Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

In honor of the debut of the TV series FlashForward (based on a novel by Robert J. Sawyer) ISFiC Press is having a sale until November 10:

• Buy Sawyer's collection Relativity and any one other ISFiC Press book direct from the publisher, and deduct 10% from your order total (before sales tax and shipping);
• Buy Relativity and either two or three other ISFiC Press books, and deduct 25% from your order total (before sales tax and shipping);
• Buy Relativity and four or more other ISFiC Press books, and deduct 40% from your order total (before sales tax and shipping).

ISFiC Press is, of course, the publisher of my novel The Cunning Blood , and here's your chance to pick it up at a discount.

About FlashForward I can't tell you much, since I don't watch TV, but the concept is intriguing: Everyone on Earth blacks out for 137 seconds, and experiences a kind of timeslip, each seeing visions of his or her own future. The blackout itself causes mayhem on a grand scale (though I wonder if it would be as grand as the premise suggests) and government agents begin searching for Suspect Zero, who was caught on tape awake during the blackout and might, therefore, have had something to do with it.

But about The Cunning Blood I can tell you a lot: It's a hard SF future action/adventure, featuring a prison planet where electrical devices don't work, due to the presence of a pervasive bacterium-sized nanomachine that homes in on the magnetic fields around electrical conductors and literally chews the conductors until the circuit fails. Hell's inmates do all right in spite of not having electricity, as there are a lot of different ways to build a technological civilization, and even a few ways to get around those pesky nanobugs. (Think wires made of liquid mercury flowing through hoses.) But the bugs on Hell are kid stuff compared to what's lurking in the bloodstreams of selected individuals on Earth: highly intelligent distributed nanocomputers, supposedly under the complete control of the secret societies of engineers that created them--except for The Sangruse Device, which has a slightly different concept of "control."

I'm guessing that my long-time readers have already heard most of this, but if you're new here, the novel has reviewed well and might be worth a look. Here's a sample chapter. And another sample chapter, which I just carved out of the novel to post for the first time. (It will make more sense if you read the older sample first.) If you like action, ideas, and cultures completely unlike our own, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

A few minutes ago, UPS left my author's carton of Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition on the front porch. So after ten months of very hard work (and another month of anxious waiting around), it's really and truly real.

100% Linux. Certified DOS-free.

It turned out pretty well, all things considered. And having (finally) held it in my own hands, I think I won't ask anything more from today.

This morning's Wired blog announced the reality of something I've been watching for and expecting for a long, long time: Bookstores have begun installing a significant and vapor-free mechanism (starring the long-but-no-longer vaporous Espresso Book Machine) to print books on demand. The books in question (for the time being) are out-of-copyright works scanned by Google into its Google Books system.

This is a fine thing, even though it probably spells the end of the road for book preservation efforts like my own re-creation of The New Reformation and The Pope and the Council the hard way: Scanning and OCR extraction of text followed by conventional layout. Google books are facsimile editions, complete with library stamps, marginal notations, flaws in hundred-and fifty-year-old paper, and the occasional squashed silverfish. I'd prefer new editions, but I'll settle for facsimiles, and certain scholars would prefer to see a facsimile to make sure that nothing of the original author's work has been left out or changed.

So no carping here, except to demand of Google: Keep going. You've got the means and the manpower, so expand the system to allow the ordering of any book--not simply the public domain ancients--for which a printable PDF image can be mounted on one of your servers. If this happens, there would be three big benefits:

• Bookstores would have a new reason for people to come in the door: To browse the bookburner kiosks for interesting stuff (old and new both) that just isn't popular enough to stock on physical shelves. We need bookstores, and this is the best recent innovation to surface that may help us keep them alive.
• New (not ancient) titles without sufficient market to warrant physical book distribution (like my SF) would have a chance to get some bookstore presence, especially if hands-on bookburner systems create new sizzle for B&M bookstores.
• Publishers who won't release electronic editions of low-volume books for fear of file sharing may be willing to trust a PDF to Google to sell in print form.

It's still unclear whether anything covered by the Google Books settlement with the Authors' Guild will become available through the system anytime soon, but in truth, if it doesn't, I'm not sure authors of our-of-print works will see any financial benefit from the settlement. Ebooks remain a geek enthusiasm. The volume is still in paper copies, and systems like this remove the wasteful overprinting and returns privileges that make conventional book publishing such a financially risky proposition.

Much to love here, and no evil that I can see. Let's watch, and hope for the best.

"Do you like Banting?"

"I don't know. I've never banted."

Unlike the oft-quoted line about our man Rudyard, this isn't really a joke. I have banted, I'm still banting, and I do like it. However, I didn't know it had a name until a couple of months ago, when I read William Banting's A Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public, and began to research the booklet's background.

Dr. Atkins, shove over. Mr. Banting was here first.

In London in the early 1860s, an overweight undertaker was talking to doctors about his obesity. He had watched himself put on weight over the previous thirty years until, at age 65, he weighed 202 pounds, and stood only five foot five inches. He was having trouble getting up and down stairs and doing simple things like tying his shoes. He was annoyed. He had tried everything local physicians suggested, including buying a boat to row on the Thames and walking briskly every day, and taking various medicines that we would today consider worthless nostrums. Nothing worked. Then he came upon Dr. William Harvey, who made a suggestion that seemed too simple to be useful: give up beer, sugar, and "farinaceous" (starchy) foods.

Banting did so, beginning in September, 1862. And fortunately for us, he was of a scientific turn of mind, and wrote down both what he ate daily, and what he weighed every three weeks, for the following year. And in that year he dropped 46 pounds, eating mostly meat and non-starchy vegetables, plus a piece of dry toast or rusk (zweiback) for tea. And he lost the weight even eating four meals a day and drinking an amount of alcohol that would leave me unconscious on the floor.

After losing about a pound a week for that year, he felt better than he had in two decades, could navigate stairs without hyperventilating, and do whatever he needed to do in terms of ordinary activities. He felt that his eyesight and hearing had improved. He was, in short, a happy guy. And having achieved his goal of losing significant weight, he did a remarkable thing: He wrote up his experience as a pamphlet addressed to the public (what today we'd call an "open letter"), printed it at his own expense, and then handed it out to anyone who was interested.

It was popular enough to warrant two sizeable addenda across several printings, but even with those included the whole thing is only 25 pages long, and available as a free facsimile scan from Google Books. You can read it in fifteen minutes, though people who are not used to Victorian diction may find the text a bit of a slog. The pamphlet became popular and was much discussed in the London area at that time, enough so that "to bant" became a new verb, and meant to adopt Banting's diet as a means of losing weight.

The Google Books edition include two longish contemporary commentaries, one from Blackwood's Magazine, the other from Harper's Weekly. Both are snarky wanders intent on demeaning Banting's experience, and neither confronts the truth face-on: Banting did an experiment, recorded his results, and made them public without any attempt to profit from them. (In fact, he gave 50 pounds to a local charity hospital in thanks.) Instead, Blackwood's tries to convince its readers that Banting was not all that fat to begin with, and besides, fat people tend to be affable and law-abiding citizens, so it's good to be fat! There's not a lot to be taken away from the two reviews except the sense that things don't change much; many of the same groundless arguments are thrown today at low-carb diets, simply because "everybody knows" that eating fat makes you fat and the best course is a "balanced diet," which, as always, means "a diet that I favor."

William Banting is important because his experience predates the modern carb wars by close to a century. He wasn't trying to debunk Ancel Keys' fraudulent research or establish a diet-book empire. He was just writing down something that had worked for him, and he cautiously suggested that, under advice from their own physicians, overweight people might try the same method. It may not work for everyone, but (in contradiction to the ridiculous critique in Blackwood's) that does not mean it will not work for anyone.

Highly recommended, especially since you can read it over your eggs and bacon at tomorrow's breakfast. (I read it on my X41.)

We pulled into Crystal Lake last night after all the usual 1100 miles, with three adult bichons and an eight-and-a-half-week-old puppy in the hold. Redball is looking for two permanent names: A kennel name, and a call name. Kennel names are nominally unique (if often complex and sometimes ridiculous) and are how individual purebred dogs are listed in breed databases. QBit's kennel name is Deja Vu's Quantum Bit, and Aero's is Jimi's Admiral Nelson. Jackie's kennel name is Jimi's Hit the Jackpot. We went through a lot of ideas on the way out (Nebraska is good for such things) and floated possibilities like Jimi's Morning Cloudscape. As for call names, well, that's how you call the dog for dinner. Short is good. One of my favorites, after listening to him fuss halfway across Iowa, is Riesling, or Reese for short. Hey, he's white and he whines. (Ceaselessly.)

We'll figure it out. The trip was uneventful. We played my mix CDs, and when the thumping hi-hat intro to Barry Manilow's 1981 cover of "Let's Hang On" started to rise, I cranked up the volume and yelled, "Let's disco!" I was being silly, but Carol took me at my word, and for the next 2:57 I watched my spouse do an absolutely pure disco routine without ever leaving the front seat of the 4-Runner. Carol has an amazing gift for dance improv that she almost never gets to exercise. I remember back in 1975 when she stood up to a friend's wedding, and I watched in awe as she and one of her sorority sisters did a near-acrobatic dance improv to a George M. Cohan medley, all in long dresses and high heels, with the wedding party's pink parasols for canes, in front of what must have been three hundred people. Thirty-four years later, well, she still has it.

I do need to set something straight here before too much longer. I got a note from one of my long-time readers just before setting out, asking me how it was that I wrote a book about baby farm animals. I've been asked this before, and the simple answer seems somehow inadequate: I didn't. However, if you google "Baby Farm Animals by Jeff Duntemann" you will get plenty of hits on all the new and used book sites. Don't order it on the strength of my reputation. The book exists, but in fact was written and drawn by the formidable Garth Williams, who is better known for the art in Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web. A little digging revealed an error right at the source: Bowker's ISBN database, which somehow got Williams' book listed under my name. That single booboo has by now propagated into virtually every significant bookselling site on the Web. I think it's hilarious, but if I were Garth Williams, I'd be seriously annoyed, or at least I would be if I weren't dead. I sent a note to Bowker, but don't expect the error to be corrected any time soon.

Ah, well. As I've said before, better Baby Farm Animals than The Story of O.

• Here's a nice, high-school physics level lab demonstration of an aluminum air battery, made from aluminum foil, aquarium charcoal, salt water, and a paper towel. A few of these in series will run a simple solid-state radio. It would be fun to figure out how to expand the concept into something a little more durable, with thicker aluminum plates, in some kind of container that will confine the messy materials and yet admit oxygen to sustain the reaction.
• Damned if the photo of this beambot doesn't remind me of the Ed Emshwiller F&SF cover for "Callahan and the Wheelies," a 1960 story by Stephen Barr that I blatantly imitated in my own high-school fiction.
• When I first got into computing in the midlate 1970s I had a number of CPU green cards, but was always a little puzzled that none of them were...green. (The COSMAC green card was blue, and the 8080 green card was white.) In truth, I didn't know at the time why everybody called them "green cards," and if you still don't know, here's a site where you can see the real deal. (Thanks to Richard Haley for the link.)
• And from Richard's own hand comes a list of instruction mnemonics that you won't find on most green cards, of whatever color. My favorite is EMW, Emulate Maytag Washer, which the crotchety frontloading 3330 disk packs back at Xerox building 214 were very good at doing, except that they were in the spin cycle all the damned time.
• Google Books has mounted most (if not quite all) of a fascinating book called Hi There, Boys and Girls! which is a history of local children's TV programming in the US. The book is organized by TV markets around the country, and the Google Books version is intriguing for how much material is actually available for free. The Chicago material is available, and excellent, if not as detailed as Jack Mulqueen's full-book treatment in The Golden Age of Chicago Children's Television, which has a much more limited Google Books preview.
• We are getting close to the release of Michael Arrington's Crunchpad Internet tablet, but little or nothing has been said about the only thing I really want it for: a large-display ebook reader. It needs an SDHC slot (which I think it has) and some decent ebook software (anybody's guess) but given those two things, it could remake the ebook biz. July is flying. Wherezit at, Mike?

Boy, I sure wasn't expecting this: An email this morning from Lulu informed me that my SF story collection Souls in Silicon was now being offered through Amazon Marketplace at its $11.97 cover price--not cover plus 30%, as I reported in my May 29, 2009 Odd Lots entry. It's evidently a test program of some kind, and not all Lulu books are included; in fact, of the eight Copperwood Press titles, Souls in Silcon is the only one in the program. Somebody's giving up significant margin here, and odds are it's not Amazon.

But this is an awesomely good thing. I have a hunch that Lulu heard that POD publishers like me were going with other systems (like Amazon's own BookSurge) to get into the Amazon database somehow and started to worry. Hey, I'd worry too. All Copperwood books would probably be on another system (probably BookSurge) by now had the assembly book project not taken over my life last November. I would not have pulled them off Lulu, but everybody knows that Amazon is the first place people go looking for books online.

I want this program to continue and go mainstream, not just for me but for everybody, so I'm going to make a slightly weird request: If my writeups on the book piqued your interest and you figured you might order Souls in Silicon someday, now is the time to do it--if you do it through Amazon. I'm about to order a few here, and if I could scare up a couple more orders from elsewhere it could support the test and convince them that the decision could pay off for them, by generating higher unit sales even at obviously lower margins.

Here's the Amazon sales link. (The same link is on the cover image above.) And if you know any other Lulu books in the same program, consider buying them as well. If Lulu's going to survive it has to be able to get its products into the Amazon database. This may be their best shot, at least until they allow me to use ISBNs from my own set.

UPDATE: I just discovered that within the past hour, all the rest of my Copperwood Press titles were updated on Amazon to their Lulu cover prices. Dare we hope that the test program succeeded?

UPDATE: Chris Gerrib wrote to tell me that his Lulu SF novel The Mars Run is also in the program, which in fact includes the top 100,000 Lulu titles by sales rank. Even my slowest seller, The Pope and the Council, is at #37,303, which makes me wonder how many copies the bottom two million Lulu titles have sold...

• The Atlantic tells us that a growth industry in NYC and other crowded cities is training dogs to sniff out...bedbugs. Dogs who can tell live bedbugs from dead earn as much as $325 an hour, and work for kibble. I got some peculiar bites on one side of my right leg while we were down in Champaign-Urbana last week for Matt's graduation, and while I can't prove that bedbugs did it, that side of my right leg is the side that contacts the bed while I sleep (as I nearly always do) on my right side.
• From Chris Gerrib comes word that The Espresso Book Machine has finally been installed in a bookstore, where it prints from a selection of half a million books on the attached server. No word on whether these are all out-of-copyright titles or what, but after what seems like decades of screwing around (I first reported on one-piece book manufacturing machines in 2001) we're finally getting somewhere.
• I've heard tell recently that Vista doesn't play nice with the Xen hypervisor. Anybody had any crisp experience there?
• William Banting's Letter on Corpulence is now available from the Internet Archive, and it's interesting as the very first detailed description of the effects of low-carb diets. Way back in 1864 Banting lost weight by eating protein and fat, and seemed surprised enough by his results to write up his experiences in detail. The more I research this, the more I'm convinced that carbs are what's killing us, and this is not new news.
• Lulu recently cut some kind of deal with Amazon to put all their books (I think; it certainly includes all of mine) in the Amazon database. However, they added five or six bucks to the cover price. Will people buy Carl & Jerry books for $21? Don't know, but somehow I doubt it.
• Machines can often see things that we can't (which is one reason that we build machines) and they're willing to share what they see with us. Sure don't look like this in an 8"...
• Ars Technica published a good article on how DRM actually makes the piracy problem worse--an insight I had years ago, and a painfully obvious one after thinking about it for a nanosecond or two.
• No rest for the weary; several people wrote to ask what I would be writing next. Not sure. I still have to get our butts back to Colorado, but once I do, I want to finish my second SF story collection, and work on Old Catholics. You can bet that I'll be posting more on Contra too, if that counts. Further than that I won't venture, though I think I'll be leaving computers alone for a little while.

Well. A few minutes ago I found myself staring at the last line of the last page of the last chapter of Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition. I'm sure it's a feeling a little like that described by some of my friends who took their time getting through college, and one morning at the end of a term found themselves thinking, "Hey! I have enough credit hours now! I can graduate!"

It took so long that I wasn't quite ready when I realized that it was finally over.

I celebrated by playing the MP3 of David Buskin's "Flying Child" and singing along. Loudly. That felt so good that I played Dean Friedman's "Ariel" and sang along louder still. Rather than make myself a little too nuts by singing Danny Hutton's manic cover of "Funny How Love Can Be" I poured myself a Diet Green River and ate too many Cape Cod Robust Russet potato chips before collapsing in my comfy chair.

Ten minutes later, Carol got back from Crystal Lake after a two-day sojourn wrapping up our trip and (not coincidentally) leaving me free to work here in Des Plaines. That was a piece of timing, but Carol's good like that. We understand one another in a quantum-entanglement sort of way that is the very best part of loving a woman for forty years.

In truth, I'm not quite finished. Chapter 12 is still first draft and needs a polish pass. I have to write a new introduction and bibliography, and add two pages to the instruction reference. After that, of course, comes proofs and so on, but it's starting to look like I'll have real books sometime this fall, probably by November and perhaps as early as October. It ran a little long (187,000 words instead of 175,000) but not long enough to fuss about. It soaked up almost all of my creative time and energy since last December. I learned a lot doing it, and as often as I found myself feeling ragged and annoyed at the scale or the pace of the project, I'm still glad I did it. The book has been in print now for 21 years across three editions (the first from a now-defunct publisher under another title) and could well be in print for another ten or fifteen. It paid off my mortgage. In fact, it's made me more money than all my other paid writing projects put together, in all of the 35 years that I've been writing for money. It's gotten to be kind of an institution around here, and I'll rewrite it again if I have to.

But not this week. Please.

Forty three-ish years ago, Uncle Louie gave me a Geiger-Muller tube. I tried to build a Geiger counter with it and failed, and I had this notion that if I could find the tube, I would try again. I haven't seen the tube for quite a few years, but I don't recall giving it away or breaking it, so the damned thing may still be down in the pile somewhere. I dug around yesterday, digging through some boxes I haven't looked through in awhile, including a few that have been sitting in the closet unopened for all the six years since we left Arizona.

I didn't find the Geiger tube. But I found something else that I thought I'd lost: My 1928 copy of Henley's Formulas, which I bought at some used bookstore or another in the '80s and had used as padding (!) in a box containing sweep tubes, 807s, 811As, 829Bs, and other peculiar and outsized specimens. This was a helluva coincidence, as I recommended the book to a friend of mine a few days ago as a handbook of "barn technology" as it was understood and practiced circa WWI.

Henley's reminds me of nothing so much as John Markus' 1968 Sourcebook of Electronic Circuits, which Markus apparently assembled by photocopying every schematic he could grab and slapping it between two covers. Gardner Hiscox did very much the same thing with Henley's, which consists of thousands of short and very short items much like the following:

A Grease for Locomotive Axles. Saponify a mixture of 50 parts tallow, 28 parts palm oil, 2 parts sperm oil. Mix in soda lye made by dissolving 12 parts of soda in 137 parts water.

That was under Lubricants, where there are literally dozens of recipes like the above, for greases and oils of every conceivable use. Not every entry is a recipe; some relay a sort of lost wisdom that was mostly lost (at least to cityfolk) even a hundred years ago. E.g.:

Bear Fat. Fresh bears' fat is white and very similar to lard in appearance. The flank fat is softer and more transparent than the kidney fat, and its odor recalls that of fresh bacon. Bears' fat differs from the fats of the dog, fox, and cat in having a lower specific gravity, a very low melting point, and a fairly high iodine value.

There is a recipe for "Dog Soap" calling for 5 parts petroleum, 4 parts wax, 5 parts alcohol, and 15 parts "good laundry soap." This doesn't sound like a good scrub for white dogs. (QBit just dove under the bed.)

What we have here, as with Markus' book, is a grimoire: A magician's memory jogger set out by categories, containing enough of the details to get you back in the groove without providing enough context to do much with them if you'd never done them before. There was a day when certain people did things like this all the time, out in the barn or the shed, and mainly this book was parked up above the buckets and barrels in case we couldn't recall how many parts of caoutchouc went into that great rubber cement we whipped up a batch of last spring. If you needed a step-by-step, it was ask gramps or sit by Nellie.

Life used to be messy, and this is definitely a very dangerous book for boys. The Explosives section runs several pages, and explains at length how to make gunpowder, guncotton, dynamite, explosive chlorates, and smokeless powder. Some of the recipes are nonetheless exaspiratingly brief:

Fulminating Bismuth. Take bismuth, 120 parts; carbureted cream of tartar, 60 parts, and niter, 1 part.

Take it, sure--at least when I figure out how to carburate my cream of tartar. What one does with it after one takes it; now, that's the trick. I'm not sure you just grind it all up in the mortar. I guess people knew how to make their own fulminates back then. Today, you'd just sink a pipe into the blogosphere and stand back.

A lot of the recipes are for personal care products, including cosmetics, perfumes, many kinds of soaps, treatments for rashes and lice, and even odder things, like one short entry entitled "Skin Bleach for Negroes." The largest single section in the book, as best I can tell, explains the details of making alcohol of many kinds, including calculations of yield per bushel of corn, sugar, or potatoes, and even fruits like bananas. There are pages and pages on dyes, paints, and inks, and a surprisingly large section on metal plating.

Much of the trouble with Henley's is the endangered terminology. I'm sure people used to know what "saponify" and "carburate" meant, and I had a vague idea in both cases. But I thought a "lute" was a medieval guitar; in fact, it's also a kind of putty. I had heard of caoutchouc but had the spelling wrong. I had not heard of iodoform, though I bet I used to smell it down at Dr. Pierce's office in the 1950s. Kefir used to be called "matzoon." "Menstruum" isn't what it looks like; it's actually an archaic term for "solvent." I haven't looked up "red bole" yet, and I thought there was more than one color of vitriol. I've heard the word "tragacanth" but it's been a long time. Ditto "putz pomade," though it sounds like the nickname of a third-string hockey player.

And that was just my first hour of flipping pages and reading random snatches. This is a fascinating book, not so much for whipping up your own matzoon as getting a sense for what people were willing to do in the days before Wal-Mart and Home Depot, before safety became a religion and milkfat became radioactive waste. Back then, skimmed milk was considered dross, suitable only for the making of casein. (It is an "article of slight value, and cannot even be employed in feeding hogs." Bravo! What he said!) Back then, I guess, we made it do or did without, and we were willing to go to a lot more trouble to make it do, assuming we had enough tragacanth powder out in the shed.

Henley's has long been in the public domain (its copyright was never renewed, even for the post-1923 editions) and there are plenty of recent reprint editions for sale on Amazon. (You can also get a free PDF facsimile on the Internet Archive.) Mine is an original, and I like that. I stuck my nose in the gutter and caught the scent of...something old and mostly forgotten. But no! Of course! On page 509: Take 1 ounce orris root, 60 grains terpinol, 4 drams tonka...

My miscellaneous low-priority do-it list has gotten mighty long since January, and every so often I set aside some time to knock off a few items. This morning something interesting bubbled up to the top of the stack: Claim my books under the Google Books Settlement. I've known about this for quite some time and haven't had the mental bandwidth to look into it deeply, but having been roused by rowdy dogs this morning a little earlier than I'd like, I sat down here and read the material.

I'm not quite sure what to think. Google is helping to create a registry of old books that are still in copyright but no longer in print. This is a very good thing, and I signed up to support that effort if nothing else. What Google intends to do is create a legal framework for making those old books available as paid ebooks, and give authors (and where publishers still have rights, publishers) a portion of the take. Google has already scanned a great many books, including a few of my own, and if I can pick up a few quarters by buying in to the system, I will. (Alas, I doubt my 1987 work Turbo Pascal Solutions is going to be a hot seller.)

Mostly, I want the problem of orphan books to be finessed, and I want it finessed without Big Media's copyright lobby shaping it so that it routes all the money to them and leaves the rest of us penniless in the dust. People gripe about Google's interest in the whole thing--they could make an enormous amount of money here if this thing catches on, and in essence become the planet's largest publisher--but the idea is sound and Google may be the best that we can do.

If anyone has any interest in this, go to the Google Books Settlement Site and read the sizeable FAQ. I especially encourage any of my author friends who have published books to decide what they think about the whole thing, and either sign in or opt out. Signing up can be done until January 5, 2010, but opting out must be done by May 5, 2009. I'm guessing that popular authors and their heirs will opt out, figuring they may be able to get a better deal somewhere, and the great starving writer masses (who know that there are no deals on their horizon) will sign on. And that's actually a good thing: The great starving writer masses deserve a way to get whatever scraps may fall from the ebooks publishing table, as the publishing industry generally becomes more and more of a "winner takes all" kind of business.

The framework has not yet been completely created, but it'll happen over time, and it will be very interesting to see if anything comes of it long-term. I'm watching the whole business closely and will report here from time to time, especially once I finish the Book That Ate 2009.

For those who care, I'm 124,266 words in at the moment, shooting for 175,000. Chapter 10 must be submitted before the end of April, and I'm rustier on some of this stuff than I thought.

I recognize that I'm way overdue for writing something profound here, but my head's still too full of conditional jump instructions. So I'll punt and offer something less than profound: Whether or not the book cover at left is funny depends heavily on whether or not you have very young children underfoot.

(Couldn't they have drawn Pooh stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce?)

• The United States has overtaken Germany as the world's lead producer of wind energy, measured in total kilowatts. Way to go--keeping in mind that Germany still beats us all hollow with kilowatts per capita. I'm a big believer in NWS, in that order, and part of the reason N comes before W is that over the past few years, when Carol and I have passed giant wind turbines along I-80 on our way to and from Chicago, they were only turning about a third of the time. Wind energy is great, but it does not stand alone.
• Small children should be allowed to get dirty as a way of building their immune systems. I was digging in the back yard since before I can remember, and never had much trouble with allergies. There may be a downside to our dirt- and germ-averse culture that has nothing to do with the risk of antibiotic-resistant pathogens. (With Gretchen's approval, I think I'm going to buy our nieces a couple of garden trowels next Christmas...)
• Few people today remember that Apple Computer was once a Pascal shop, and had a promo poster in the late 70s incorporating a classic "railroad" diagram of Pascal language syntax. Yes, the 70s really did look like that. (At least it wasn't all done in Harvest Gold.) Thanks to Paul Santa-Maria for the link. Paul created his own version of the poster in black and white, which I hope he makes available at some point. The Waite Group sold (or gave away; not sure if it was a boom promo) a similar card in the same era, but it's long since vanished from my collection.
• Has anyone here ever read any of the Very Short Introduction books from Oxford University Press? Are they useful? I just ordered several, and I'm curious as to the quality of the series. I'll report here once the books show up and I've had a chance to read them. There are many subjects I'm interested in sufficiently to read 150 pages on, but not 600 pages.
• A German publisher wrote an article claiming that cheaper ebooks will put them out of business. (The article is in German; take what you can from the English summary or if you know the language, click through to the original.) The gist is that there are special costs associated with e-publishing that more than balance the special costs associated with print publishing. My take: If true, it's only until we get up to speed. (I also think it may be true that many publishers don't really understand all the forces that bear on how they make their money. Many things lead up to the cash-register's beep, not all of them obvious.
• I'm a lot less sanguine about the OLPC than I used to be, but the recent unveiling of future designs intrigues me: The next-gen OLPC will have two displays, and can be held and read portrait-style, like a book. When a keyboard is needed, rotate the device 90, and one of the two displays becomes a keyboard. Very cool, and something like that should be sold worldwide by every electronics retailer. (Their peculiar distribution mechanism will eventually be the end of them.)

Context changes are expensive, whether you're a writer or an operating system. That's why I like long, uninterrupted days to write. Writing in small chunks on large projects never worked well for me; I'd rather pull three ten-hour days than find thirty disjointed hours in the course of a week and waste half of each of them trying to recover my train of thought.

So it's been with the fourth edition of Assembly Language Step By Step. I've spent most of the last four days blasting away at it, and if I haven't returned to the Carb Wars here, that's the reason. All in good time.

This is a big project, probably the biggest I've attempted since Drive-by Wi-Fi Guide, and it's likely to be eating my life until June. There's a great deal of new material to be written, and a lot of concepts to be covered that just weren't issues under DOS. For example, when you work at the assembly level under Linux, endianness comes into play and needs to be explained, even though 85% of the world's desktop hardware is little-endian.

That's actually been fun; as I've said many times, the very best way to make sure you understand something is to explain it to somebody else. What's been humbling is running into writing bad enough to make me wince. Every so often, I have to push back in my chair, heave a deep sigh, and ask myself the purely rhetorical question: "Geez. Did I write that?" (I did. 21 years ago. Practice helps...)

No problem; this is what editors do, though I am very glad that we're not using typewriters anymore. And unlike certain other projects I've worked on, the author in this case takes criticism well.

I'm hard at the rewrite of my assembly book, and in going over the chapters closely I realize that I have a lot to do, significantly more than I thought going in. Parts of this book date back to 1988, and the work as a whole was not organized back then the way I would organize it today. So I'm doing more to it than I thought I would, and although that will make for a better book, it's also eating more of my time. (Expect a few fewer Contra posts over coming months, and perhaps shorter ones.)

I've also been using Ubuntu a lot more than I ordinarily do, since the rewrite finally exiles DOS from the discussion except as a historical footnote. I find myself surfacing for a breath now and then, and realizing, I haven't been in Windows for almost six hours! Crossover Linux has made this possible, since I have Office 2000 and Visio 2000 installed under Ubuntu now, and don't have to be bouncing between two machines or two partitions to write code and then write about the code.

In the process, I've been using Ubuntu more and at more depth than I ever have before. One thing I'm beginning to appreciate is just how easy it is to get software and keep it current, and just how good the software that's out there really is. That's changed in ten years. Back in 1999, in order to run NASM under Red Hat I had to download a tar file full of source, unzip it somewhere, and then recompile the whole damned thing. I had no intention of changing the assembler and would have been more than happy with binaries.

It's different now. With Ubuntu (and I assume most modern distros) you go up to a software repository through a package manager utility, cruise an enormous list of free packages that are available, and check off the stuff you want. Then you click Apply and stand back: The package manager downloads the package and anything that the package depends on, checking first to see if you've got any of the prerequisites installed already. Only the stuff you need comes down, and when the smoke clears you have new apps on your app menu, or new libraries tucked in where they're supposed to go. (Or both.) Wow.

Ubuntu periodically checks to see if updates are available for anything you have installed, and a couple of clicks brings them down and installs them.

I'm sure that not everything that exists is up there, but what's up there is extremely impressive. If I allowed myself to get distracted, I'd be playing with Gambas and Boa Constructor rather than writing. The Nemiver debugger front end didn't exist ten years ago, and it will star in the new edition of Assembly Language Step By Step. Most of all, I want to play with Lazarus (the GUI IDE for Free Pascal) and have to slap my hands periodically, or I'd get nothing else done.

The primary barrier to the adoption of the Linux Desktop is unlearning old habits, followed as a distant second by conversion of existing Windows-centric files. There may have been a third barrier somewhere, but I've forgotten what it was. There is certainly no shortage of software to get the jobs done.

I got the NASM plug-in installed into Eclipse yesterday, after a tip from Bishop Sam'l Bassett of the Old Catholic Church, who had spotted a forum comment that I hadn't. (The real skill in using the Internet is crafting your search terms.) Eclipse has a plug-in cache, and sometimes you have to empty the cache to get it to refresh its list of plug-ins. I intuit that this function is usually served by exiting and restarting Eclipse, but in my case that wasn't enough.

I got the cache cleared by rebooting the system, and suddenly, there was the plug-in. The forum comment in question also mentioned that you can start Eclipse with the -clean command-line parameter, and Eclipse will start "clean" with an empty plug-in cache. I didn't have to do this, but it's worth knowing.

Otherwise, I had done all the right things. Eclipse doesn't really "install" plug-ins in the sense that we install things in Windows. Unzipping a plug-in archive under the Eclipse plugins directory is all that installation requires, assuming that the archive contains all of a plug-in's necessary elements.

There's still work to be done in configuring Eclipse to develop with NASM (setting paths for the assembler and gcc, and a bunch of other things) but that's straightforward and should be done long since by tonight. I'm going up to SoftPro Books in Denver tomorrow with Jim Strickland, and we'll see what they might have that could be useful getting up to speed with Eclipse. A quick scan of pertinent titles on Amazon indicates that most books are about developing Java apps with Eclipse, but some discussion of the IDE in general terms would be very useful about now.

I have a gripe about Ubuntu that I might as well air at this point. The folders in which you unpack Eclipse plug-ins are owned by root, and unless you're running as root you can't unpack files into those folders. Fair enough. I had hoped that Ubuntu and Gnome would have evolved sufficiently since I last did this sort of thing to just pop up a sudo dialog when the user (and we're all users on this bus; Ubuntu does not really have a root account in the strict sense of the word) attempts to do something that violates permissions. But no; it throws up a fairly useless message and glares at you. To get the job done you have to bring up a terminal or the graphical command line dialog and run "gksudo nautilus" to run Nautilus as root. Installer systems like apt-get don't throw tantrums like that on you; when they need permission to install files in folders owned by root they just ask for your password. Nautilus needs to do that.

After all, I'm the Visual Developer Magazine guy, and I have a fetish: Command lines should never be compulsory. Never. It's 2008. We're supposedly all OS grown-ups now. Fundamental things like file management should be 100% point-and-click.

As I mentioned yesterday, my publisher wants me to revise Assembly Language Step By Step over the coming year, for release in early 2010. I had assumed for some time that they considered the book a dead issue, though judging by my royalty statements, it continues to sell. And that's a clue: When the market is bad, publishers get nervous about striking out in entirely new directions with new series and lots of new titles. A handful of books are what they call "evergreens," because they sell all year, every year, for years and years and years. I think that a lot of evergreen titles are going to be freshened up and reissued in the next few years. The publisher considers my book an evergreen (it was first published, after all, in 1989, and has sold steadily ever since) and the acquisitions editor had done her homework. She wanted DOS to go. She wanted to ditch the CD bound into the book. She wanted more Linux coverage. And if possible, she wanted me to use Ubuntu as the flavor of Linux cited in the book.

I'm cool with all that. I had decided years ago that DOS would be missing from any future editions. I had assumed that I would include coverage of 32-bit Windows console apps, but I'm not welded to that notion, nor to any particular Linux distro. The book is not about Windows, nor about Linux. It needs an OS over which to run the example programs, but which OS is mostly immaterial, so long as it supports the Intel 32-bit flat model. The book is a "front door" introduction to what computers actually are, and how Intel-based machines function under the hood. It's about that waydeepdown place where the software meets the hardware. It is not about how to make API calls nor how to coordinate all the folderol that happens inside large-scale apps.

A lot of people misunderstand the book, and I get gripes all the time about how it "doesn't go far enough" and "doesn't teach the principles of software development." That's not what it's for, and I don't have the page budget to write enough book to satisfy all my gripers. The format has worked across twenty years and three editions, and I'm sticking with it.

There's still a lot of work to do. Much of the coverage depends on DOS, DOS calls through INT21, and BIOS calls through INT13. All that has to go. I need to explain how the software interrupt mechanism itself works, and for that I'm going to defy the Unix Gods and explain how to use the Linux INT80 call gate. This is heresy, but the mantra that "INT80 calling conventions can change at any time" isn't sufficient reason to keep the secret. I've asked several people to show me an example—even a single example!—of when a Linux INT80 kernel call changed, but so far I've seen nothing. And even if some of the more arcane kernel calls are still evolving, I doubt that the very simple calls have changed at all in many years. Proper warning will be given, but I don't bow before that particular altar anymore.

Alas, if DOS goes, Rob Anderton's excellent NASMIDE programming environment has to go as well, and something else will need to be found to help people load, assemble, link, and run the examples. I've got John E. Davis' text-mode JED editor installed, and in a pinch it will do, but the holy grail for me would be running NASM under Eclipse. Eclipse is a sort of Erector set (ok, a Lego set) for creating platform-independent IDEs in Java. Almost everything beyond the very basics is a plug-in. You can get plug-ins for most modern languages and toolsets, and Eclipse can run anywhere that Java runs. (Of course, your tools must either be in Java or available on the host hardware.) Eclipse itself and nearly all available plug-ins are free and open-source. I've already got it running here on both XP and Ubuntu. All I need is a NASM-oriented assembly language plug-in.

The infuriating thing is that such a plug-in exists, but it comes with no installation documentation, and it does not install the way all other Eclipse plug-ins I've seen install. Eclipse has a clever system in which plug-ins are posted on the Web using a standard format, so that the Eclipse environment can fetch them down and install them automatically, given a URL. I've downloaded the plug-in file and have tried just about everything to get Eclipse to suck it in or even see it. So far, no luck. If you've ever gotten it to install and work, boy, I'd sure love to learn the secret.

I have to scope out some new example programs, write them, and then describe them, and make sure that DOS and segmented Real Mode retreat into a few pages of historical context. It's months of work, even if it becomes my major project (which it will) and knocks most of my lesser projects back into the closet (which it might.) I'm slurping at the firehose right now regarding Eclipse, and have a couple of books on order. It's going to be a long climb, but I've made such climbs before, and they're always good mental exercise. It'll give this book (which I considered a throwaway back in 1989!) another eight or ten years of life. The publisher has always treated me well, and the book paid off my mortgage. What's not to love?

• My editor at John Wiley called and indicated that they want me (finally!) to rewrite Assembly Language Step By Step for a new edition in the spring of 2010. This will be a big job, since DOS will be jettisoned completely (and real mode relegated to a hisorical footnote) and a huge chunk of the book will have to be rewritten almost from scratch. More on this in coming days.
• OEM Parts in Colorado Springs (our local surplus house) is moving to a new and larger building about 2 miles north of their current location on Palmer Park. I was there with Mike Sargent the other day and discovered that everthing was half price. Got a bunch of Compactron tubes, some NOS Miller coils, a dozen or so high-ohmage 1-W carbon resistors, and a roll of emery cloth for $22. The new address is 3029 N. Hancock. They weren't entirely sure when they new location would open. Phone first: 719-635-0771
• PC Magazine is going "all digital." That means they're dropping the print edition. The last printed issue will January 2009. I remember when that damned thing was an inch and a half thick. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• A wine to avoid: Schmitt-Sohne Relax Cool Red, which is a dornfelder so bad I drank one glass and dumped the rest. No wine has gotten that treatment since Three Thieves Zinfandel, and before that, Bully Hill's Sweet Walter, which still holds the prize as the worst single wine I have ever tried.
• Mars is evidently not as dry as we thought: Glacier-sized water-ice glaciers (and not snowdrift-sized glaciers) have been reliably detected by way of the SHARAD radar system on the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter. Some of this stuff is half a mile thick, and you can do interesting things with such quantities of volatiles, water most of all. I recall an entry in my SF story ideas file from many years ago: Somebody has begun terraforming Mars—but nobody knows who.
• While we're talking Mars, Pete Albrecht alerted me to the impending release of Christmas on Mars, a new film billed as "avant-garde SF," which in my experience generally means "filmed in somebody's basement." The major character is Major Syrtis. Nyuk-nyuk.
• And while we're talking space, it's worth noting that the average American thinks that NASA gets 25% of the $2.7T federal budget. (!!!!) The truth is 0.58%.

Uggh. Today has been misery punctuated by mere discomfort, and you won't get anything profound from me tonight. What time I didn't spend in bed with Aero's butt in my armpit and QBit lying across my ankles I spent reading in my big chair, pulling Kleenexes from the box as needed and tossing them atop my desk when I finished with them. A few minutes ago, I looked at the pile of snotty Kleenex and asked myself, "Did I do all that nose-blowing this afternoon?" I was so bleary I barely remember.

Yet objective evidence (the head-sized pile of snotty tissues) suggests that I did.

And on that note I will make a very strong recommendation for the book I am mostly through reading, though I will probably have to read it a second time once I'm no longer blissed out on antihistamines. Do not miss this one: Mistakes Were made, But Not By Me, by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. (Thanks to Michael Abrash for recommending the book.) It is a masterful piece of pop psychology, beautifully written and well footnoted, that offers to explain why we justfy foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful behavior. It has been a painful read in that I have seen myself in every other paragraph, and you will too. It has been a hopeful read, however, in that I have been intuitively struggling against these damaging psychological mechanisms for much of my adult life; in fact, the book has allowed me to define what I mean by contrarianism: the act of swimming against the torrent of stupidity and falsehood that flows from the deeper mind.

If you are a person given to certainty, the book will enrage you, since it almost defines certainty as a species of mental illness. (This is also the thesis of another book that I have read but not yet reviewed here, On Being Certain, by Robert A. Burton.) No matter what you're certain about, you're wrong. So am I. All knowledge is tentative, and our memories are full of holes and scrambled pointers. I'll start talking about that once I feel better and this damned election is over.

At this point it's time for shower and bed, and my nose is running. Damn. I'm out of Kleenex. I was sure that the box was still half-full!