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Hugo Nomination Kudos

March 29, 2007

Kudos and congrats are due to some friends who have gotten onto the final ballot for the Hugos this year: John Picacio, nominated for both the Professional Artist category and the Related Book category (for Cover Story, his collection of book covers). Not only is John a phenomenal, groundbreaking artist, but he’s an extremely nice guy too, which isn’t a bad combination. Lou Anders, my esteemed editor at Pyr, has received a well-deserved nomination for … Read more

Five Things That Do Happen When You Become a Published Author

March 16, 2007

Following my somewhat pessimistic post on Five Things That Don’t Happen When You Become a Published Author, here are a few things I’ve noticed that do happen when you become a published author. 1. Strangers will be strangely deferential to you. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met in the past year whose eyes lit up when they discovered I had written a novel published by a real, live, New York publisher. The … Read more

Five Things That Don’t Happen When You Become a Published Author

March 13, 2007

Just a few random observances of what my life as a published author has been like compared to what I had expected or hoped for. Keep in mind that I can only speak for my own experiences as a debut novelist with a large independent U.S. publisher. Your mileage may vary.

To summarize, I quote the great Bruce Springsteen: “There I was one night, just a normal guy. And then, there I was the next night. Goddamn, I was still just a normal guy.”

And now, Five Things That Don’t Happen When You Become a Published Author:

1. Money does not suddenly rain down from the sky. Well, it hasn’t for me, at least. I’m sure it has for Naomi Novik, whose debut novel was optioned by the great Peter Jackson. And I suspect Gordon Dahlquist, whose debut novel The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters earned a gajillion-dollar advance from Bantam, isn’t clipping coupons right now. But as my buddy Tobias Buckell revealed in his author first novel advance survey, first novel advances in SF/F are actually rather paltry — $5,000 on average.

Über-blogger and Campbell Award winner John Scalzi reveals that he made $67,000 off his SF writing in 2006. Now $67,000 is nothing to scoff at, and I suspect Mr. Scalzi’s take will only be going up in the next few years, but don’t forget that publishers don’t pay benefits.

Not only is it unlikely you’ll get richer writing novels, it’s likely you’ll get poorer. Why? Because chances are you passed up on much more lucrative opportunities to devote time to your writing. And you probably spent a wad of your own cash promoting your book.

2. Your career worries do not melt away. I made a conscious decision to quit my full-time job in November of 2000 and carve out time to write. Since then, I’ve been doing a series of contract and part-time jobs that take up between two and four days of my week.

But the problem for the Writer With a Day Job is that the folks at the Day Job wonder how committed you are to their work. It’s a fair question. I try very, very hard to segregate my working and writing lives, but I’d be lying if I claimed I’ve never opened Microsoft Word in the middle of a meeting to frantically dash out plot points that suddenly popped into my head.

So many writers find themselves in career limbo. You’re not likely to make a good living writing novels; but to give up the writing to concentrate on climbing the ladder in your day job is unthinkable. The result? A juggling act.

3. Your lifestyle and self-image do not dramatically shift. Before I was published, I had a lot of thoughts about how different things were going to be once I was published. I’m going to read more, I’m going to eat better, I’m finally going to paint over those ugly water stains on the ceiling in the basement, little blue Sport & Health Club Pixies are going to wake me up every morning and whisk me off to the gym on a magic cloud.

Needless to say, this hasn’t happened. I’m very happy that I get to devote time to doing something I love. But I felt the exact same way about writing before I made any money at it. The big shift in your self-perception comes when you actually make a commitment to your writing, not when someone finally writes you a check for it.

Dave on Ruby on Rails

March 12, 2007

Imagine you’ve never played the game of football (the American version) before. You’ve never even seen a football game, and you have no idea what the rules are. But somebody tells you it’s way hella cool, and you’ve got the build for it, why don’t you come on down and join the team.

So you suit up and get on the field, but you still don’t have the foggiest idea what’s going on. Sometimes people are running with the ball, sometimes they’re throwing the ball, sometimes they’re kicking it or just pushing other players around and jumping on them for seemingly no reason. You try to ask the other players what’s going on, and they’re perfectly willing to help you — but all you can catch is a few seconds of their time between plays when they’re out of breath.

That’s kind of how I feel trying to learn Ruby on Rails.

What the hell is Ruby on Rails? For all you non-technical people out there, it’s a programming environment that’s supposed to make development super, mega easy.

Those with a more technical bent have probably already heard about Ruby on Rails. But for those who haven’t, it’s an open-source web framework where you can use the popular Ruby language to build robust applications using the Model-View-Control pattern in an astonishingly few lines of code.

How easy is it? Well, once you’ve got it installed properly, you literally type “rails book” and then “ruby script/generate scaffold chapter.” In the space of seconds, RoR generates all of the files you need for a project called “book” composed of multiple “chapters.”

From there on out, it’s amazingly simple too. You can describe the data model with two basic statements:

class Book < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :chapters end

class Chapter < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :book end

RoR takes care of generating all of the HTML files needed to make it work on the fly. Within five minutes, you can have an application that will let you seamlessly add, edit, and delete chapters to a book. No more mucking around with granular SQL statements and spending hours debugging.

The problem is, you’ve got to get it installed properly.

And getting Ruby on Rails installed properly is a bitch. It’s taken me days, and I’m still not sure I’ve got it done right. Luckily, you don’t need a web server to serve up the application because RoR comes with a built-in lightweight web server called Webrick. Oh, but wait, Webrick isn’t powerful enough for a production server, so we need Apache. With the FastCGI module installed and configured for Ruby files. Oh, but wait, nobody uses FastCGI to do this anymore, everyone’s using something called Mongrel these days…

Don’t Worry, Vista Will Handle It

March 7, 2007

Call me a masochist, but I installed Windows Vista on my home machine this past weekend. I wasn’t about to spend much money to get my rapidly aging Shuttle XPC Vista ready, so I simply opted to buy an $85 ATI Radeon video card that would let me run the Aero interface, however creakily.

The list of apps with Vista compatibility problems is truly mind-boggling. We’re talking about stuff I use every day. Dreamweaver, ColdFusion, Eclipse, iTunes, Irfanview. Add to that the fact that my Photoshop disc is on the fritz and you’ve got a major productivity roadblock. But perhaps the app that I miss the most is one that works in the background: Diskeeper.

Diskeeper is (or was) probably the best defragmenter available for Windows. It’s got a feature called “Set It and Forget It” which allows you to configure the program to defrag your hard drive in the background whenever it sees the need, and then, as advertised, forget all about the damn thing. But the bastards at the Diskeeper Corporation want me to pay $30 to upgrade to their new Vista version, even though I already bought an upgrade less than six months ago. So I decided to look at alternatives. (Update 3/8/07: Never let it be said this blogging thing is a waste of time. I just received an e-mail from a nice fellow at Diskeeper Corp. apologizing for the upgrade confusion and offering to make it up with a coupla extra licenses. Thanks, Diskeeper!)

I opened up the built-in Windows Vista Disk Defragmenter, and I was astounded to see this:

Windows Vista Disk Defragmenter

In case you’re looking at this image and wondering what’s so astounding, the only thing you can configure here is the schedule. No setting priorities, no setting unmovable files, no program menus, no help file, no nothing. I wasn’t expecting a robust interface like Diskeeper’s that allows you granular control over what files get positioned in what place on the hard drive, but I wasn’t quite expecting this either.

Windows Vista is full of these kinds of user interface decisions. Places where the operating system presents you with a limited set of options and tells you, “don’t worry, Windows Vista will handle it.” We’ll defragment your disk for you, we’ll switch color schemes when necessary, we’ll block you from handling the nasty files, we’ll decide when the computer should sleep and when it should wake.

Remind you of anything? It reminds me of a Mac.

Windows Vista Frustrations

February 23, 2007

I’ve got a new part-time job, and along with that job came a brand-new Dell PC that came with Windows Vista Ultimate preinstalled. Here are my first impressions about the good and the bad.

Windows Vista and Easy Security

February 1, 2007

I’ve owned and continuously operated Microsoft PCs since that clunky 8086 behemoth running MS-DOS 3.3 that I took to college with me in 1989. It ran at a sizzling 6 MHz, unless you pressed the big white button labeled “Turbo” on the front, and then — look out! — 12 MHz. (Why you would ever turn this button off, I don’t know.)

In all that time, I’ve never been hit by a computer virus, worm, or malicious piece of spyware. Once, not too long ago, I actually double-clicked on a virus-infected e-mail attachment without thinking, but my computer security package quickly caught it and disabled it.

That’s not to say that I’ve never received a virus over e-mail, or suffered an attack on my firewall. These things happen all the time. I’ve been to web pages that could conceivably have launched various bits of nastiness onto my machine had I not been running Firefox with a pop-up blocker and lots of Javascript restrictions. I’ve just never suffered the effects.

Windows Vista with Aero screenshot And why have I never suffered from a virus outbreak? Because, despite what you see and hear all over the Internet and the media, the security problems of Windows are vastly overblown. Windows is and has always been a fairly secure operating system, if you know what you’re doing.

True, I’m what they call a computer professional, meaning that I make my living on these things. I can program PHP and ColdFusion. But when it comes to the operating system, I’m not some technical uber-wizard that can pinpoint obscure DLL failures using the command line. I know how to edit the Windows Registry, I know how to start and stop Windows Services, I know how to use the Event Viewer. These are all fairly basic computer troubleshooting skills, and yet these skills and some readily available off-the-shelf security software are all it’s taken for me to keep my computer safe for nearly 20 years.

(And no, this is not an invitation for someone out there to try and craft something that will infest my computer. I’m sure you can. But the point is that you haven’t bothered to try yet.)

The security problem, therefore, does not lie with Windows software. The problem is with Windows usability.

Most of you reading this blog may be astounded to realize this, but Microsoft’s most pressing problem is not the encroachment of free and open source Linux. It’s not the growing popularity of the Firefox browser, or the lagging performance of its online properties in relation to Google’s and Yahoo’s, or the activities of a small population of malicious hackers and crackers. The thing that keeps the Microsoft brass up at night, believe it or not, is that most people feel like Windows is too darned hard to use.

To us in the tech world, it seems like every Joe and Jane you pass in the street reads Slashdot and has contemplated switching to Ubuntu. But the vast majority of people aren’t nearly that technically savvy. I found a study from 1997 that gives the number of IT jobs in the United States at 2,063,000. Even if we’re charitable and say that, despite the IT bubble burst, the number of tech jobs has doubled since then — or even tripled — we’re still only talking about roughly 2% of the U.S. population. We’re a lot more computer-literate than we were a decade ago, but I’m willing to bet at least 70% of the Windows users in the United States have never even heard of the Registry.

You Are What You Read

January 31, 2007

Never let it be said that I’m not a sentimental idiot. I had a fun little idea earlier tonight about taking my catalog of books on LibraryThing and doing a photo mosaic out of it. You know, to prove that “you are what you read,” or something jejune like that. So I took a couple of photos of myself and one of the Infoquake book cover, and I done did it.

Here are two of me. Once again, these are mosaics made completely of the book covers from my collection in LibraryThing. Click for the full-sized images (2.52 MB and 2.05 MB, respectively). No, really, click on them, resize them, scroll around, it’s worth it. And don’t forget to expand the image out if your browser does that automatic image resizing thing.

And here’s the cover of Infoquake, also composed strictly of my LibraryThing book covers. Again, click for full image (1.44 MB):

So how did I do it? It’s surprisingly not very difficult at all.

Ten Tech Companies That Blew It in the Past Two Decades

January 26, 2007

I had a high-tech CEO ask me the loaded question to end all loaded questions the other day. What makes a technology company succeed?

It’s almost impossible to come up with a single answer, or even a single set of answers. What do Google, Microsoft, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Mozilla, Adobe, Dell, and Apple have in common? I came up with a number of factors off the top of my head — empowering users, keeping a steady pace of innovation, good PR, making easy-to-use products — but none of them seemed to be the end-all, be-all of high-tech success.

So I decided to look at the question from the opposite angle. What makes a technology company fail? Here are a handful of companies from the past twenty years that strike me as prime examples of organizations who lost a commanding lead and/or market dominance in a particular field due to their own idiocy or incompetence.

1. Atari. The mass market videogame console was more or less invented by Atari in the late ’70s. Their only real competitor for years was Mattel’s Intellivision, which may have had vast technical superiority but had inept marketing. (George Plimpton? You’ve got to be kidding me.) But instead of innovating, Atari took the road of suing anyone and everyone who touched its much-beloved system. (Activision, Coleco, Starpath, Odyssey, Nintendo, Phillips, and Epyx all suffered Atari’s litigious wrath.) There was also a precipitous drop-off in videogame quality, as anyone who remembers notoriously bad media tie-ins like E.T. The original company was sold off many times and finally diluted to nothingness in the ’90s. The name still had such cachet, however, that Infogrames later licensed it for themselves.

2. Netscape. Netscape partisans and Microsoft haters have long promoted the urban legend that Microsoft drove this company into obscurity. And while Bill Gates & Co.’s anti-competitive practices certainly helped, ultimately the blame lies with the company itself. Netscape was running neck-and-neck with Microsoft in the browser wars for several years until its hideous Navigator 4 browser (which earned the company the Nutscrape label, among many other less complimentary names). Undeterred by their slipping fortunes, the company followed Navigator 4 with… nothing. For years. They pursued a ruinous portal strategy instead and sold out to AOL, who let the company completely die on the vine. Now Netscape is stuck with a dying portal website and an also-ran browser that piggybacks on both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

3. Palm. The early PalmPilots finally found the magic formula that had eluded so many other companies for so long. They were easy to use, integrated tolerably well with your PC, and were extremely reliable machines. No wonder the company built up such a network of software developers. And then a long series of ownership switches threw the platform’s future in the toilet. The result? Microsoft’s Pocket PC platform (now Windows Mobile) overtook the Palm on basic, must-have features (like oh, say, enabling a contact to have both a home and business address, which the Palm still can’t do). I read recently that the Palm OS actually still funnels everything through emulation software for its ancient Dragonball processor, which is a good indicator of how far behind the innovation curve these folks have gotten.

The End of MySpace

January 24, 2007

Ziff-Davis’ Baseline recently published an insider’s look at how MySpace functions on a technical level, and it’s quite revealing.

The common assumption among programming types about MySpace is that the system started off as somebody’s pet project and quickly mushroomed beyond the programmers’ control. Rather than cooling off growth to create a better infrastructure, the MySpace folks opted for growth at any costs. As a result, we end up with the buggy, unreliable usability nightmare that is MySpace today. Now, it’s assumed, the programmers and sysadmins are scrambling to play catchup.

This article pretty much confirms these assumptions. According to the article, MySpace started out as a ColdFusion-based project — and while ColdFusion is ridiculously easy to program, any developer can tell you it’s got a reputation (deserved or not) for being a little slow and resource-heavy on the performance scale. So as they’ve grown, MySpace has been moving to Microsoft’s ASP.Net and relying on emulators to port some of the older code over.

One can’t really blame MySpace for such logic. It’s the kind of hot-air logic that propelled companies like Pets.com to the stratosphere back in the ’90s and made a ton of people oodles and oodles of cash. It’s Web 1.0 thinking. Using such Web 1.0 thinking, MySpace has quickly vaulted to become the most visited site on the Internet and gotten snatched up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in the process.

But as a result, they’ve built on an unsustainable foundation. They’ve made the classic gamble that short-term gain will trump long-term stability. And like so many Web 1.0 companies that came before them, MySpace is headed for a big, clumsy fall. Here’s why.

Easy come, easy go. The base audience for MySpace consists of teenagers and folks in their twenties. That’s not to say this is the only demographic using MySpace, but that’s the core audience. These people flocked to the service for the same reasons young people flock to anything: it was new, it was cool, it was free, and everyone they knew was doing it. Give them an alternative that’s newer, cooler, better functioning, and more reliable — not to mention backed by big corporate dollars — and they’ll flock there just as quickly.
Insecurity. Recently someone came up with the grand idea of distributing malicious code through a security vulnerability in embedded QuickTime videos. Folks have been taking advantage of CSS and HTML quirks to hack MySpace almost since the place began. More and more people are complaining about hacked profiles and hijacked identities. MySpace has demonstrated time and again that they’re behind the curve when it comes to security. So I think it’s highly likely that at some point in the near future, we’ll see a series of successful crippling attacks on MySpace that will send people running in a panicky exodus.
Slowing pace of innovation. Adapt or die, that’s the unofficial motto of the Internet. And unlike, say, Google, which continues to pump out features and applications by the gallon, MySpace has remained largely sedentary for the past year. They released a lamentable, old-school IM client and better video integration, but otherwise the system is pretty much the same as it was 18 months ago. As MySpace’s technical problems grow and their folks spend more and more time just keeping up with demand, they’re going to fall even further behind.
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