen, playing a movie in a continuous loop.

A few people, including me, volunteered to give short presentations about certain aspects of SLED, and I was giving a short talk and demo of XGL under SLED. I demoed it to about 20 people and they were all quite impressed with it. Along they way I managed to help out several people with their linux problems.

I absolutely loved this meetup and I hope I can attend many more in the future. There are more details and pictures here.

The motherboard on my server died 2 weeks ago and it’s taken me this long to find a replacement and get the server up and running again. A benefit of changing the motherboard is that now the server is even more quieter than before! It’s all because I took more time to isolate the noisier case fans and to re-install them.

So I haven’t been able to blog for 2 weeks and *so* many things have happened. narf and blanca finally managed to get Windows XP running on a Mac! This is awesome news, especially after disappointing news a while back that Vista will not support EFI either. It seems they have managed to emulate a regular BIOS for the XP on Mac competition. Soon after the announcement, Leo Laporte did a great segment for MacBreak where they install XP on a Mac Mini and that’s the first place where I saw it actually running. A lot of people can now dual-boot their new Intel Macs and have a choice of XP or OSX (and even Linux!). I’ve never seen such a versatile machine! These are interesting times indeed.

We just spent a lovely few days in Shakespeare Country. We stayed at the Ambleside guest house and also managed to visit Warwick Castle while we were there.

Stratford-upon-Avon is a lovely small town and we enjoyed several walks through the town centre (it only took about 30 minutes to walk around it). I highly recommend the Bensons and Crabtree and Evelyn cafes there. We ate a lot and had quite a few excellent cream teas. For those who don’t know, English Cream Tea is usually served with scones and Clotted cream (an English specialty), butter and a selection of jams. Lovely stuff
We also went to see a production of The Canterbury Tales Part 2 at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. The performances were quite good, and I left wanting to see the first part but we had to leave the next day. We also spent a lot of time sitting idly by the river next to the theatre, watching the ducks and swans go by. It was a very relaxing experience. We tried to get a river cruise but nobody seemed to be doing any at the time. Perhaps it was too cold at the time.

Nevertheless, we had a great time and we will definitely just go there someday in the summer once again to sit by that lovely serene river and just relax …

As always, I’ve uploaded all the pictures to Flickr.

Yahoo has started a new RSS + SMS service, but reading about it, I’m really not sure what I use I would put it to:
RSS + SMS

As Russ has already mentioned, it’s typical use case is not the elite digerati who subscribes to 500 feeds, it is instead useful if you have a more focused feed (let’s say within a company) and want employees to be alerted to certain critical events. The use cases i’ve thought of so far that might work for me are:

- Sysadmins being texted when there are new updates on a server? This is assuming that whoever provides the updates publishes an RSS feed to go along with it.
- Employees being texted reminders from their Outlook or iCal calendars. A lot of online calendaring apps like Backpack allow you to publish your reminders as RSS feeds so you should be able to get alerts for those.
- Any other scenario where someone needs to stay updated on a certain topic every hour or so. I assume you can configure the Yahoo service to send alerts out only every hour or so, so it sends them in a “batch” format instead of 10 updates per hour. This should help alleviate the 50 updates an hour problem.

The only problem I see is that I’m sure people *already* have ways of doing this stuff. I can easily write a script that checks my server for updates every day and sends me an alert or email about it. Granted, Yahoo’s service is supposed to be free, and SMS will cost me, but still, it’s already been done.

When this comes to the UK (if), I’ll probably configure it to send me an alert about system updates for my servers, etc. If there isn’t an RSS for it, I’ll create it.

A lot of cool stuff has been coming out of Microsoft recently at the PDC. You can watch the webcast of the event here.

Here is a short summary of some of the announcements, linking to a Channel 9 video of each (if possible):

Sparkle - separating visual components and design of an application from the data representation.

Start.com / Gadgets - nice, clean start/home page which can be extended using “gadgets”. and these gadgets can be re-used through inheritance. The windows vista sidebar will also sport gadgets which help people get to commonly used or needed data or tasks.

Microsoft Max - a kind of a cross between iPhoto and iMovie. allows you to create rich interactive photo albums with slick effects and to export these albums so that almost anybody can view them.

LINQ - a really cool idea of trying to remove the impedance mismatch between object and relational databases. From what I have seen, manipulating XML should be easier. It’s all done in C#. Creating and populating objects after using SQL joins should be easier.

WCF or Windows Communication Founcation (formerly Indigo) - Much more than just another web-services framework, it implements a lot of the plumbing that a lot of developers usually have to manage all the way from SOAP to P2P to some other method of app-to-app or pc-to-pc integration. So if you want 2 machines to talk to one another somehow you don’t have to worry too much about the plumbing going on behind all that communication. At least that’s the easiest way I see to summarize it

One the of absolutely coolest things that Jim Allchin showed off was the ability to increase the available memory of a PC running Vista by simply plugging a USB key in. It’s ingenious and I haven’t heard of anyone doing anything like it unless I am mistaken.

WPF/E or Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere. WPF was formerly Avalon, a new way to build rich interactive web / client apps using XML. They showed a very cool Netflix (video rental online) demo that they ran on 4 different machines and it scaled, etc flawlessly: a desktop machine, Media Center PC, Tablet PC and a PDA. Everything being vector based makes this a lot easier. Another cool North Face demo here

A lot more stuff than this has been announced of course but it is good to see at least a few cool things and possibly 1 innovation come out of Microsoft so far! They are pretty gung-ho on security nowadays and let’s hope that Vista finally gets security right (by right I mean a lot better than XP by default). Note that I’m usually *not* very pro-Microsoft, but I do believe in competition, and I hope Apple, Google, Linux et al give Microsoft all they’ve got because it makes things a lot more interesting for the consumer and gives us more choice. That is always a good thing.