Symphony Strikes a Weak Chord

The following review has appeared in LINUX For You earlier.

IBM Lotus Symphony gives the OOo UI an interesting makeover, but has miles to go before it can take on the big boys in the office suite segment.

September marked the entry of a new kid on the office suite block; and with Big Blue backing it with full gusto, no ordinary kid it was. IBM Lotus Symphony, named after a defunct software suite of yore, is a collection of three applications—a word processor (Symphony Documents), a presentation tool (Symphony Presentations) and a spreadsheet tool (Symphony Spreadsheets). Notably absent from the current beta edition are tools for editing equations, creating diagrams and building databases.

Available for Windows and Linux, Symphony draws heavily from other FOSS projects—with its office components built atop code from OpenOffice 1.1.4, and core shell based upon the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. In fact, some of the early criticism that the suite has attracted relates to the fact that it is based on OOo code obsolete by three years. However, true to IBM’s spirit, it brings in a fresh lease of innovation on many fronts—most notably, a highly-usable interface that is bound to win admirers.

User Interface

Symphony seems an apt name for the suite when one observes the degree to which its components are integrated. When you fire up any of its applications from the main OS menu (Fedora Core 7, in my case), all that will greet you for the first few moments is a minimalist menu-bar, and the telling IBM logo in the middle of a pleasing blue expanse. Symphony then loads a blank document of the type you requested—for instance, a spreadsheet if you clicked on Symphony Spreadsheets.

Unlike MS Word, the suite gives you an option to work simultaneously with spreadsheets, presentations and word-processing documents. All active documents are arranged neatly as tabs—an idea borrowed from tabbed Web browsers like Firefox and Opera, and definitely a first for an office suite. Symphony can even open hyperlinks from active files as separate tabs—without launching an external Web browser.

This approach (although not new, since OOo has incorporated it to a lesser extent for quite some time) caters well to the Internet age, where one is incessantly working across different forms of information—for instance, converting a lengthy proposal into a crisp presentation that would appeal to the top management.

The context-sensitive sidebar  is another interesting UI feature in Symphony that keeps the space below the menu-bar uncluttered. The sidebar displays the attributes of the active element for you to change them. For instance, when you are typing content into Symphony Documents, the sidebar displays text attributes such as the current font, its size and effects such as position, strikethrough and text colour. On the other hand, when you edit a spreadsheet, the sidebar displays the text and cell attributes instead.

On the whole, the user interface of Symphony is polished and intuitive. The learning curve will be minimal if you are familiar with MS Word or OOo, and you’ll find most of the common options accessible readily.

Resource Crunch

The system requirements for installing Symphony are pretty steep compared to those for OOo or even MS Office 2007. Wikipedia reports the minimum prerequisites for installing the suite as 512 MB of RAM and 540 MB of hard-disk space. On my modest P4 laptop with 256 MB of RAM, Symphony was painfully slow, and thus hardly of any practical use. To add to my woes, it would crash every now and then, displaying elaborate Java error messages. Even on my friend’s brand-new PC with a gigabyte of RAM, its performance was far from stellar.

The high firepower that Symphony demands makes me wonder what the target user-base for the suite is. It doesn’t have enough applications in its kitty to meet the requirements of the office user, and all home users cannot be expected to have the latest, high-end hardware that it fancies.

Installation

Symphony for Linux can be downloaded as a distro-independent binary. While I had expected a no-hiccup installation, the process did pose a few minor challenges. For one, SELinux on my Fedora Core 7 machine prevented me from launching the setup wizard graphically. Even after I had disabled SELinux, the setup wizard just wouldn’t launch in the graphical mode. Finally, I had to settle for a text-only install with SELinux disabled.

While installation in the text-only mode is a simple affair for anybody even remotely familiar with the Linux command-line, for a newbie it may prove to be a major deterrent.

Features and interoperability

The suite offers roughly the same features as OpenOffice.org. In fact, an e-week.com news-item goes to the extent of saying the “IBM’s Lotus Symphony is OpenOffice in Eclipse Clothing.”

Coming to the components, Symphony Documents is a full-featured word-processor, and sports an intuitive interface that will help you design well-structured documents with ease. Symphony Spreadsheets is loaded too, and offers a host of features to represent information graphically as charts and graphs. I had a bit of trouble picking up momentum with Presentations, since its interface seemed too bare-bones. I had to refer to the Symphony help system on many occasions—something that high-flying executives may not have the time, or patience, for.

Like OpenOffice, Symphony offers an in-built “Export to PDF” functionality in all its components. The default file format for Symphony is the ODF, and the suite can also read, and write to, MS Office 97-XP file formats to some extent. Symphony does not support the MS Office 2007 OpenXML format yet.

I tried opening some basic MS Office documents in Symphony, and everything worked fine. However, the suite cannot execute MS Office macros, but offers its own “command language” instead that advanced users can quickly learn and leverage. For quick automation of routine tasks, it offers an MS Office-style graphical macro wizard. The Symphony documentation mentions some of the advanced MS Word features that the suite may not import correctly.

Gray spots in interoperability

Symphony may not correctly import the following advanced formatting features in MS Office documents.

MS Office: AutoShapes, revision marks, OLE objects, form fields, indexes, tables, frames, multi-column formatting, hyperlinks, bookmarks, WordArt graphics and animated characters/text

MS Excel: AutoShapes, OLE objects, form fields, pivot tables, new chart types and conditional formatting

MS PowerPoint: AutoShapes; tab, line, and paragraph spacing; master background graphics, grouped objects and certain multimedia effects

The path ahead

The IBM team has indicated that it has begun work on the second beta release of Symphony. “In some early testing of the beta two code, we are witnessing improvements in the areas of start up, loading PowerPoint presentations and response times when opening and saving documents in other formats,” they write on the project homepage. Besides the issues that they have taken cognizance of, Big Blue will need to incorporate features to facilitate collaborative authoring. After the debut of Google Docs and Spreadsheets, office suites are increasingly moving towards the ‘anywhere, anytime’ model, and there is no way Symphony can escape that.

The near-time evolution of the suite will be particularly interesting to watch, since OOo has already announced its intentions of ramping up to version 3.0 by summer 2008. A personal information manager (PIM), support for Web 2.0 weblogs and wikis and an Office 2007 OpenXML import filter are just some of the goodies that OOo has promised to roll out in 3.0. Although Symphony too is slated to move to version 1.0 from its current beta state in early 2008, it is unlikely that it will eat into the formidable reputation that OOo has built over the years. This production release of Symphony may, however, bundle some missing pieces like a database application and a drawing tool.

All in all, the advent of Symphony means that users will have fewer reasons to go shopping for a proprietary office suite. And that will compound the anxiety at Redmond for good!

Triple Booting with GRUB and LILO

Note: The interview appeared at Linux.com, a reputed portal covering Linux/OSS developments and trends. The original link is here.

Triple Booting with GRUB, LILO and Windows XP

Wondering how to create a triple-booting system that involves Windows and two Linux distributions — one that uses the GRUB bootloader and the other using LILO? Here’s a hands-on procedure that lets you do just that, without tweaking cryptic configuration files and messing with geeky commands.

When you power on a PC with multiple operating systems installed, software called a bootloader asks you what operating system to boot. A boot loader can be installed on the master boot record (MBR) of your hard disk, or you may install it on the root partition that a Linux distro uses. For x86 hardware, you have the choice of two popular bootloaders in the Linux world — the Grand Unified Bootloader (GRUB) and the Linux Loader (LILO).

Most flavors of Linux use GRUB as their default bootloader, but many, such as Xandros and Mandriva, still use LILO. You can find lots of tutorials on the Web that explain how GRUB could be configured in different scenarios to boot multiple operating systems. With LILO, it is a different ballgame; such resources are scarce and hard to find.

One typical problem you encounter when you create multi-boot systems is making LILO and GRUB work in tandem. For this discussion, we will focus on creating a Xandros, Fedora, and Microsoft Windows triple-booting system as an example of creating multi-boot systems involving Windows, LILO-using, and GRUB-using distros.

Sometimes distros will automatically detect other Linux operating systems installed on a system, but often they don’t. Also, if the GRUB-using distro is the last operating system (out of the three) that you plan to install on your system, my method will save you hours of tedious geeky stuff.

A practical solution

With Xandros and LILO, I faced problems when I attempted to create a triple-booting system. Though you can easily configure GRUB by editing its configuration file /etc/grub.conf, editing the /etc/lilo.conf file for Xandros didn’t quite work. Xandros overwrote the modified file with the default values whenever I restarted the system. This prompted me to try using GRUB to boot the three operating systems, which proved to be a lot easier.

Your first step is to back up your data to whatever media you prefer. If you’re starting with a new hard drive and want your Linux distros to coexist with Windows, install Windows first.

You may partition your disk using a utility that comes with new hard disks, or with utilities such as fdisk, cfdisk, Disk Druid, or Ranish Partition. Create two partitions, then install Windows on one of them. You’ll use the other one later for the two flavors of Linux.

Once you are done installing Windows on one partition, proceed with installing Xandros. Do not let Xandros install LILO on the MBR. Instead, let LILO write to the root partition of the Xandros install.

Installing Xandros

Boot right off the Xandros installation CD, and you’ll be presented with the Xandros installation wizard. Review and accept the license agreement and select Custom Install when you are asked to choose between the Custom or Express methods of installation.

On the Software Selection screen that follows, you should choose to install the Complete Desktop, since this will install most packages that one needs on a daily basis.

When presented with the Disk Configuration screen, select Manage Disks and Partitions. You will be presented with a screen where you can modify the partitions on your hard disk. Create the / and swap partitions for Xandros, and click Next. Take care to leave sufficient free space for Fedora; I recommend 4GB or more.

Also, note the device name of the Xandros root (/) partition which is usually something of the form /dev/hdax, where x is the number of the partition on the device.

The next screen will show you the summary of disk configuration. On this screen, remember to uncheck “Install boot-manager on the master boot record of [device name].” This will prevent Xandros from installing LILO to the MBR. LILO will be written to the Xandros root partition. Now complete the rest of the installation, and when prompted, remove the installation CD and reboot your system.

Installing Fedora and configuring GRUB

At this stage, you won’t be able to boot into Xandros since there is no bootloader installed on the MBR. Simply boot off the bootable CD/DVD of Fedora, and wade through the basic installation options.

When asked what kind of installation you would want, select Custom Install. When presented with the disk configuration options, select Manually partition using Disk Druid. Now choose to format the free partition you left earlier in the Ext3 format and supply the mount-name as /.

Next, you’ll be presented with the GRUB options, and a list of the operating systems detected. Xandros will probably not be listed. Click on the Add button, and in the window that pops up, enter Xandros in the Label field and the devicename of the Xandros partition (which you noted earlier) in the Device field. This will add Xandros to the GRUB list that you see later. Now complete the rest of the installation steps, and when prompted, remove the installation CD and reboot the system.

Test fire

Once your system reboots, you will be presented with the blue GRUB screen listing the three operating systems. You may boot into Fedora and Windows simply by selecting the appropriate option from the listing and pressing Enter.

However, when you select Xandros, you’ll be greeted with the second bootloader — the Xandros LILO installed on the root partition of Xandros. Select Xandros from this listing and press Enter. The listing will also probably list Windows, but not Fedora, so you can boot into Windows from LILO if you want to.

This method of using the Fedora GRUB bootloader instead of the Xandros LILO is quite flexible, since one may simply edit the Fedora /etc/grub.conf file to add or delete operating systems. Since GRUB is a popular bootloader, many system administrators can create configuration files for GRUB out of thin air.

Coping with Windows

Instead of beginning with a freshly formatted hard disk, many users might wish to install the Linux flavors on a disk that already has Windows installed. This is not too difficult, either. You’ll need to follow one of the two procedures described below, depending upon how your disk is partitioned.

If your hard disk has one or more logical partitions, the task is easier. Back up all of your data on the partition you want to use, note its size, and reboot into the installer for the first Linux distro you want to install. If you have more than one additional partition on the disk, you’ll want to use the last partition on the disk — so, if you have D: and E: under Windows, for example, you’d want to use the partition Windows sees as the E: drive.

When you are presented with the disk partitioning screen, delete this partition to free up space. Linux names the partitions differently, so you’ll need to compare the sizes of the partitions to make sure you are deleting the correct one. It might be a good idea to back up all of your data, including that on your C: drive, in case you accidentally delete the wrong partition.

Now, out of the space freed up, carve out a swap partition and a “/” partition for Xandros, as explained earlier. Take care to leave enough space for Fedora. Then proceed with the rest of the steps, as explained in the Installing Xandros and Installing Fedora sections above.

If you have everything on a single partition, which is pretty common, there’s still hope. First of all, defragment your hard disk. Then download Partition Resizer, which is an excellent piece of free software. Copy it to a bootable diskette and reboot into the DOS environment using it. (A bootable CD-ROM will not do since Partition Resizer requires the medium it is launched from to be writable.)

Run the program and resize your C: partition to carve out free space for the Linux distros. Reboot into Xandros installation routine and create its swap and / partitions out of the free space. Then, proceed with the rest of the steps of the procedure.

Modifications and alterations

What if you wish to install the Fedora GRUB (using the Linux rescue mode installation of your Fedora install CD) on an MBR that already has the Xandros LILO installed?

In this case, append the following lines to the Fedora /etc/grub.conf file to add Xandros to the list of operating systems that the bootloader can boot. This will work because Xandros installs a copy of LILO to its root partition anyway. This method will prove useful if you wish to install Xandros on a system that already has Fedora installed.

title Xandros
rootnoverify (hdx,x)
chainloader +1

Replace (hdx,x) with the GRUB name of the partition on which Xandros is installed — for instance, (hd0,5).

This method has the advantage of keeping the Xandros (or Mandriva, for that matter) LILO boot sector completely separate from the GRUB information used by the other distro, so mishaps are less likely. And of course, you might tweak this method to suit your specific needs — like creating a system that can boot four, or even more, operating systems. Best of luck!

Jagriti Case Study

Note: The interview appeared at Linux.com, a reputed portal covering Linux/OSS developments and trends. The original link is here.

Initiative helps farmers in rural India using OSS

“India is like a long snake. While its head is moving into the twenty-first century, the tail is still in the sixteenth. And there are people all over its body.”

Those lines by computer guru Ed Yourdon sum up the inspiration behind Jagriti e-Sewa (“Jagriti” means “awakening” in Punjabi and “Sewa” means “service”), a non-governmental organization (NGO) that uses open source technologies to bring much-needed knowledge and advice to farmers in the Indian state of Punjab.

The model that Jagriti has adopted is strikingly simple. Kiosks or centers that provide IT-enabled services are set up in rural areas to help farmers keep abreast of the latest developments in agriculture through the Internet, give them access to experts, and organize training programs for them. Since these kiosks are franchised mostly to educated youth or ex-military men, they also create jobs.Jagriti’s initiative to help farmers procure cheap loans for agricultural operations is worth a special mention. The NGO has partnered with a major nationalized bank to ensure that farmers don’t fall into the debt trap laid down by notorious middlemen and private money-lenders — a vicious circle that has driven thousands of farmers to suicide in recent years.

Counting on Linux

All the Web servers that enable Jagriti services are powered by Linux. The reasons behind the choice are obvious. Jagriti is a small organization venturing into an area where it has no precedents to follow. It has to keep costs low without compromising on performance or security. And there is another important consideration. J. S. Sandha, CEO and founder of the project, says, “We Indians recycle anything and everything.” Jagriti wanted a platform that would make the most of available hardware and not favour any particular vendor, since the bulk of computers in India are unbranded. Linux fit the bill perfectly.

Although the Web servers central to the project are Linux-powered, franchisees are free to use any OS on their terminals to provide services to villagers. Many potential franchisees come to Jagriti with obsolete machines and ask if they can start kiosks using them. The mentors at Jagriti encourage them to use Linux by demonstrating its benefits, and help them reach the right learning resources.

At Jagriti, the adoption of open source software was coordinated by Sandha himself. “Initially, our lack of technical expertise and the scattered documentation of open source projects seemed to be problems, but things are improving now,” he says. The numerous Indian LUGs helped Jagriti often by answering queries and giving advice.

Sandha says Linux has proved to be a viable choice for the project. “We are not only satisfied, but have proved that Linux is most suitable for reaching out to the masses — whether you consider the TCO angle, reuse, or localization.” Realizing the need for quality software to fulfill the needs of the Indian rural sector, Jagriti has developed applications like e-Khad (to help farmers find the lowest-cost combination of fertilizers they need) and e-Khet (to help analyze the soil of a farm) atop open source technologies. “We are in the process of developing many more online applications,” Sandha says.

The project’s single greatest achievement is that it has introduced many naive villagers to the wonders of the information age. It has given them access to easy finance options and scientific methods of farming.

Sandha urges the open source community to focus more on localization. “It is only through localized applications that we could bring IT closer to the common man,” he says. He feels it is important to popularize open source in a country like India, and points out that the open source philosophy is consistent with the Millenium Development Goals of the UN and the Vision 2020 of Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, former president of India.

The success story of Jagriti underlines the importance of technology reaching out to those who really need it. After all, in the end, it is the quality of human life that should benefit from all advancements.

Autopackage Interview

Note: The interview appeared at Linux.com, a reputed portal covering Linux/OSS developments and trends. The original link is here.

A conversation with the autopackage team

Curtis Knight, Isak Savo, and Taj Morton are the lead maintainers and developers of autopackage, a set of tools designed to let developers build and distribute distribution-neutral installation packages. In this interview, they share their vision of the project and where Linux packaging in general is going.

Linux.com: How and when did the autopackage project begin? What does the current project team look like?

Isak: Autopackage began in 2002, when Mike Hearn decided he wanted to make Linux easier to use. Hongli Lai and Curtis joined the team in the first year, while I joined somewhere around 2004, and so did Taj Morton. The current team is mostly Curtis, Taj, and I, with occasional contributions from other people on the project mailing list. Geographically, we are spread apart. I live in Sweden, Taj on the west coast of the US, and Curtis on the east coast.

LC: Many open source developers work on FOSS projects in their free time. Does that hold true for you as well?

Isak: Yes, I work on autopackage in my spare time. I recently graduated from university with an M.Sc. in Computer Engineering, and am now working in the R&D department of ABB Sweden, where I am a software developer and researcher.

Curtis: Not enough hours in the day for me! I work as a mechanical engineer and support mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic system design focused on the construction equipment industry.

Taj: I am currently in my last year of secondary school.

LC: How would you articulate the major goals of the autopackage project? Was developing a package management framework like the Windows click-click-install systems an objective?

Isak: I don’t think our goal ever was to create an InstallShield/MSI for Linux. It is just that the UI for autopackage is simple, familiar, and fairly straightforward to implement. The objective of autopackage is, and has always been, to make software installation on Linux easier.

Besides, I think that the autopackage UI is more user-friendly than the average Windows installer. Mike Hearn, who started the project, had a vision of what software installation will look like in the future.

Curtis: Intuitive use is a goal, but a comparison with other existing installation methods may not be useful. We have a few firsts to our credit. For instance, using a Web browser to initiate an install session was not a popular feature until we rolled it out in autopackage. There are, however, a couple of installation systems using that hook now.

LC: Autopackage makes desktop users’ life easier. Does it also have something to offer to system admins and developers?

Isak: Autopackage certainly helps developers, since it lets them create a single package that works for many users. This is especially valuable for developers of smaller projects that do not have the manpower or the community support to create packages for every distribution out there.

Curtis: There are no specific advantages for admins, but we made sure we did not inhibit that use case. If a graphical front end is not available, an admin can run packages remotely by invoking the terminal console front end.

LC: What major projects are now available for download as autopackages? Will we see any significant additions to the list in the near future?

Taj: Inkscape is probably the largest project that uses and supports our project. Most of our users come from smaller projects that aren’t distributed or packaged by distributions. By using autopackage, they only need to create one package instead of many for different distributions. Also, they can make it easier for their users to install their software.

Isak: aMSN instant messaging is another big project that uses autopackage. Twenty-five percent of all traffic to autopackage.org originates from aMSN’s Web site. Abiword is another major project using autopackage. On the commercial side, we have Xara Extreme as well as a Dutch tax program benefiting from our project.

Curtis: Smart Technologies, which supplies interactive whiteboards, uses autopackage for remote client software delivery.

LC: An article we published last year talks about your project’s struggle for acceptance — in particular, the slow growth in the number of applications available as autopackages. How do you react to that?

Isak: It is a bit sad obviously, and we had hoped we would get better acceptance. Looking back, maybe, we were a bit naive on that front. What keeps us motivated now is the positive feedback we get from the existing user base. This feedback is mostly from users installing packages, but sometimes also from developers providing autopackages of their software.

LC: To a great extent, autopackage aims to address the complexities that the multiplicity of Linux distributions poses to the common user. Do you think that the variety of choice in this case hinders the wider adoption of Linux?

Isak: Maybe, yes. I think the most fundamental issue blocking adoption is simply the fact that Linux is different from Windows. Also, Linux has a history of bad hardware support, and this pain point isn’t fully resolved yet. Recent backing by hardware vendors such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard selling computers with Linux pre-installed, as well as the open sourcing of ATI’s graphics drivers and specifications, will certainly help in that area.

And, of course, one thing that often shows up as an issue is software installation on Linux. Windows or Macintosh users are used to visiting a Web site, reading about a particular software package and then downloading it without hassles. Through autopackage, we provide that functionality.

Curtis: Autopackage can reduce the complexity of software installation on Linux, but it also has the potential to add to the Linux distribution landscape. Autopackage seeks to share the effort on packaging user-facing software, and can make a new distribution happen quickly. The developers of the flavour-in-making would just need to focus on the core system software, while using autopackages to supply user software. The result will be distributions that are highly focused and quick to create, without compromising on upstream user software.

LC: Do you think Linux has really arrived as a desktop platform? What other issues (besides too many distros) do you think affect the reach of Linux as a desktop OS?

Taj: The biggest issue here is still the lack of a standard Linux platform like a Windows or a Mac OS. A Linux platform is something we have discussed in the past, but never had the development firepower or community support to follow through. By platform, we mean a standard set of libraries with stable ABIs providing a guaranteed set of APIs. Then, application maintainers and independent software vendors (ISV) could simply say, “We rely on Desktop Linux Platform 1.3,” and know that with v1.3, all the libraries that their applications need will be available.

To a certain extent, distros provide this platform, but unfortunately, the differences between them (and even the different versions of the same distro) are so great that they keep any “standard platform” from being created. Backward compatibility is crucial for commercial ISVs, but most Linux distros do not guarantee this.

LC: Why was the autopackage project released under the LGPL instead of the GPL?

Isak: I am not a lawyer, and was not with the autopackage project when the licensing decision was taken. I assume that the LGPL was adopted to make sure that non-free software would be able to use the autopackage framework.

Not everything autopackage is under the LGPL. We have licensed the tools that we provide under the GPL, and use the LGPL for the necessary support code that is part of each package. Some code is even released in the public domain, with no copyright claims at all. All this is to give as many developers as possible the opportunity to use autopackage, regardless of their chosen licensing model. However, all through, we do make an effort to ensure that the “freeness” of autopackage is preserved.

LC: Of late, a considerable debate has raged over some security issues surrounding the project. Critics have pointed out that autopackages, much like shar files, are simply executable shell archives, and share similar vulnerabilities. Do you think these concerns are valid?

Isak: It all boils down to trust. Ask yourself why you wouldn’t trust a package provided by a software vendor, when at the same time you do trust the actual program provided by that vendor.

What few people seem to realize is that distribution packages such as . deb or .rpm contain shell script code that is executed during installation, and as such, they could also be called executable shell archives. If someone wanted to create a malicious package, it would be equally easy to do so regardless of the end package format. So no, I don’t think these concerns are valid.

LC: Also, there have been apprehensions that since autopackages install to the /usr directory by default, they may conflict with a distro’s usual way of installing applications, creating problems for support teams in the end.

Isak: Yes, that is one of the key issues we get criticized about. Our goal is to give the best possible integration with the system in question, and that means putting stuff under /usr. Many applications do not work when installed in, say, /usr/local, and we have tried to persuade distributions to change that. There has been recent activity on the mailing list of Damjan Jovanovic, and things may start moving in this direction soon.

Damjan has talked directly with upstream projects like pkg-config and fontconfig, and has been posting updates about his progress on our wiki. If it turns out that distributions will begin to fully support /usr/local, we can start changing the default /usr to avoid conflict.

Curtis: Part of the issue is that other installers do not check before clobbering files. Additionally, you would not necessarily install the same software using two different systems. The main system installer can always reinstall its package in case of problems, so that system software can be restored.

LC: What is your opinion of similar projects like klik and Zero Install?

Taj: Both of these projects address the same problem in different ways. Klik uses an approach similar to AppFolders, which is used by Mac OS. We have discussed the pros and cons of this approach. Klik’s packages come from Debian-compiled binaries.

Isak: The upside of converting already existing packages is that you can get a lot of installers really quickly. The downside is that the final binaries have a smaller chance of actually working on user systems, since they have been compiled for a specific distribution. While some may consider this an acceptable tradeoff, others may not.

ZeroInstall is really interesting because it tries to eliminate the actual installation step. The user just decides to run a program; if the system doesn’t have it, ZeroInstall automatically downloads and installs it before it is started. I have not tried it so I can’t say how well it works, but I like the idea.

LC: What are the open source technologies and platforms that you think will make it big in the coming years? If you were to name one technology that a budding developer should master, what would it be?

Isak: I am not sure if they constitute a technology, but I definitely see integration and communication as key areas. I’m talking about application-to-application communication (through DBus, for instance), as well as application-to-Web communication (integration with Web applications).

Taj: Again, although it is not really a technology, I think that new developers should learn about the importance of keeping their library APIs and ABIs stable. Another key thing is changing the developer mindset that distros compile software. It is the software maintainers who are the most knowledgeable about how their software should be compiled and built, so they should be handling the packaging bit.

LC: Where do you see the autopackage project heading two years down the line?

Taj: I hope to see acceptance for autopackage grow, both in terms of the number of projects using it for distribution, as well as the distros recognizing it. Also, I hope that in two years’ time autopackage will see much more commercial usage from companies, as they port their applications to Linux and need an easy-to-use method of having their applications deployed.

As far as Linux in general is concerned, I would like to see much more focus on compatibility between distros and libraries. This would definitely help Linux gain a footing in the desktop space by providing a stable platform for which programmers and companies can develop applications.

Isak: I absolutely share Taj’s hopes, but realistically speaking, I doubt we’ll see any support or endorsements from major distributions. Personally, I’ve begun focusing on making autopackage easier to use for new developers. I hope to do this by improving the tools that are used to create autopackages. My vision is to have a complete GUI where everything pertaining to packaging can be done. I’ve also thought along the lines of integrating package creation into existing IDEs, such as Anjuta, KDevelop, and Monodevelop. However, all these are just loose ideas as of now.

Curtis: As packaging and integration become more standardized, I see autopackage being updated to use those standard calls. This is already happening with xdg-utils and XDG_* environment variables being included in all recent distribution updates. I would look for new software, either community or commercial, that has not existed on Linux to be rolled out first as autopackages.

Overall, the issues of distributing binary executables — for instance, symbol management, library sonames to API versioning, and removing application prefixing — have been shown to be useful to packagers. Certain features from system installers, such as package searching and update, are on the anvil as well.

Hopefully, these ideas will help the Linux platform to surge forward, even if autopackage does not win as wide an acceptance as we hope it will.

An Article on Managed Services

Note: This article appeared in Express Computer, an Indian IT magazine published by the Indian Express media group. Here is the original link.

Managed Services: instant IT for your business

Giving your business an IT edge doesn’t have to involve maintaining an army of network engineers. Hail Managed Services—the world of readymade servers, pre-cooked clusters, and instant karma.

A recent media article argues that the term ‘information technology’ is now obsolete. The reasoning is simple—since most commerce today depends on IT to some extent, a better term would be ‘business technology’. One agrees to the fancy logic, but doesn’t that imply every business now should be expected to maintain a technical wing? Not necessarily, thanks to the recent trend of handing an entire IT infrastructure to experts who know how to maintain it best. Build my server, keep it running, update it, but trouble me not, say customers. Thank you very much.

Whither servers, whither heat?

Full-blown managed services can involve the outsourcing of the entire IT operations of an organisation—complete with hardware, development efforts, maintenance, trouble-shooting, support and upgradation. With time, more organisations are realising that even maintaining a small in-house team of techies does not deliver the goods. Modern businesses expect high uptime from their IT infrastructure. For instance, a chain of hotels offering centralised booking of rooms requires its WAN backbone to be continuously available.

Moreover, high-performance servers can often be clumsy, fire-breathing monsters. They cost a fortune and require impeccable housing facilities to function properly. Companies specialising in maintaining IT infrastructure usually club hardware serving many customers at a single, closely-monitored IT facility organised into racks and rails. These are usually also provided with multi-tier power back-up and connectivity—measures critical to maximise availability. Proper heat management measures are taken, and the customer is updated if services need to be suspended for a while for upgradation and maintenance. Ever imagined a place full of neatly-combed servers toiling round the clock? Welcome to the data centre.

Managed boxes, packaged deals

An increasing number of concerns are recognising the value of the expertise that managed services companies bring to the table. The technology challenges involved in e-enabling a business vary across industry verticals, and so do the solutions. For instance, the needs of a Web site offering online match-making services are miles apart from those of a grocery store-chain looking to tap Net-savvy customers. The Web is just an ancillary technology for the latter; for the former, it is bread and butter.

The managed services model tries to build a solution around the deliverables expected. The service provider analyses client requirements and takes the necessary decisions on his behalf. Let’s take another look at the example—our match-making Web site waiting to go live may ask a provider to buy the relevant hardware, choose the operating system and the software technologies that need to be deployed, and finally house the server at its own data centre. Then there are certain specialised processes that even IT companies choose to outsource. Modern businesses generate data by the terabyte, and all of it needs to be kept secure and made available in a snap. Back-ups are most effective when stored offsite, and need specialised recovery techniques in the event of a failure. Additionally, companies specialising in disaster recovery methodologies make available sufficient redundancy for guarding critical data.

Managed services often come branded as a bouquet of offerings—right from deployment advice and maintenance of facilities to disaster recovery services and technical support. Services can be managed either directly by engineers at the data centre or through remote access technologies such as VNC or Citrix Metaframe. The latter facilitates outsourcing of service management on a global scale. Governed by the terms laid down in the SLA (service level agreement), the provider guarantees the client a specific uptime, and levies a lump-sum fee and monthly charge. Any violation of the terms of the SLA translates into discounts and reimbursements for the customer. Many managed services firm even offer a money-back option if a client’s expectations are not met.

Co-location: sardines in a can

So you are a compulsive geek who knows setting up a server is not exactly rocket-science. You know which applications fit the bill perfectly, and how to get them to work. But are you ready for the power cuts, malware attacks and the frantic midnight calls? Relax, you can build your server yourself, and then have it housed at a co-location centre offering controlled environments designed to maximise availability.

Co-location can be managed or unmanaged. Managed co-location is similar to managed services, except for the fact that the hardware is usually owned by the client instead of the provider. On the other hand, unmanaged co-location is similar to renting rack space for servers, and offers the client greater control over configuration. Co-location centres too are provided with fail-proof connectivity and power supply.

A closer look at disaster recovery

If you’ve been wondering all the while, backing up your critical data on tapes, CDs or DVDs isn’t as safe as it seems. Even maintaining a back-up server in-house, cumbersome as it is, will not help in the event of a full-blown disaster. This is the primary reason for people opting to store their data in a third-party data centre. Often, the SLAs for data recovery services also outline the level of physical security that the provider will ensure for the back-up servers. Usually, equipment is monitored 24×7 using closed-circuit surveillance techniques. The confidentiality of the client business is also maintained by ensuring that the technical staff can view just ‘data’ and not ‘information.’ Your proposals are a potent weapon if they fall into the wrong hands; encrypted streams of data that read like nonsense aren’t.

Another critical question you should ask yourself before deciding to maintain back-ups in-house is whether the data will be retrievable at will. You may need to maintain an inventory of the back-up media, and sifting through heaps of plastic isn’t quite pleasant when you’ve just had a data crash. Data centres are usually equipped with sophisticated retrieval technologies—even clandestine proprietary tools—that make the recovery of relevant data easy. It is way simpler to access a remote server presenting organised lists of your files than suddenly realising you forgot to label a couple of back-up discs.

And the bottom-line is

Whether you are a corporate satrap or a budding entrepreneur, chances are you wouldn’t want a fuming inferno in the backyard of your air-conditioned office. Managed services are a cost-effective and foolproof way to put your business on the fast track, and offer solutions that meet your exact needs. While enterprises in the developing world are slowly waking up to the many benefits that this approach brings, the West is growing comfortable with the idea of entrusting complex technology infrastructure to distant, safe hands. There are a number of industry players you can bank on. If you’ve always wanted to give your company that flashy Web site or an incredible database, a quick Google search for ‘managed services’ or ‘co-location’ will do the trick for you.

OOo and MS Office — A Comparison

Note: This article appeared in LINUX For You, India’s largest selling Linux and OSS print magazine. It also appeared on OpenITis.com, LFY’s online edition that features select articles from the print issues. The link is here.

OOo vs MS Office: The Plot Thickens!

With the release of MS Office 2007, the bar in the office suite segment has risen higher. Will the OOo community keep step with Redmond, or will it strive to give the office suite a unique identity of its own? In either case, get your wish list ready!

Very recently, I had a chance to sample Microsoft’s latest offering, Office 2007, on a friend’s PC. This buddy had been constantly singing praises of the release–presumably to irk me, the OSS enthusiast! Also, as a documentation professional, I was curious to see what was on offer. He kicked off the demonstration with MS Excel, and as the pleasing blue interface filled up the screen, my jaw dropped! It was obvious that, unlike Office 2003 and XP, Office 2007 was not a vanilla upgrade. It was a major revamp–to the extent that even a seasoned Office user might need an hour to get accustomed to the new controls. It was as if somebody had been thinking fresh to challenge conventions and look for ways to simplify everyday computing.

Is it really that different?

Yes, it is. It seems the usability analysts and interaction designers at Microsoft have been ruining their weekends to make this the most user-friendly release of Office, ever. Let’s take MS Word, for instance. The Menu –> Command centric interface in Word 2003 has given way to a streamlined hierarchy, where a Tab holds Groups that in turn contain the Commands that you might want to use at a given moment. Within a tab, the groups are displayed on a graphical Ribbon. For instance, to add a footnote to your document, all you need to do is to go to the References tab and select the Insert Footnote command from the Footnote group. Intuitive, isn’t it? On the same tab as the Footnote group, you’ll find groups corresponding to all types of references that Word allows you to create. The tabs in Word 2007 are more task-oriented than in any of the previous releases.Word 2007 also makes it significantly easier to integrate pictures into documents and play around with them. MS has created a new, prominent Office button that makes it simple to access common document options like Save/Save As, Open, Copy, Paste, etc. One big improvement in Word 2007 is dynamic content controls that help you modify elements like ToC on the fly, without worrying about Groups and Tabs.Similar improvements are evident in the user interfaces of key MS Office applications. MS Outlook retains the traditional Menu –> Command interface, while adding many other components that make the busy professionals life a tad easier. The GUIs of PowerPoint and Excel, like Word, have been overhauled to incorporate a task-oriented approach. The new Office button lends its special touch here, as well. It is now way easier to add elements like WordArt and headers to spreadsheets. The long-standing advantage that OpenOffice.org or OOo has enjoyed over Office in offering a ‘one-click conversion to PDF’ will be ironed out to some extent now, since Microsoft now offers a free plug-in for this purpose with Office 2007. Theres a catch, though — only users with genuine (read, licensed) copies of MS Office can download it. Fair enough, one might argue!Office 2007 saves its files in the new Open XML format. The familiar file extensions have changed — for instance, .doc has made way for .docx in the case of MS Word. However, users can opt to save their files as plain old .doc at the cost of losing the formatting that relies on Office 2007-specific features. Media sources indicate that the Novell flavour of OOo, inspired by the company’s recent interoperability deal with MS, has already begun supporting the new Office format.The larger challenges before OOo

Besides the cosmetic changes that Redmond has unfurled, there is a visible emphasis on making the product future-ready. Content technologies have seen rapid development over the past few years, and Office 2007 makes all efforts possible to hasten the pace. For one, there is an excellent new tool bundled in Office 2007 that makes the creation of collaborative content a snap. MS Groove, as it has been christened, enables the creation of a central workspace that teams can use to collectively author documents, spreadsheets and more. This can considerably boost the products appeale — specially now when online applications like Google Docs and Spreadsheets have fuelled user expectations. The best part is that Groove integrates itself with the Windows interface, so you can synchronise a folder by simply right-clicking on its name to select the appropriate option.

Office 2007 also incorporates an improved Microsoft OneNote, which allows users to collate research from the Internet, gather to-do lists, and more. OneNote can communicate seamlessly with the other Office components — for instance, you can directly send an e-mail from your subordinate to OneNote for later perusal. Notebooks can be password protected to keep preying eyes at bay.

While many open source fanatics do not mind OOo’s lack of its own e-mail client (there are enough good ones out there already!), the community will do well to add some more variety to the suites application portfolio. It has done it before with OOo Base, and it is time for a few more surprises.

It isn’t free, all right!

Office 2007 might be a giant leap forward for Microsoft, but it still costs an arm and leg for the user. OOo is multi-platform, does most of the routine things we need, and bails us out of trouble when proprietary programs exit displaying a shareware message. Now that Office 2007 has taken the initiative, open source enthusiasts can expect OOo to incorporate new features faster. Usability issues surrounding OOo, particularly the long wait before loading, need to be remedied. The suite will also need to incorporate some collaborative features for enterprise content teams.

All in all, if you’ve been planning to push the OOo team to develop a skinnable interface, or ask for better integration with online research tools, the time to spam their forums is now. Raise your voice and you may see your wish list bundled and ready for use in OpenOffice.org 3.0!

KOffice, The GIMP and more…

Note: This article appeared in Indus, the online journal brought out by the India chapter of the Society of Technical Communication (STC). The original link is here.

Free Tools for Documentation

There are scores of free software tools that technical writing practitioners can use to their advantage. In this article, we list just a few of them—leading projects that you can begin using straightaway!

OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org is an office productivity suite complete with a word processor (OOo Write), spreadsheet (OOo Calc), presentation tool (OOo Impress), graphics tool (Draw), database tool (Base) and a tool for editing complex equations (Math).  Evolving initially as a ‘lightweight’ version of StarOffice (a commercial office suite), OOo has grown to get a life of its own. Releases for all major platforms (including Windows) can be downloaded from www.OpenOffice.org, the official website of the project.

For the technical writer, OOo offers a strong style-based document-design environment. It scores high on interoperability and can work with all common file formats. The Export to PDF feature has long been integrated into the OOo user interface (unlike MS Office, which has begun offering this via a free plug-in only recently—in its 2007 edition). Compared to Office, OOo also offers a more unified user experience, which means you can click open a spreadsheet or a database even within OOo Write, primarily a word processing tool.

While OOo is not an MS Office clone, it has traditionally tried to match it feature-by-feature. Now that the bar in the office suite segment has been raised by the release of Office 2007, it will be interesting to see how the OpenOffice community beefs up its strategy.

AbiWord
AbiWord is your no-frills word processor. Lean and multi-platform, it helps you design many common types of documents—letters, memos, reports, press releases, fax cover-sheets, etc. AbiWord, like OpenOffice.org, can read and save documents in MS Office formats. Although this application is frugal on features when compared to MS Word and OOo Write, it hogs up less system resources, offers a style-based document design environment and is quite intuitive to work with.

The AbiWord project is under active development, and new releases are frequently made available at http://www.abiword.org.

KOffice
KOffice is a full-featured office suite that comes integrated with KDE, a desktop environment that runs on Linux and some other UNIX-like operating systems. KOffice comprises the KWord word-processor, KPresenter for creating and editing presentations and KSpread for working with spreadsheets. KOffice can work XML and an assortment of formats, including .doc, .xls and .ppt.

The GIMP
The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Tool) is a lot like its name—classy, whacky and full of life. Beneath a user interface that is deceptively simple (you may reduce it to a quarter-window, if you are a minimalist), it offers a host of rich features that let you create and modify images in almost all popular formats. Free and lightweight, The GIMP could give expensive proprietary tools like Photoshop a run for their money. And yes, it doesn’t even keep you waiting for eons while it loads up!

There are numerous handy plug-ins and wizards that you could use with GIMP. So give your company’s logo that Chrome finish if you desire, or use the built-in wizard to create buttons for your webpage! The package benefits from some excellent documentation, and has a pretty-useful Tip of the Day feature that ensures you learn a new trick everyday. GIMP is also perfect for grabbing snapshots of the entire screen or a window—either current or a few seconds into the future. Check out Figure 3 for a quick look at the UI of The GIMP. GIMP is an application developed in GTK (The GIMP Toolkit), so you’ll need to install GTK before you carry on with the installation of the imaging tool. Grab the latest version from http://www.gimp.org.

Scribus
Scribus, a fine piece of open source software, is a lot like Adobe PageMaker on the features front. This DTP application has a built-in Export to PDF feature, so you can generate production-quality documents without any hassles. Scribus offers a user experience on Linux that is close to the look and feel of leading desktop publishing tools on the Windows platform. See Figure 4, and visit http://www.scribus.net to know more about this exciting project.

UML Tools
Technical writers involved in the documentation of complex software systems often need specialized tools for creating UML diagrams. Two excellent open source tools for this purpose are ArgoUML and Umbrello. While ArgoUML has a release available for the Windows platform, Umbrello is currently available for the K Desktop Environment (KDE) on Linux and other UNIX-like systems. See Figure 5 for a snapshot of Umbrello.

The user-interface of ArgoUML deserves a special mention for its striking simplicity. The entire range of UML diagrams can be created and exported to popular image formats.

Freemind
Freemind is the perfect tool for planning projects, organizing thoughts and general brainstorming. This mind-mapping application helps you give your documentation projects a structure, and export the final schematic to an image format that you can share with colleagues.

There are also some other cool office tools that come bundled with most flavours of Linux. GNumeric is a spreadsheet application that can save spreadsheets in XML, CSV and .xls formats, to name a few. KThesaurus, Kivio (for editing diagrams and flowcharts) and Kugar (for reports) are some other KDE tools that technical writers will find useful.

Hint: If you haven’t worked with Linux before, try using a Live CD flavour like Knoppix or PCLinuxOS to begin with. These allow one to ‘sample’ the features of Linux without actually installing the OS to a hard-disk. Simply  pop the CD into the correct drive, and voila!

Where to get free software tools?
Besides the websites of individual projects, http://www.sourceforge.net maintains an up-to-date repository of open source projects. Binaries (and source code, which you might not need) for all platforms can be downloaded from Sourceforge. In addition, www.rpmfind.net makes available the *nix binaries of open source packages. If you choose to install a Linux distribution on your PC, you’ll find that many of the tools discussed here are available by default.

Contributing to the community
Contributing to the open source community isn’t just for programmers. Open source projects, like all software applications, need good documentation—even more so, since free support for OSS tools is often through user forums only. As a technical writer, one can volunteer to contribute content, participate in localization drives, suggest enhancements and bug-fixes for open source DTP projects, and, yes, spread the word. Besides helping the community, such exposure could give a lot of visibility to your work—strengthening your resume in the end.

This piece is released under the Creative Commons No Derivs license. As a whole, it may be reproduced freely in any media, as long as it is attributed to the author. Quoting excerpts for educational purposes (with attribution maintained) is permitted, as well.

An Interview with Bruce Byfield

Note: This interview appeared in Indus, an online journal published by the India chapter of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). Here is the original link.

Technical Writers Must Learn to be Technical

After a successful stint as a technical writing consultant, Bruce Byfield moved on to journalism, and is currently working as Contributing Editor for some leading technology portals. In this interview with Samartha Vashishtha, Bruce speaks candidly about his experiences and the road ahead for technical communication.

You have been a teacher, technical writer, and now a journalist. How has the journey been? What has brought about the transition?

I used to say that the reason was that I have a low boredom threshold. But the truth is that all these careers had more than enough variety for me. The real reason is that I’m a writer at heart. With each career change, I was getting closer to what I really wanted to do. Journalism is the closest yet, so it’s the most satisfying of my careers so far. Even if I start selling more of my fiction, I’m unlikely to abandon it completely.

How was your experience as a technical writer? What companies have you worked with? What trends did you notice in technical communication in the United States?

When I started as a technical writer, I was tremendously excited. Finally, I’d found a career where an English major like me could earn decent money.

Gradually, though, I became tired of having to prove myself all the time. There are a lot of technical writers in North America who believe that writing skills are all they need, and that they don’t need to know anything technical. That’s never been my style, because I firmly believe that you have to understand what you are writing about to do a good job. But the technical writers who refuse to be technical are numerous enough that they have left a bad impression in the high-tech industry, and each time I started a new job or contract, I’d have to prove that I wasn’t like them. Selling articles on free and open source software gave me some instant credentials with developers, and that helped, but technical writing is still a low-status job in North America. I’m not in the least ambitious about making my way in the business world, but after being a product manager and director of communications, the lack of disrespect for technical writers was hard to endure. Besides, having done the job of my managers, I couldn’t help thinking that I could do their work better than they could.

I worked mainly as a consultant, so I had experience with dozens of companies. IBM, Watson Wyatt Worldwide, Dataphile, The Alderwood Group, Stormix Technologies, and Progeny Linux Systems are some of the companies that I have worked with.

It’s hard to generalize the trends, especially in the United States since I’m a Canadian. However, the most general trend I have noticed is an almost universal tendency to under-budget for documentation and a reluctance to develop processes that support it. For example, at most companies, getting a review of the documentation accepted as part of the release cycle is almost impossible. Some companies are better organized, but they are relatively rare.

Many technical writers feel their profession does not command enough respect from developers and program managers. What are your thoughts on this?

It’s true that most technical writers don’t get much respect. Part of the reason is that most people who aren’t writers themselves don’t understand what writing is about. They believe themselves literate, and most people certainly are literate enough to write a short letter or memo. But they haven’t tried writing a long document themselves, so they don’t respect the difficulties of the task.

Coupled closely with this problem is a lack of foresight to see how good documentation can increase customer satisfaction and reduce the need for technical support. These matters are hard to quantify—so for many people in business, they don’t exist.

But a large part of the lack of respect also comes from the attitudes of the writers themselves. Developers tend to operate in a meritocracy, and until you can prove yourself to them on their own terms, you are not going to get any respect. With the attitude that many technical writers have that they don’t need to know anything technical, it’s not surprising that they shouldn’t get any respect.

The sad thing is that the respect of developers isn’t hard to gain. You don’t have to be an expert in what interests them. In most cases, showing an interest in learning the technical details is all you need to do. Yet too many technical writers won’t even make that effort.

In the end, it’s very simple: unless technical writers show respect for what developers do, they shouldn’t expect any respect from developers.

Tied to this is the insecurity that technical writing may not be a sustainable profession for life. How do you see the future of the profession in general? What countries will be the hub for technical writing in the years to come?

As the name suggests, technical writing combines two skills—technical expertise and writing ability. The profession is unsustainable only if you don’t develop both at the same time. Companies, especially high-tech ones, are always going to need someone who understands their technology and can explain it to the average person. I don’t see how this need can ever go away altogether.

That’s not to say that the media for technical writing won’t change. But, although you have to understand the advantages and disadvantages of each medium, regardless of whether you are presenting information on paper, online, or in a video, the basic act remains the same. Regardless of the medium, you are still explaining.

At a guess, the countries that will be the hub for technical writing will have a number of similar traits. They will be ones with lower labor costs than North America. They will be places where many people have a good command of English, since English will probably remain the language of international technology for some time to come.

Increasingly, though, a pool of people literate in other European and Asian languages will become important, because technology is starting to become internationalized—and a good thing, too, for those whose first language isn’t English. These will be the minimal requirements.

However, in addition to these requirements, the countries that will dominate technical writing will be those that also have technically educated people who are also highly literate.

No country completely fits this description, but from the little I know, I’d say that India might some day make its mark. South Korea might, as well.

What is the general growth path that technical writers should chart for themselves?

As I said before, technical writers are hybrids. They need to develop both their technical knowledge and their writing skills. They can start with just one, but they shouldn’t believe that they can do the job well without both.

A double major in computer science and English would be ideal, or a major in one and a minor in another. In addition, some experience in design and layout would be useful. Often, technical writers need to do everything for themselves, so the more skills they can offer, the better their chances of employment.

Some universities offer technical writing certificates or programs, but I’m a little skeptical of the ones I have seen. They tend not to be nearly technical enough.

You have a creative writing background—your genre of choice being poetry. Do you feel technical writers have the freedom to play around with words? Putting it differently, do you find technical writing, with its standard templates and style guides, creatively stifling at times?

Every genre has its restrictions, so although technical writing may have more than most, it’s not unique. No matter what the genre, the challenge is always to pinpoint the information that you need to convey, and then to make sure that you do so appropriately.

Admittedly, technical writing is simpler than journalism, fiction, or poetry. You have a smaller lump of facts to sculpt into a coherent whole than you do in journalism, no concern for plot or dialogue like fiction, and, unlike poetry, your stylistic concerns don’t extend beyond clarity, brevity, and preciseness.

However, that’s not to say that technical writing isn’t a challenge. As Isaac Asimov once said while replying to criticisms that his style was too straightforward, stained glass has been made for centuries, but clear glass that you can see through is a much more recent invention. Anyone who thinks that a simple and a clear style is easy or stifling hasn’t tried to write in such a style.

Your current assignment is as Contributing Editor with the Open Source Technology Group (OSTG), which maintains some of the leading technology portals on the Web. What attracts you to the open source philosophy?

To be honest, I’m more of a free software advocate than an open source supporter. The open source movement tends to be concerned with the quality of software that making the source code available to everyone produces. By contrast, the free software movement is interested in the philosophical freedoms that making the source code available helps to protect.

I’m an idealist, so the idea of extending the concept of civil liberties into software and computers is both logical and exciting to me. Like me, millions of people spend their days in front of a computer, so we should be concerned that civil liberties are preserved in such an important aspect of our lives.

Just as importantly, free software levels the playing field. It gives developing nations a better chance of taking their place with industrialized nations, and encourages computing in languages other than English. I’m in a privileged position, being a native English speaker from one of the top industrialized nations in the world. But I believe that this privilege is unjust and anything that erodes it is only ethical.

What promise does open source software hold for the technical writing community? Can technical writers contribute their bit to the movement?

Definitely! Documentation is still a weak point in a lot of free and open source software projects. In fact, free software projects are an excellent place to gain experience that will help you get hired.

What open source tools should technical writers learn? Where do they begin?

A lot of free software tools can be used in technical writing. OpenOffice.org, for example, is a more than adequate substitute for Adobe FrameMaker. I know, because I have used it for a number of manuals. The GIMP can be used instead of Adobe PhotoShop. If you use GNU/Linux, you’ll find dozens of other useful pieces of software, including Scribus and Inkscape. The choices are more limited if you are using Microsoft Windows, but they are there.

Last time I checked, the biggest lack for technical writers is free software for Windows Help files—and, for all I know, some project is working on that now.

Now, with the advent of Web 2.0 and associated technologies, how do you expect technical writing practices to evolve the world over? Will there be new modes of information delivery?

Any changes due to Web 2.0 will be in terms of working methods. Collaborative working methods can be very unsettling to people the first time they encounter them. Writers, who often have a strong sense of ownership of their work, may find the adjustment harder than most.

Eventually, writers may find themselves using online applications rather than desktop ones. Just now, though, online applications are too primitive for a technical writer’s needs. They may also find themselves working on wikis, and with more content management systems.

But all these changes are peripheral, I believe. At the core, the act of writing won’t be seriously affected. Technical writers may learn a different style, but their concern will still be organizing ideas so that people can understand.

What do you think is a more important aspect of technical writing—knowing the tools of the trade or developing a writing style that communicates ideas clearly?

Developing a clear style—it’s certainly harder! Technical writers do need to know how to use advanced features of programs, such as the styles in a word processor, but once they have learned one application of a particular kind, they should be able to pick up other applications of that kind pretty quickly. If they can’t, they are probably in the wrong profession!

How do you see the future of technical writing in India? Any advice for the technical communicators here?

India has the potential to be a center of technical writing. Many of its people are fluent in English, and its technology sector is booming.

One way to make best use of these advantages is to explore free software. The more free software spreads in India, the faster its technology base is going to grow. In fact, given the number of people in India, free software may be the only way that the country can complete its industrialization. I’m not sure that India—or any country—can afford to use proprietary software to grow technologically. You can learn more at the Free Software Foundation of India.

My Portfolio

This blog is a collection of my technical articles, mainly on open source technologies, published in print and online technical magazines. I hope you enjoy reading them.

Looking for more? Here is an online anthology of my creative writings.