Where the writing flows …

I’ve been doing quite a bit of editing these past couple of days. It is mostly inspired (and instigated) by my new crit pal 🙂 I haven’t actually gotten that many critiques of my work – partially because I haven’t been able to find good (and reliable) beta readers but also because I don’t have the time to give back to a crit group. I hate joining a crit group and then not putting in enough effort but just coasting along so that I can get my own stuff critted. That seems somehow dishonest.

But I digress. Working one on one with another writer can be really helpful. I’ve gotten feedback on what works and what doesn’t work with "Honest" and thinking about it, I realized that the opening chapter (the one which is currently up on my site :p) is too long. I spend too much time on two characters and then completely forget them for several chapters as I introduce more new characters. I decided to see if it would work better by cutting the first chapter into several different chapters (or scenes) and interspersing the introduction of the other characters in between. It seems to work (to me) but what do I know? :p

I also got another rejection early in the morning today 🙂 This is the second rejection in about a week for this short story. This is actually from one of the few places which usually gives feedback on their rejections but this time, the rejection didn’t prove to be very helpful. It said, "Intriguing as this is, it moves awfully slowly – I’m not sure if it’s just the pacing, or the excessive exposition. The footnotes are amusing, for a while, and then become a little annoying, too – I suggest using them judiciously, if at all." It’s not very helpful when they aren’t sure why the story moves slowly – at least, for me. I’m kind of wondering if I should give up on the short stories and simply take the time to work on my novels. Or if I should put writing on hold for a while and get back to coding …. Guess I’ll figure it out 🙂

Response and responsibility

I read an interesting entry on a blog I visited today. The entry was about how this lady was the guidance counsellor for a group of high school students and she almost stopped a project that a few of them proposed because she didn’t have the time to devote to it. (She tells the story much better and my condensation just doesn’t do justice to it anyway – so go read the story :p) She realized in time that they didn’t want her to be involved, just to be a counsellor and they did end up going ahead with it and it was a roaring success.

When I read the story, I was struck by her final comments where she remarks about how often have we shot down a project or an idea because *we* couldn’t handle the responsibility. She wrote the article from the perspective of a counsellors (or an adults) interaction with youth. But I was struck by the fact that this same point applied to what we did everyday with anybody we came in contact with. So I wrote a comment on her site which said something along the lines of, how often have we, perhaps unconsciously, discouraged somebody from following their dream or from trying out a new idea they had because we thought it wouldn’t work or because we felt that the other person wasn’t ready for it or because we didn’t want to be dragged into the project ourselves? How often have we crushed the seed of something great because of our fears, insecurities and our prejudices? Makes you realize how much responsibility you wield on a day-to-day basis and how the tiniest of your actions can affect things on such a grand scale perhaps. A butterfly flapping its wings in Sumatra …

Wiki, wiki, wow!

I mentioned yesterday how I was looking for an new note-taker/information manager utility which had keywords. Well, since yesterday was my day off, I decided to devote the full day to my search 🙂

First, I went through page after page of Google searches and came up with a couple of possibilities – TexNotes Pro and TaoNotes 3D Pro. They both had keyword-based searching of notes but the UI of each app itself turned out to be the problem :p In the case of TexNotes Pro, each note is opened in a new tab and there is no easy way to close tabs quickly. So, given that I go through dozens of notes in a given work day, I’m going to end up with a really cluttered UI pretty soon with TexNotes. I believe TexNotes is meant for somebody who has multiple large notes. Not somebody like me, who has tons of tiny notes 🙂 The issue with TaoNotes was similar – I didn’t like the UI or the way it was laid out. It seemed way too clunky :p

At this point, I had another idea. Keywords was what I had been looking for up till then but what about tags? Tagging has been pretty big lately and there had to be somebody who thought of combining information management and tagging? I found that there were a lot of people who talked about the "concept" (mostly with regards to web 2.0) but there didn’t appear to be any actual desktop apps around (at least ones that I could find via a Google search) that did what I wanted. Then I had another idea – what about a wiki? Or rather, a personal wiki?

This led me to a list of desktop Wiki software at Wikipedia which in turn led to several possible candidates. The most likely looking were Notebook, WikiPad and TiddlyWiki – though I actually found TiddlyWiki elsewhere and later saw it listed in the Wikipedia list under a different section :p Notebook was a straightforward note taking app which behaved like a wiki. WikiPad had an automatic treeview created from the wiki entries but it didn’t have tags and it used non-wiki syntax to format the entries, as did Notebook. So the sole contender left was TiddlyWiki. (Actually, that’s not quite how it went down – I found TiddlyWiki before I found the other two but it reads better this way :p)

Now TiddlyWiki deserves a paragraph to itself because it’s quite the marvel 🙂 First of all, there is no installation. Secondly, it’s just one simple (OK, maybe not quite simple …) HTML file. Yes, that’s all there is to TiddlyWiki! You download the HTML file, load it in your browser and you have a wiki. I really like this solution. There is no complicated installation. No software to lug around. And no proprietary file formats to deal with. All my information is in one HTML file which lets me access the information I want, the way I want! And it supports tagging! What more could you ask for? (I don’t yet know what more I can ask for but for the moment, I’m using TiddlyWiki as my new information storage/management engine …)

Information overload

As you go through life, one thing that you don’t stop accumulating (besides bills :p) is information. Now if you’re one of those people who can keep all that useful (and useless) information in your noggin, the more power to you. Me, I prefer to rely on one of Sherlock Holmes‘ maxims – as Holmes himself says in "A Study in Scarlet": "I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

So what do I do to not fill up my brain attic with useless information? Why, store it all on the computer of course :p The problem with storing information on the computer is that you have to remember where you stored the information in the first place 🙂 The easiest way to solve that problem is to have all your information in one place. So I began using TreePad a long, long time ago. In those days, the app was free and it was fairly straightforward – you saved text in a file which represented various folders and branches of information in a treeview.

For close to ten years, TreePad was all that I used. But during that time, TreePad itself evolved, spawned new versions, added new features and my information capturing needs changed as well. A year or so ago, I looked at what was available for capturing, storing and organizing information and after going through several possible candidates, I selected TreeDBNotes. One of the reasons for my switch was the much better interface on TreeDBNotes, but that wasn’t the only reason :p I believe it was also cheaper, had more in the way of features and it was free to upgrade. I’ve been using TreeDBNotes for a year now and have been perfectly happy with it but a few days ago, I got that old itch to change information managers :p

The reason? The tree paradigm no longer cuts it for me. Sure, I can organize information into different tabs of trees and different branches in each tree but I still have to remember which tab or which branch holds the information I want :p For instance, I have like 4-5 tabs in my TreeDBNotes file – for work, writing, personal information, passwords etc. On the work tab, I have different branches for the different things I work with – mysql, Plesk, cPanel, qMail and so on. But what happens when I have a bit of information that relates to mySQL under Plesk? Do I put it in the Plesk branch or the mySQL branch? Sure, I can put it in one or the other and put a bookmark to it from the other location but that is a lot of work and I still have to remember where to look for the information the next time I need it. Or I have to keep hitting "Search" and hope that I know what to search for :p

So I began thinking of a keyword based information manager. Simply store the information but tag the information with keywords. So, for the above scenario I described, the bit of information would have both the mySQL and Plesk keywords and I’d find it no matter which keyword I used. Simple right? Well, not quite :p The problem is that such information managers don’t appear to be there yet. Or if they are, they are either very expensive and meant for the corporate market or not very user-friendly. About the closest approximation to what I want, that I’ve been able to find, are Personal Knowbase and knowledgeBase. But they each have their own shortcomings. Yes, I’m picky :p So I’m still in search of that perfect information management tool …

Rejections and reflections

I received another rejection day-before-yesterday – this time for one of my short stories. I had submitted my story, The Wyrm’s Lair, to Orson Scott Card’s Integalactic Medicine Show. I am not worried about the rejection – rejections are bound to come – but the way the rejection was given surprises me a bit. First of all, though the magazine has a website, the rejection came from a Yahoo address :p Secondly, they are supposed to respond to submissions in three months and the rejection came right on the dot on the final day of the three month period. The my paranoid side can’t help but wonder if perhaps they ever read the submission or they simply reject everything that has been with them for three months?

This paranoia is reinforced by point number three – there was no reason given, no critique of the story. It simply stated, "we can’t use it, you can submit it elsewhere now". To be honest, I’m disappointed with Orson Scott Card :p Of course to be even more honest, I’ve never read any Orson Scott Card :p He’s one of those authors that I’ve been meaning to read since I first saw one of his books on a library shelf way back in 1989. But I’ve never done so because either I never find any of his books at the bookstore or I find part of a series and never the whole series. But still, I expected a magazine run by somebody of his calibre would at least give you a few pointers when they rejected your submission.

I grew up reading about Hugo Gernsback and "scientifiction", about authors of the calibre of John W. Campbell, Horace L. Gold, Lester Del Rey and Anthony Boucher who would spend hours discussing stories with their writers and who even when they rejected a story, inspired the writer to do better. When I started writing and submitting myself, I expected something like that. But I guess I’m forgetting the fact that the world has moved on. That everybody is in a hurry, that everything moves much faster now. I have made hundreds of queries and a few submissions over the last year or so. Most of those have been met with a rejection without any explanation. Of the handful of submissions I’ve made, I’ve received one rejection where they actually took the time to analyze stuff. Everybody else used meaningless and pat phrases like "not right for me", "I can’t get enthusiastic about it" or "too busy" to get out of actually giving their honest opinion.

Is it just that the world has become so PC that nobody wants to offend anybody else? Or just that everybody is so busy that they can’t be bothered to sit down and write down their opinion? Or worse yet, that nobody has an opinion anymore? :p

The way I see it …

I know I said I won’t do it but I’ve started editing "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" again 🙂 It all started like this: I came across a crit group where the crits were individual. You select somebody that you think will suit your requirements as to what you’re looking for in a crit partner and you pair up with them. They crit your stuff and you crit theirs. If it doesn’t work out, you move on and find another partner and so on.

Except for Laurie going through the book several times, "Honest" has not had any full crits done on it. Yes, I’m already submitting the book to agents but I can’t but help feeling that perhaps there are things that could be improved upon :p So, I’ve been thinking of getting into a crit group but the biggest issue with that is time. I don’t have enough time to devote to a full crit group where you’d be critting the works of several others in return for them critting your work. However, a one-on-one crit is much more manageable for me in terms of time. Besides, the person I picked turned out to have just as many time constraints as I do :p So we both know that the crits will not be lightning-fast but that they will get there.

We’ve exchanged our first chapters and critted them and I like what I’ve read as well as the crit I’ve received so far. It has been very helpful in pointing out an area that I’ve always had trouble with – point of view (POV). When I write, I simply write. I don’t worry about head-hopping, about switching POV in mid-scene etc. This worked fine for non-fiction where I didn’t have to worry about this kind of stuff but when you’re writing fiction, this is something that you have to be very careful about :p

I do think that I managed to get the POV stuff under control by my second or third edit – whichever the last one was. But it still wasn’t perfect. The problem has been the fact that I’m confused as to how POV works :p I think that if it is third-person limited POV, then everything has to be described through the POV character’s eyes. You can’t state anything that is supposition as fact. While strictly speaking this might be true, it tends to lead to rather lengthy sentences with "appeared to", "seemed to" or "as if" being included in them a lot 🙂

So I went back to basics. I took up a few Pratchetts – I consider him to be my virtual guru. Besides, my style is pretty similar to his and so it made sense to look at his books for POV advice 🙂 After reading a few excerpts from "Small Gods", "Night Watch" and "Going Postal", I had a much clearer view of how I should handle point of view :p Of course, PTerry does do some head hopping in "Small Gods" and that is supposed to be a no-no but then again, he’s a master! Me, I’m still not published and so I don’t think I should become that ambitious. But I did go ahead and dropped the "seemed", "appeared" and so on from my narrative and it actually seems to read much better :p

Who’s to blame?

I’ve been going through news reports about the whole Blue Frog thing that I wrote about yesterday here, here and at a few other places as well. The more I read these reports, the angrier I become.

Some of these are probably the selfsame people who talked about "collateral damage" and how "you can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs" when Bush declared his "war on terror" and went over to Iraq in search of WMDs. But now, let a few million "innocent" bloggers be deprived of their daily right to ramble, and out come the pitchforks and the torches. Not to get at the real culprit mind you, but to crucify the guys who actually seem to be fighting the spammers. So I guess a few thousand foreign lives have no value but by God, we have to protect the inalienable right of our innocent bloggers to blog daily, gosh darn it!

(Of course, a reverse of the same rhetoric was used by a Blue Frog defender elsewhere :p He said, and I quote, "First, the media says ‘shame on us’ for going after a sick group of people who fly planes into buildings (and who are bent on our destruction). Now, they are saying ‘shame on Blue Security’ for trying their best to fend off a cyber CRIMINIAL who thinks the Internet is his to do as he pleases." So I guess the rhetoric can be used both ways – and even to defend the viewpoint of those who think that Blue is at fault. But the rhetoric stays :p)

Now I’m by not a die-hard Blue-freak :p But Blue Security appears to be doing something about spam when almost all that these so called experts do is to sit around and talk about it. Sure, Blue seems to have been rather stupid in the way they handled the attack. But then again, if their claims are true (and the fact that they have traffic reports showing the decline in traffic to their site seems to indicate that they were working based on a hypothesis that they thought was true), they didn’t know about the DDoS and so weren’t knowingly throwing TypePad to the lions. So why are all these "experts" hell-bent on vilifying Blue Security?

Is it just the human mob mentality where you pick on the closest handy-looking victim because you really don’t care who you blame as long as you have somebody to blame? Or is it more sinister? Are these people blaming Blue because they really don’t want spam to go away because that would mean that their "expert" advice would no longer be needed – at least with regards to spam and so revenue streams will dry up? Or is it just a case of the little green eyed monster rearing its head? I don’t know … but the reporting about the incident, at least, seems a little biased.

And the battle rages on …

I wrote about Blue Security, Blue Frog and the fight against spam a couple of days ago. At that time, I mentioned how a spammer was trying to intimidate Blue Frog users and get them to stop using Blue Frog. I also mentioned that the Blue Frog servers appeared to be under attack at that time.

Well, it turns out that the two events were related. The spammer who was trying to get Blue Frog users to stop was the same one who was attacking the Blue Frog servers. He had gone as far as to get an employee at an ISP to filter all traffic to the Blue Frog site except from inside Israel, where their servers were located. If I was surprised at that – at the fact that employees at ISPs were corruptible and didn’t really take their responsibilities seriously – I shouldn’t have been. We are after all, human and utterly fallible :p

Blue Security had overcome that particular issue by moving their company blog outside Israel by pointing it to a TypePad account of theirs. The spammer had retaliated by launching a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against the TypePad servers, denying service not just to Blue Security but all the other users of the service as well. Apparently, the spammer then proceeded to DDoS TuCows, Blue Security’s domain service provider, resulting in TuCows terminating their services for Blue Security.

Of course, this Yahoo news report (and probably others like it) seems to indicate that Blue Security might not have been totally blameless here and it looks as if people are actually blaming Blue Security for all this. I am not aware of the actual events that took place – besides, they say that there are three versions of the truth: his, hers and what really happened :p However, there are two things that I do find interesting – one, that major service providers (including registrars) will shut you down if somebody attacks you and you did not do anything. Basically, they are punishing you for somebody else’s misdeeds. Two, that people will find the most visible scapegoat for anything without actually bothering to find out who is at blame. This unfortunately, is typical of most people.

Sure, Blue Security might have been aware that they were being DDoSed and have pointed their domains at TypePad – if they did, that was reprehensible. It is also possible that they were never aware of the DDoS as they claim and that they simply pointed stuff at TypePad so that they’d have a site visible to the rest of the world. So why castigate them? Why is it that nobody talks about the spammer here and censures the guys who actually make the effort to go after spammers? I think it’s because this is not about who is right or wrong but about one thing and one thing only … money 🙂

TuCows is going to lose money if their servers are down and so they cut Blue Security loose – doesn’t matter that Blue Security was combatting spam and were a victim of the DDoS themselves. TypePad is angry because their servers went down and they look bad. Does anybody care that somebody took the stand against spammers? No. All they care about is their own businesses.

However, this situation has certainly made me go after the spammers with a vengeance 😛 I used to simply delete the spam in my Google and Yahoo inboxes. Not anymore. I report the spam with relish! If 10% of the people who were affected by this whole Blue Frog thing feel the same way as I do, the spammers have made a major mistake by launching this attack and they are going to find that it’s going to cost them …

Attack of the purchase pains

My new computer purchase pains that I’ve been chronicling for a while now, decided to strike back in force yesterday :p Of course, the story stretches over a few days and begins day-before-yesterday.

The story actually begins on Wednesday the 3rd when I last referred to the purchase pains story 🙂 I received a call from the notebook sales guy and he said that they had the RAM and that they were ready to come over to our place and install the RAM. I said fine and they said "see you in about half an hour" and hung up. An hour goes by, nothing. Two hours go by and still nothing. So I call the guy up and ask him if he’s lost or something and he says, "Oh sorry, our boss had an urgent job for us and so we’re doing that instead. We’ll try to come over to your place tomorrow".

And of course, they never turn up on Thursday :p On Friday, we had to go out and so I decided that we might as well take the notebook over to the shop and get the RAM since otherwise we’ll probably be waiting forever and still get nothing. So over to the shop we went, got the 2GB of RAM installed, got the USB flash thumb-drive we were promised as well and came back home.

Everything appeared to work fine on Friday. Saturday morning (yesterday), I turn on the notebook and start working and half an hour in or so, the screen suddenly goes blank and the computer reboots. I get a sinking feeling in my stomach since these are familiar symptoms (at least for me :p). When the computer comes back up, it doesn’t even get through the boot process. I think perhaps the new RAM is not seated properly and so I open up the machine, remove the RAM and replace it. The machine boots up, stays up for another half an hour and then reboots again. So it goes through the morning – sometimes the machine boots up immediately, sometimes I have to keep it shut down for a while before it will come up again and it always appears to go down soon enough.

I had sent a Windows crash report in there somewhere and Windows came back saying that it was probably a RAM issue and to use their Windows Memory Diagnostic utility. I download the thing and realize that there is nothing remotely Windows about it – it’s a DOS-ish utility which needs to boot via a floppy or CD-ROM and I don’t have any CD’s to burn at the moment. So I find an alternative – AleGr MemTest, which can be launched from XP itself. I launch the test and one screen into the test, the screen goes blank and the computer refuses to come up at all after that :p

It’s around 9 o’clock at that time and shops do not open for another hour. I get read, call a trishaw and go to the notebook shop. The shop is closed! I call the guys and they are like "Oh, we had a meeting and so we are opening late but we’ll be there soon!". They come in, get the machine open and test the RAM and it turns out that one of the RAM sticks are bad. And guess what? They don’t have any more RAM in stock! What about the two 512MB sticks they removed from my machine a couple of days ago? Oh, they’ve already sent it over to their head office since they needed RAM badly! So now I’m down to 1GB again and they tell me it is going to take at least a couple of weeks for them to get the other 1GB in because they’re having cash-flow problems. If mine is any indication of the kind of experience in dealing with them, I can perhaps see why they might have cash-flow issues …

Spammers and scammers

Have you heard of Blue Frog? It’s this anti-spam solution by Blue Security. It comes as a free tool installed on your computer as well as a FireFox extension which automatically submits spam from your Hotmail, Yahoo and GMail accounts to Blue Security for processing. (Don’t follow the links above at the moment since their servers appear to be under attack and they are trying as hard as they can to combat the issue and we don’t want to aggravate things, now do we? :p)

So why am I writing about Blue Frog (besides the fact that it is a good tool)? Well, I signed up for Blue Frog a while back, used it for a while and then uninstalled it. The reason I uninstalled it is because I’m too lazy :p I get about 20-40 spam messages a day and it’s all through my regular e-mail client, not webmail. The way Blue Frog works is that you have to forward the spam mails to Blue Security and they send a complaint to the spammer’s sponsor organization when you complain. The idea is that the more people who complain, the more complaints that the spammer gets – sort of a reverse spam :p

So being, totally lazy, I just couldn’t be bothered to forward mails to Blue Security and so I gave up on it. Gave up that is, till a few days ago. "What happened a few days ago?" you might ask. I got a message from spammer saying that they had hacked the Blue Security registry and that they had my e-mail address as a Blue Frog user and that they were going to keep spamming me till I stopped using it. Now the thing is, I wasn’t a Blue Frog user at that point. I don’t know for certain that Blue Security was hacked. Actually, it’s rather simple to find out if somebody’s e-mail address is registered with Blue Security or not. Blue Security has a feature where a spammer can run their mailing list through Blue Security to find out which addresses are protected by Blue Security so they can remove those addresses from their mailing list. All a malicious spammer needs to do is run their mailing list like that, pick the protected ones and start spamming them :p

What annoyed me was the effrontery of the spammer in thinking that all he had to do was to start spamming you more to get you to stop complaining about them. I ignored the message at that point but I got several more copies of the same message that day. The next morning, instead of the usual 20 spam messages, I got around 80. Now I am not sure if the two events are linked or if it was random chance. But since my spam count has increased since then, I decided to take action. I wasn’t doing anything to combat spam till then except to delete them when they came in but I sure as heck was going to report them if they thought they could scare me :p

That was yesterday. I looked around for a good solution and came back to an old faithful – MailWasher 🙂 I used to filter all my mail via MailWasher before opening it in my mail client but when I got PocoMail, I decided to do away with MailWasher and rely only on PocoMail’s internal junk mail filtering. It does work fairly well (I mean Poco’s junk mail filtering) but what brought me back to MailWasher was the fact that MailWasher now has built-in support for reporting spam to Blue Security :p So, I installed MailWasher again, ran all my mail through that and have been reporting spam left, right and center to Blue Security. Only problem is that their servers are under attack (I guess they must be getting effective and the spammers really hate them :p) and so, my spam reports are bouncing 🙂 Hopefully, they get the attacks sorted out and will be back to normal operations soon ….