British weekly print magazine Micro Mart has accepted one of my operating system themed articles. The article is entitled “2009, Year of the independent OS?” and it should appear in the Thursday 15th of January issue. As the title suggests, the premise is that some of the less-known freely available OSes might achieve sufficient maturity to enter into relatively widespread use over the course of 2009. The operating systems that I evaluate are AROS, Syllable, Haiku, and ReactOS. It’s a three thousand word article, so I’ve been able to go into a quite a bit of detail on the relative approach and progress of each OS project.

If it sounds like your kind of thing, look out for it in the newsagents on Thursday 15th.

Update: I now have a copy. It’s a shame that MM don’t mirror their content online.

A bit more Tech Book 1 news. Basically, it’s 90% finished and I’ve sent off for a proof copy. I’ve frozen the contents and anything that I write and retain the copyright on, from now on, will be added to Tech Book 2.

Tech Book 1 is a compilation of my published articles written in 2006, 2007 and the first half of 2008. It’s part vanity project, part promotional exercise and part self-publishing experiment. One of the downsides of being a freelancer is that it can be difficult to get the attention of commissioning editors. I’m hoping that a hard copy may work in situations in which email enquiries have proved ineffective.

As a test, I sent off for a proof copy from Lulu.com. It looks great and I’m happy with it, although I wont be using Lulu for the main print run. I might go for a more exciting cover for the finished copy. However, I think that trying to do too much is the common mistake of the amateur. An online buddy of mine, Darryl Sloan, did quite an elaborate cover for his self-published novel Chion. However, he has the benefits of an artistic background to begin with, and I don’t.

All of the articles are available for free on the web. For people who have already read the articles, there is some value in the book as these are slightly improved versions. In addition, many of the articles were very long and will probably work better as a chapter in a printed book than they did as an article on a website. By investing in a ISBN number and by dealing with a print-on-demand printer directly, I’m hoping that I’m going to be able to offer it at a really low price. I’m not intending to directly make any money out of the project. It might bring in some other work and it has been a useful learning experience for me.

Linux.com have published my current article. I hope the community find it an enjoyable read. I never know how people are going to take articles like this one. I said in my RISC OS article, “I hold the opinion that if you are truly a fan of something, you can accept criticism of it. You don’t have to be loyal to something that is genuinely good.” I wonder where platforms like Amiga and OS/2 would be now if a few more people had complained?

From the article:
These problems span the entire Ubuntu experience but they all have two things in common: they are all solvable and they are all serious enough to evoke the dreaded, “I tried Linux but it didn’t work”.

At the moment I’m working on a little side project. It’s a not-for-profit, print-on-demand book that re-bundles some of my old technology articles. I plan to use the book as a promotional device for my skills as a writer. For that reason, I’m editing the the articles to bring them up to my current standard. The working title for the book is Tech Book 1. Although it’s turning out to be a time consuming job, it has also been a great learning experience. It should be finished and ready in a couple of weeks.

All of the content is available on the Internet (see links on side menu) but these are slightly updated versions.

Please note, I’ll add a bit of older gender politics material from my other site but this isn’t the Gender Equivalence book that I have been working on for the last two and a half years. Work on that book is still in progress. Apart from anything else, the new project will serve as a dry run for the GE book as might still be doing that as a self-published project.

Breezy 1000 word article about the iPhone. I’ve sent it to OSNews.com and if they want it, I’ll add add it here as usual. [Published now. Click here to read it online]

Stylistically, it’s a bit of departure for me: short, conversational tone, and not very techy. To keep things streamlined, I forced myself to be brutal at the editing stage. It finished up at just over 1,500 words and I managed to cut it down to about 1,000. The result is closer to the type of writing style that you would see in a newspaper. I’ll leave it for the reader to judge whether or not I have gone too far and cut out too much.

In other news, I may have got a lead into some possible paying writing work. I’m going to spend the rest of this year pitching articles as a freelance I’ll let you know when something develops.

BTW, I’m afraid that I had to delete the comments to the previous posts as I got spammed. I have now installed a new comments system and you can comment with confidence once more.

I’ve created another tech article. The article is an overview of LyX, the text processor that I use for my of my writing. Hopefully, the article will be carried by OSNews.com soon. [Update click here to read it]

The article is about 3,500 words in length. I wrote it in a day and that represents something of a breakthrough for me. It’s not the most entertaining article ever written but the subject matter of a review doesn’t particularly lend itself to much humour or insight.

I have now had three articles published on osnews.com. See sidebar menu for the direct links.

Re-reading them, I’d say that the most recent one (“What It Would Take To Make Me Consider RISCOS Again”) is probably the poorest of the three. I think that the first one (“My Dream OS”) was probably the best one and the second one (“A Very Critical Look At OS Recreation Projects”) was probably the most insightful.

If you’re interested in this sort of writing, read on for some more retrospective analysis and some conclusions.

The first one – “My Dream Operating System” (about 4000 words)

This was my first attempt at writing a tech article and in some respects, it was the most successful. The article was intended as an exercise in developing my ability to write in a less academic and more ‘chatty’ style. In those terms, it was reasonably succesful in eschewing the overly formal style that I was attempting to get away from. On the other hand, it could have been tighter and grammatically better without compromising the informal tone.

As with most of my writing, it suffers from a weak opening section. The first few paragraphs are particularly flawed and could should have been rewritten after the first draft was finished. Things aren’t quite as bad as I start to get into my stride towards the middle of the article.

Also, when I was writing it, I was determined not to get bogged down in grammar; in some of my other writing, I invest quite a lot of time examining the meaning of every word and phrase. In all fairness, when writing about a more ‘serious’ subject it is more important to be assured of the precise meaning of what is being written. This was supposed to be a ‘fun’ article rather than a polemic treatise.

If nothing else, having written the first article, I discovered what the goal of the exercise actually is: to improve, but also form an agreement between, the technical and expressive sides of my writing. ‘Compromise’ is the key word here: readability and entertainment value are just as important as precise meaning. The use of imprecise language is perhaps an indication that the ideas are not very well defined but perhaps a good idea, well made, shouldn’t have rely upon strict grammar to succeed?

The article was written over the course of a couple of sessions and posted off without a proper honing stage. One of the reasons for this is that I was quite nervous about submitting it; given that I have a tendency to procrastinate rather than finish things off (oh, I’m famous for it!), I decided to get it sent off rather than allowing it to wilt and die on my HD.

In the article’s favour: The tone is about right, it’s grammatically not too awful, it has a good pace, it makes most of the points that I intended and I hope that it is successful in conveying my enthusiasm for the subject matter.

An extended honing period could have improved it as could have an extended planning stage.

The second one – “A Very Critical Look At OS Recreation Projects” (about 4000 words)

I spent a bit more time on this article than I did with the first. As with the first, I didn’t worry overly about emaculate use of language. In some respects, this article was more successful than the first because I found a greater number of ‘hooks’ for expositional analysis of the subject. I was able to actually utilise the methods of philosophy and even psychology. That is the area of the article that was the most successful.

The structure of this article was similar to the first: a first half that defines the principles of the investigation in question followed by a second half that applies those principles.

I enjoyed writing the first half of the article but by the second half, I was beginning to get bogged down with it. It also occurred to me that some parts of the article would require quite intensive research. To get around this, I made the decision to restrict the scope of the analysis in the second half to operating systems that I was already familiar with. If I focused upon operating systems that I was less familiar with, I could have got myself into a situation in which I would have to do two hours research for each few hundred words of article.

As with the first article, I didn’t do a very extensive rewrite, although, I seem to remember that I retouched the first half a little bit. As with the first article, having finished the first draft, I had to make a decision between either spending some more time on it or posting it. Spending more time on the article meant the possibility of allowing the project to linger and wilt as I endeavoured to make it ‘perfect’ or I simply got tired of it. By the end, I was a bit burned out with the project: I wrote it for free and it was taking time away from other projects. If it had been a piece of paid work, I could have justified the extra time for it.

As I said above, the article improves upon the first one as it contains a bit more analysis and formulation of thesis. I could feel myself applying what I have learnt, particular from my study of philosophy. For this reason, I hope that it’s an article that not just anyone could have written.

The finished article doesn’t quite have the vigour of the first and I don’t think that I got as close to the chatty tone of a magazine article as the first article managed to. It was perhaps overly ambitious and frankly, just too much work to do for a free project that wouldn’t bring any direct benefits.

The Third One – “What It Would Take To Make Me Consider RISCOS Again”

The article was only finished about a week ago so, I might not yet have enough distance from it to make a proper analysis. The best thing to come out of writing article #3 was that I have started experimenting with using a ‘mind mapping’ tool for the note taking stage of a small projects (see last news item for details). I’ve made some useful advances in the project planning area. I also chalked up a bit of experience in terms of ‘what not to do’ when writing such an article.

The planning stage went well but I ended up letting the article length balloon out of control. The project really started to drag so I was sick of it by the end. As I was nearing the 6,000 word point, half as a long again as the other two, I made the decision to finish it off at all costs. I was so sick of it that I don’t think that it was even given a thorough proof read.

There are a few little moments where the article starts to shine, with a bit of in-depth analysis and theorising but it much of it ended up as a dull stating of dry facts. I had anticipated a bit more fallout from hardcore RISCOS fanatics so the final bit of work I did was to add a bit of pre-damage control to the front of the article. In retrospect I wonder if I might have insulted some of the RISCOS enthusiasts who read the article?

Anyway, as a learning experience, article #3 was quite useful. But the article wasn’t the most worthy addition to my portfolio. To really finish the article would have meant adding another two or three thousand words and spending perhaps a total of another few nights on it.

The main thing that I have learnt from writing #3 is that there might be more value in creating articles closer to the 2,000 word mark. At this length, it can still be a useful exercise but there is less chance of me becoming bogged down when writing it. If the idea needs further exploration, it might be worthwhile to revisit it later with a part 2. No more epic-length tech articles!

Future Articles

I’ll try to maintain the 1 article per month rate but I’m going to cut down on the article length. Then, they can still serve as a useful exercise but without detracting from other, more important writing work.

Before long, osnews.com will have published another one of my articles. When they post it on the site, I’ll link to it on the side menu as usual. The subject this time is the RISCOS operating system. It’s an OS that I have some emotional attachment to as the machine that I geeked my way through the middle part of my teens on was a RISC OS workstation. It’s also an OS with a fanatical set of followers so, let the flaming begin!

Finishing the article ended up being quite a lot of work; having just woken up, the next day, it is an effort to even write this news entry. In that spirit, I’m going to take the day off from doing any more writing and get out of the house instead. Time to do some Christmas shopping.

Hello to all people who have surfed over from OSNews. I hope you all like the article. By the way, the names Rhyder/Michael Reed/Robin Hyder are all synonymous. Click here to read it.

Erk. It would seem that I may have been pipped to the post in my dream to create the first IT orientated sit-com. I haven’t seen a copy of The IT Crowd yet so, I don’t know how bad this is. If TIC is really similar to my own thingy, I may have to abandon the project entirely.

I’ll see what audience reaction to TIC is like and maybe try to get hold a copy before deciding whether to proceed with TUOL. The plan had been to rewrite the pilot to create a second draft. Amongst other changes in the second draft, I planned to make the script more plot orientated. I also came up with the brilliant idea of adding a female character to the main cast; you can perhaps picture me sighing when I saw the pictures and read the first accounts of TIC :-/

Serves me right for thinking ‘ah well, you’re 30 now (on 31 of Jan) what else can go wrong this week?’