An Antic Disposition

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One Year and One Hundred Posts Later…

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I’m not one for excessive self-reflection. Like the Heresiarchs of Uqbar, I think that mirrors are abominable. However, since I have simultaneously reached my 100th blog post as well as my one year anniversary with An Antic Disposition, I feel that an inward glance is both appropriate and timely.

Only 100 posts in a year? I remain in awe of other bloggers who manage to put out an order of magnitude more material, sometimes several posts in one day. Writing is not easy for me. Although it may not always show, I agonize over every word. I aim for clarity, euphony, a smart rhythm and a bit of wit.

Clarity is difficult, since my readers come from a wide range of technical backgrounds, so some posts are high-level, simplified descriptions, while others dive into the bowels of the beast. But of course, clarity is no excuse for not being understood. As Gertrude Stein wrote:

Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding anyone.

Since I started blogging on document format issues last July, here are the basic stats on the blog, once I subtract out other parts of this website, like my weather observations and family tree pages:

  • Average page views per day: 2,082
  • Average visitors per day: 1,800

The traffic has been steadily increasing over the last 12 months, so I’m actually averaging closer to 3,000 visits/day today.

I’ve been Slashdot’ed a few times and featured on GrokLaw more times than I will ever be able to thank. Such days can drive traffic up to 25,000 visitors.

Technorati shows 787 links to the blog, which is pretty good. It gives me a Google PageRank of 7 which has some humorous implications as we’ll discuss later.

Most popular posts by hits:

  1. How to Hire Guillaume Portes (71,152 hits, 3 January 2007) The intent here was to create a fictional name, which roughly translated “Bill Gates” into French. However I later found out this is the real-world name of a game programmer in the UK. I hope he took this with good humor (or even humour). The post dealt with how overspecification can hurt a standard. This post tipped people off to the weird compatibility flags in OOXML that tie it to undefined legacy behaviors in Word 95, etc. The line, “This is not a specification; this is a DNA sequence” was a spontaneous insight I came up with in response to a question from the audience at the KDE aKademy 2006 conference in Dublin the previous October.
  2. OOXML Fails to Gain Approval in US (48,802 hits, 15 July 2007) This was a report on the INCITS V1 OOXML vote. It became widely quoted, very quickly. I think this was partially because was in a straightforward, factual style of reportage, without overt color or opinion. My working title was “US Technical Committee Fails to Approve OOXML,” but that caused the title to wrap to two lines, which I try to avoid.
  3. The Formula for Failure (37,648 hits, 9 July 2007) OOXML’s spreadsheet formula specification is full of mathematical errors. How was this not detected earlier by Ecma? What does this say about the sufficiency of the Ecma review process?
  4. A Leap Back (20,270 hits, 12 October 2006) A look at the history of the Gregorian Calendar, and how OOXML gets it wrong. Microsoft says it was done for “legacy reasons,” which is another way of saying it is a bug that they don’t want to fix.
  5. Math Markup Marked Down (21,358 hits, 25 April 2007) This post told how Nature and Science journals were rejecting submissions in OOXML format.
  6. The Chernobyl Design Pattern (21,079 hits, 26 October 2006) This one was never widely quoted, but continues to receive sustained traffic from StumbleUpon.
  7. A game of Zendo (9,344 hits, 18 July 2006) This post lacks focus, seemingly trying to discuss Zendo, backwards compatibility as well as Word art borders. The technical points are sound, but I think the post lacks cohesion.
  8. The OOXML Compatibility Pack (8,067 hits, 6 September 2006) This was an early post on the topic, but the later Interoperability by Design post covered it better, I think.
  9. File Format Timeline (9,920 hits, 24 June 2007) I first posted it as just a PNG graphic, with no HTML text. I received no links. It is hard to quote something that has no text. So I added some text and received links and a lot more traffic. A good lesson to remember: A picture is worth a thousand words, but if you don’t have any text, no one can quote you.
  10. More Matter with Less Art (8,730 hits, 31 January 2007) This is a long, rambling response to critics of How to Hire Guillaume Portes. I’m reminded that the old saying “It is impossible to make something foolproof because fools are so ingenious” applies to arguments as well.

My personal favorite posts, in no particular order:

  1. How to Write a Standard (If you must) A look at how Microsoft and Ecma are making a travesty of standards development. I originally wrote this post as a straightforward analysis, but it was ponderous. Then I rewrote in the form of an antipattern, but it still lacked crispness. Then I had the key insight — If I simply state their argument explicitly, it works as a satire.
  2. How Standards Bring Consumers Choice This was written for a general audience who knew nothing about OOXML or document formats. I had a lot of fun reading up on the various electrical standards.
  3. A Tale of Two Formats One of the problems that I perceive is that we are not dreaming big enough when it comes to the future of office applications. Many seem satisfied with simply being a mini-Office or following after Microsoft’s technologies at a delay of a few years. But I think we need a more radical re-imagining of what office productivity applications are all about. What we have today is determined by the dead hand of a monopolist leading us in conventional circles, unable to innovate because of the grip of their own installed base. Are we ready for some real innovation? Or are we happy with 15 more years of paying for upgrades and only getting dancing paperclips?
  4. File Format Timeline I first posted it as just a PNG graphic, with no HTML text. I received no links. It is hard to quote something that has no text. So I added some text and received links and a lot more traffic. A good lesson to remember: A picture is worth a thousand words, but if you don’t have any text, no one can quote you.
  5. The Legend of the Rat Farmer Another parable, this time to refute the specious argument that more standards improves interoperability.
  6. Pruning Raspberries Zero comments, zero links. Sometimes I write for an audience of one, and that is fine.
  7. The Cookbook Another parable. Why parables? For over 2000 years (e.g., Christ, Socrates and Confucius) story telling has been an important rhetorical device. The point is not that a story is the easiest way to explain something. On the contrary, it is much harder. But a story is one of the best ways to explain something if you want it to be remembered. Another good technique is to express the argument in song lyrics with a catchy tune, but I promise you I will not go down that road.
  8. The Case for a Single Document Format (in 4 parts, unfinished) This one is stretching the bounds of what I can do in a blog, due to length. I still need to finish part 4, and in the end I might just redo this as a paper rather than these too-long blog posts. But the material gives a good multi-disciplinary look at the question of standards and tries to answer the question, “Why do some technologies have a single standard, while others thrive with multiple standards?” We must acknowledge that both occur, but we must also acknowledge that it is important to know whether this is random, or whether a single standard regime is the natural and indeed the desired outcome under some conditions.
  9. Essential and Accidental in Standards Yes, it rambles, and takes a long time to make a simple point, but I think it is an interesting trip. A simpler version of the same basic argument (the theme of a sweet spot for technology) has been covered more succinctly (and perhaps more convincingly) by Tim Bray.
  10. The Parable of the Solipsistic Standard Another story, but I think this one went over almost everyone’s head. Solipsism is the ultimate philosophically reduction of the Not Invented Here (NIH) Syndrome. Mixing epistemology with linguistics and standards and satire is asking for trouble. I think I got what I deserved here. But it was fun and some readers enjoyed it.

Top counties based on number of visits:

  1. USA
  2. Germany
  3. United Kingdom
  4. Netherlands
  5. Australia
  6. Canada
  7. Denmark
  8. China
  9. France
  10. Spain
  11. Italy
  12. Slovakia
  13. Austria
  14. Poland
  15. Belgium

Most active states based on number of visits:

  1. California
  2. Nevada
  3. Washington DC
  4. Colorado
  5. Pennsylvania
  6. New York
  7. Washington
  8. New Jersey
  9. Virginia
  10. Ohio

Most Active Cities based on number of visits:

  1. Beijing, China
  2. Mountain View, California
  3. Carson City, Nevada
  4. Washington DC
  5. Denver, Colorado
  6. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  7. London, UK
  8. Gliwice, Poland
  9. Chester, Pennsylvannia
  10. Malchow, Germany
  11. NYC, New York
  12. Dublin, Ireland
  13. Bellevue, Washington
  14. Auckland, New Zealand
  15. West Sacramento, California

So my question is: who is in Gliwice, Poland? I didn’t know I had so many readers from there. Ditto from Carson City, Nevada.

Top search phrases that lead people to this web site:

  1. rob weir
  2. traduttore
  3. jingle bells batman smells
  4. antic disposition
  5. cum
  6. cannibalism
  7. jingle bells batman smells lyrics
  8. ooxml
  9. rob weir blog
  10. jingle bells santa smells

Around 30% of the traffic is directed from search engines. I have observed the danger of having a high PageRank web site. Whenever I use an odd word in a post, this blog automatically becomes one of the top hits for people querying on that term. So a post from last July called, Cum mortuis in lingua mortua generates many search referrals from those who are merely looking, I presume, for more information regarding the Latin conjunction “cum” meaning “with.” I hope they found what they were looking for.

Similarly, an old blog post talking about transmission of culture among children mentioned the “Jingle Bells/Batman Smells” parody. This gets many hits, especially in December. Although I have no particular expertise in Latin conjunctions or Christmas carol parodies I am an instant “authority” on these subjects (according to Google at least) because of this blog’s ranking.

Browsers:

  1. 38% Firefox
  2. 7% I.E. 6.x
  3. 6% I.E. 7.x
  4. 2% Opera
  5. 1% Safari
  6. 1% Konqueror

So some good strength being shown by Firefox.

OS’s:

  1. 35% Windows XP
  2. 30% Other
  3. 19% Linux
  4. 5% Mac OS
  5. 4% Vista
  6. 3% Windows 2000
  7. 2% Windows NT
  8. 1% Sun OS

Aggregation feeds:

  • The Atom feed gets around 1,400 hits per day
  • The RSS feed gets around 300 hits per day

Thanks, everyone, for reading!

-Rob

Document Format Punditry

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Rick Jelliffe, Mr. Schematron, who blogs for O’Reilly, recently announced that he had been contacted by Microsoft to see if he would be interested in a contract to edit the Office Open XML (OOXML) and Open Document Format (ODF) Wikipedia pages. As Rick says,

So I was a little surprised to receive email a couple of days ago from Microsoft saying they wanted to contract someone independent but friendly (me) for a couple of days to provide more balance on Wikipedia concerning ODF/OOXML. I am hardly the poster boy of Microsoft partisanship! Apparently they are frustrated at the amount of spin from some ODF stakeholders on Wikipedia and blogs.

I think I’ll accept it: FUD enrages me and MS certainly are not hiring me to add any pro-MS FUD, just to correct any errors I see. If anyone sees any examples of incorrect statements on Wikipedia or other similar forums in the next few weeks, please let me know: whether anti-OOXML or anti-ODF. In fact, I already had added some material to Wikipedia several months ago, so it is not something new, so I’ll spend a couple of days mythbusting and adding more information.

This immediately brought on an avalanche of commentary, on his blog, and elsewhere. As someone who also blogs on ODF/OOXML topics, I’d like to say a few words on the subject of document format punditry.

Few of my readers know me personally. They only know me via my words. Their acceptance or non-acceptance of this blog and what I say is largely determined by their perception of these two dimensions:

  • Authority — Am I an expert? Am I writing about things that I have direct knowledge of, or through education, training or direct experience would be expected to have worthwhile insights on?
  • Orientation — Do I have a bias on the subject being discussed. I’m not using the word “bias” in a pejorative sense, but to describe how far one’s views vary from a neutral, journalistic point of view, to a view that is overtly partisan on a particular issue. Bias is expected in opinion pieces, but not in Wikipedia articles.

My blog clearly comes with an expert, pro-ODF orientation. Additionally, I try to keep it light and humorous so even if a reader disagrees with me on one issue, at least they will be amused.

Looking at the range of people writing on these issues, I see the landscape something like this:

  • We have a number of highly informed experts in ODF and OOXML who aren’t really talking to each other.
  • We have the press, trying to be neutral, but having difficulty figuring out the significance of the technical issues since they are rather esoteric.
  • The General Public, who won’t even hear about the issues until the press figures it out.
  • And then we have various degrees of extremists of all varieties, not easily classifiable. Their writings are backed by ideological more than technical arguments. There are important ideological issues at stake in this debate, so these are voices are important.

What we seem to be lacking is the expert, neutral technical commentary. This is not too surprising. Many of the experts took sides a long time ago, or decided to sit this one out. That is understandable. But without this center of expert commentary, the press will continue to report the biases of whatever side they happen talk to first.

Where does Rick fit it into this chart? His expertise is undeniable. But if he takes Microsoft’s money he risks losing his reputation for neutrality. That is his choice and I am in no position to fault someone for that. He joins a crowded field of opinionated people already writing on this issue from one angle or another. He’ll likely be one of the better pro-OOXML writers out there. Nothing wrong with that. As Charles McCabe famously said, “Any clod can have the facts, having opinions is an art.”

But I do suggest that Microsoft’s money would have been better spent, and Rick’s skills better used, if they had engaged Rick earlier to help review and improve the OOXML specification. Trying to fix perceptions of the standard after the fact will be a lot harder, and more expensive, than creating a good standard in the first place.

And I will lament the fact that we continue to lack neutral experts who can digest the massive amounts of technical information out there and present it in a way that the press can reference and the public can understand. I think Rick would have served this role admirably. Instead we risk having one less voice in the middle.

Looking at this potential deal with Rick, and Microsoft’s earlier deal with Novell, I wonder if someone at Microsoft thinks that neutrality is dangerous and that their purposes are better served by eliminating it?

Surviving the Slashdot Effect

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You wake up one morning, check your email and what do you see? Fifty comments in your moderation queue awaiting approval. Hmmm… You then check your server stats and see that 500 people have hit your blog in the last 5 minutes. Hmmm… You check the referral’s and see that they are all coming from a familiar site.

Congratulations, you’re on Slashdot. But will your site survive the Slashdot Effect, or will it be a casualty of the day’s load? What do you do now? What can you do?

Here’s some things to consider, based on my experience last Friday when I had a 50,000-page day.

  1. If you have it, turn off comment moderation for the day. Comments will come in faster than you can approve them and you likely already have a backlog.
  2. Download the server logs and see what your bandwidth use is for the day so far. While that is processing, check with your host to see what your bandwidth quota is. Have a credit card handy in case you need to quickly upgrade.
  3. A look at the comments on Slashdot indicated that some were experiencing slow response time. So I simplified the page and took out some extraneous images from the side bar. From the logs I had downloaded earlier it was clear that a good percentage of users were going to the blog’s home page after reading the post. So I simplified that page as well, having it show only the last 5 post rather than the last 20. This improved response time as well as reduced the bandwidth requirements.
  4. I’m sure you’re familiar with Linus’s Law, as stated by Eric Raymond: “Given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow”. This applies to prose as well as to code. So it is a good time to proofread your post and make sure spelling and usage are correct, that all the links work, that quotes and ideas are correct attributed, etc. With 50,000 readers today, even the smallest error will be noticed by 100’s of them.
  5. Since your post will now be in front of many more people, including those who have not been following the topic closely, you might want to add some links to background information.
  6. Do a quick security audit. Do you have reasonably complex passwords for your server accounts? Have you changed them recently?

I’d be interested in hearing what advice others have for how to quickly up-armor your site when sudden load surges occur.

Some short notes

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I’ve updated the blog to use Google’s new “beta” Blogger software. I haven’t noticed any glitches, but please let me know if anything seems broken. They’ve updated their feed to support Atom 1.0 which is great. Previously they served up Atom 0.3 which I then updated to 1.0 via this mechanism.

Also, the new Blogger has added item tagging support via the Rel-Tag microformat. (Blogger calls them “Labels”). I had been using Technorati tags for this purpose, but the integrated UI in the new Blogger is worth the work of switching over, so you may notice a little churn in old entries as I convert.

As you probably have heard, OpenDocument Format (ODF) has been official published by ISO as ISO/IEC 26300:2006, as you can see here. This is the culmination of almost four years of effort by the OASIS TC. Also note that ISO/IEC JTC/SC34 had a ballot last July to request that JTC1 make the final ISO version of ODF freely available for download at no charge. Until that happens, you can purchase an ISO version from the ISO web site, or download an OASIS version at the OASIS ODF TC’s web site. The content should be identical. Eventually the ISO version should be downloadable for free as well.

Another member of the ODF community has started up a blog. Florian Reuter, an ODF TC member who recently joined Novell, discusses some suggested enhancements for ODF 1.2.

Finally, OpenOffice.org has announced the winners of their Template/Clipart Contest. The templates of course are in ODF format, so this is a good illustration of the richness and capabilities of the format. Linux.com has the details.

Site Updates

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If I had know I was going to be Groklaw’ed, I would have spruced up the place first and prepared for company! Thanks to all for the overwhelming expression of interest in these topics.

This blog is generated by Blogger, and published via ftp to my site. This blog is still quite young and you will continue you see things moving around a bit as I find out what works well.

Recent changes:

  • I had misconfigured some Blogger settings, causing my feed URL to be incorrect. So, if you subscribed before 7/20 then you’ll want to re-subscribe.
  • I’m auto-converting Blogger’s default Atom 0.3 feed to Atom 1.0. Thanks to the Sultan of Syndication, Sam Ruby, for help with that.
  • I’ve added a brief capsule bio linked to from the sidebar. My contact info is there as well.
  • I’ve also added a blogroll of sites which I find indispensable for keeping up with news related to ODF. I hope you find them as informative as I do.

I plan on writing additional essays related to ISO ODF and the draft Ecma OOXML. Expect to see one or two a week. There are already several bloggers who cover the universe of ODF news/happenings. Rather than repeat their good work, I will try to deal with technical issues in depth, with an emphasis on clearing the air of some of the FUD out there. I’ll also try to keep it fun. If there are any topics you especially would like to hear, please let me know.