Well, first, because EPUB is an international standard put together by the International Digital Publishing Forum and I’ve got the hots for international standards. I love them. Without international standards, you wouldn’t be able to have your luggage tagged from one international destination to another, make phone calls or send a postcard to a friend, for example.

Let me admit something to you. I’m also an open-source fan. I don’t like proprietary systems. I like to rip things apart to see how they work. EPUB fills those criteria.

PDF, while widely known and used, is an Adobe product and, while I adore FrameMaker, Adobe has been notoriously antagonistic (or indifferent, take your pick) towards Linux. What really bites in this regard is that Adobe products are available for Apple (a *NIX variant) but they will not go that bit further and port across to Linux.

Secondly, you have to understand the philosophy behind the two products. PDF was created as a screen alternative to print, at a time when most documents were still being sent from place to place in paper form. In order to win over those print fans, Adobe created the Portable Document Format (PDF), that had all the advantages of a printed document, but without the horrendous shipping and time costs.

Because Adobe was targetting print fans, PDF gives you a printed page on a monitor. You see the page as the author intended, complete with the typefaces, margins and positioning as the author intended.

The production of a PDF, then, is a completely different proposition to the production of an EPUB, where the size of screen, margins and even typefaces and their colours vary according to the reader’s choices on her/his screen.

PDF has another problem. Where the PDF hasn’t been constructed to be reflowable, it will look terrible on your screen. I know this because I’ve tried (and failed) to read dozens of PDFs on various ereaders and they are a pain. Having to depend on the PDF author/publisher to do the right thing is a risk I am no longer willing to take, and one I don’t wish to impose on readers.

And, lastly, because PDF is a faithful rendition of a printed page, all the considerations that didn’t have to go into an EPUB have to go into a PDF. That is, I have to cater for widows, orphans, gutters, rivers, hyphenation, and so on. This is not a trivial task if I want to do it properly and, believe me, I want to do this properly.

Having said all that, I haven’t ruled out the possibility of having PDF giveaway versions of my Sandal Press books, but it’s just going to have to wait until I have a bit of spare time. (Although, if you really want a copy, Smashwords has WAR GAMES in PDF to sell you.)

Hope this explains the reasoning. Have a good weekend and I’ll catch you next week.

ADDITIONAL: Oops, I forgot to mention. The winner for the WAR GAMES giveaway ended up being two winners and copies have been sent to Cathy Pegau and Barbara Ann Wright. EPUB, natch!

I don’t like clouds. I have accounts with a few cloud backup services but I only use them when I can’t get to my usual concrete resources. But the reason I don’t like The Cloud isn’t to do with the fact that I don’t run a hot little start-up or that I can’t afford to spread my business across several cloud providers and/or time-zones. I don’t like clouds because I don’t like eavesdropping layers between me and my private data.

Private data. It’s bad enough that so much of our personal details are no longer private. You would have heard about Apple collecting location information on its users but it’s not the only violator. Google do it too. Then, to add salt to the paper cut, popular cloud back-up service, Dropbox, recently amended their Terms of Service to say the following:

As set forth in our privacy policy, and in compliance with United States law, Dropbox cooperates with United States law enforcement when it receives valid legal process, which may require Dropbox to provide the contents of your private Dropbox. In these cases, Dropbox will remove Dropbox’s encryption from the files before providing them to law enforcement.

The old adage of “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to be worried about” is well and truly beaten to a pulp by that career Roman Catholic, Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, who said in those racey days of the early 1600s:

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

Reference too old for you? How about Professor James Duane on why you should never talk to the police.

So, coming back to one’s data, I hate that a foreign government has access to my private information. Lest we forget, the US government has a long and cosy history with its corporations. Some standout moments include:

• Overthrowing the elected government of Guatemala on behalf of the United Fruit Company (here, here and here for official documents).
• Project ECHELON that eavesdrops mostly on non-military targets across the world; i.e. governments, organisations and businesses. This is an ongoing initiative and there have been a few spats over the decades about how the USA has used information gathered by ECHELON in Western Europe to give US corporations competitive advantages.
• Derailing open-source in Vietnam
• Quantitative Easing

A lot of collusion dates back to way before the interconnected Web 2.0 world that we now live in. But of course we don’t even have to consider the US government to talk about corporate collusion. Both Google and Yahoo! have collaborated with foreign national governments and Blackberry will too if it hopes to continue doing business in the Middle East.

With all these interested government queries, software back doors, location polling and decryption-on-demand, is it any wonder that I’m nervous about (a) where my data is being stored by all these magnanimous corporations (Gmail, Dropbox, Apple, Yahoo!, Android, Facebook, Twitter, ad nauseam) and (b) how long for?

So what’s the answer?

First, open-source software. Microsoft isn’t open. Neither is Android. Neither is Chrome. And, despite what the fanbois may tell you, neither is Apple. The only open-source operating system software in the world is Linux. Proper Linux, not its partly-closed variants as developed by Google and Apple.

Tangible back-up resources. I use a combination of my other computers, USB sticks, SD cards and external hard disk drives to back up my data. When stuck, I will use the cloud, but I’m sure to delete my stuff off there as soon as possible. (Not that that’s a guarantee. Who knows which governments are slurping the data even as I upload them?)

If you use the cloud and decide to delete the more private files, remember to delete the server versions as well.

If you have to use the cloud to store data, use your own encryption before uploading. Never ever depend on cloud encryption.

And educate yourself a little. I know those EULAs are a pain but you’re not going to learn anything if you don’t read them. And it’s no use clicking past all those windows only to declare, a year or so later, that “I didn’t know!”. If the computer is a big part of your working life (as it is mine), it behooves you to know as much about that world as you do about your own immediate reality. Because, let’s face it, in this world, your computer IS your reality.

It’s ten o’clock in the morning. Do you know where your data are?

After I wrote that, J read it and asked, “What about Java?” In buying Sun, Oracle bought Java as well. Would Oracle turn things around and give Java a bit of the lovin’ it had been denying other open-source initiatives?

[Insert snort of derision here]

An El Reg post from 8 February cites a Forrester report that declares Java’s future as “alive and well but limited”. El Reg journalist Matt Asay points out that:

Java [has not been] helped any by the political infighting that has plagued its development over the last few years. Sun had its share of detractors for its (mis)management of Java, but the ire reserved for Oracle’s manhandling of Java and its Java Community Process takes the criticism to a new level.

Perhaps most notably, the Apache Software Foundation dumped its support for Java’s governance processes, and the open-source crowd also decided to fork the popular Hudson code management project.

It also leaves Oracle with one more black mark against its reputation with developers.

And what do the bread-and-butter developers think of Oracle? That would be the wonderfully entertaining commenters at El Reg. At the risk of fielding an accusation of cherry-picking quotes…oh hang it, here are other dudes that also think Oracle are a bunch of tyrannical twats. Andy73:

If I were a shareholder in Oracle, I’d be most concerned that rather than buying an asset and leveraging it as far as possible, the company appears to be entrenching itself and alienating the wider market. As the author says, it’s probably a position they can hold for some time with little ill effect, but companies don’t grow by defending a corner.

And from DrXym:

…Oracle are insane to alienate open source developers whether they are volunteers or employed. The Apache foundation, Spring (VMWare), Hibernate / JBoss (Red Hat), Eclipse (IBM) are all critical contributors to the success of Java. If you develop for Java then the chances are you use a combination of tools and libs from all of the above.

If you piss off these projects, or deny them input into the platform, they’ll simply begin to think about taking their business elsewhere.

And while amanfromMars1 is perhaps overstating things by drawing philosophical connections between Quantitative Easing and Oracle’s bullheadedness, his heart seems to be in the right place:

[Quote from Matt Asay's article:] “Oracle won’t be a comfortable position if it owns the data center but cedes client-side application engineering to someone else. Microsoft showed long ago that owning the end-user drives a lot of infrastructure decisions.”

Quite so, Matt. Having a store of information [owning the data center] and not having the developers/metadatabase analysts in this case, to turn toxic old phorm information into dynamic new build intelligence, is a carbon copy in a parallel plane [and/or if you are heavily into Virtual Reality Fields and the ARGenre], of the present QE fiascos, with the trillions of fast instant cash being pumped into the money system, which is the owning-the-data-center element, doing absolutely nothing to create a bulwark against catastrophic collapse of the system because there is nobody to use the flash cash/toxic old phorm information to build a SMARTer Intelligence System for SMARTer IntelAIgent Systems.

But the prize of Geek In-Joke of the Day has to go to Rafael1, who says:

In a side note, I love when I get people’s CVs which mention HTML as a programming language… I have to resist the urge to ask them to implement a sorting algorithm in HTML.

Good one, Rafael1! Have to remember that.

As an Open Source geek, I don’t like Oracle. They’ve already proven that they will take open source initiatives and shut them down. OpenSolaris is one example. I don’t care whether you’ve used Solaris or not, innovation thrives in competition and Oracle is all about getting rid of it. I was working at Oracle when the Sun acquisition went through and it was not seen as a positive move by many Sun engineers involved in any open source initiatives. It was this, as it turned out, justified fear that led members of Open Office to “fork” the product by forming The Document Foundation and creating the LibreOffice suite.

According to Wikipedia, and for all the Australians among you, LibreOffice was only supposed to be the interim name, to be changed when Oracle joined the party. In true Oracle fashion, not only did Oracle not buy into the foundation, but they demanded that all OpenOffice.org board members involved in LibreOffice resign. Ah Larry, your management style is truly exceptional!

I’ll be honest. Even when part of Sun, Open Office was limping along, forever approaching the software guillotine then retreating from it. Now that it is part of Oracle, I really fear that the next trip to the downsizing blade won’t be as merciful.

My advice to authors who use Open Office? Switch to LibreOffice and do it as quick as you can. Get involved with the development team. Try out some Release Candidates and log bugs. If we want LibreOffice to be a viable alternative to Microsoft Word (and which FOSS advocate doesn’t?), then involvement with the product is the best way to do it. And, because it’s Open Source, that means that your comments and contributions count! You can’t get more democratic than that.

To find out more about The Document Foundation, go here.

To download LibreOffice, go here.

The Linux community has embraced LibreOffice and it is moving to replace Open Office in several distributions. I have removed Open Office from my machine and installed LibreOffice. Hope you do the same.

UPDATE: LibreOffice 3.3 was officially released yesterday. And, as the article from Developer.com says:

“I think that there is a very real and sincere offer for [Oracle] to join the community, the only blocker is Oracle,” [Michael Meeks, distinguished engineer at Novell] said. “They could become a leading light in the LibreOffice community. We’d love that. We’d love to have Oracle. This is not attempt to attack them, this an attempt to do something better.”

What’s the bet Oracle just ignores them?

I see that the average prices paid by various users is also up on the link given above. As of 17:35 this Friday afternoon, payments are as follows:

• Windows users – average paid – $6.82
• Mac users – average paid – $9.61
• Linux users – average paid – $13.65

All I can say is, YOU CHEAP WINDOWS BASTARDS! Wwwwhhhhyyyyyyyy? I mean, you’re already used to paying through the nose for all things software, right? Same with the Mac users, who are a category of people who’d rather spend their last dollars on a pair of Jimmy Choo’s rather than food, thus resulting in the most fashionable corpses around. It’s us freeloader Linux users who demand software for…y’know…FREE! And yet our payments are double (let me repeat that…DOUBLE!!!1111) that of the Windows users and fifty percent more than that of Mac users (as of this writing). You cheap, stingy bastards. That’s all.

PS And to preclude the obvious argument of: “But, there are almost double the number of Windows purchasers as Linux, so it all evens itself out in the end”, no it doesn’t. You did not go to the page saying to yourself, “Oh let’s see the breakdown of the three platforms vis-a-vis the purchase price average…. Hmmm, okay, I shall then compute the necessary purchase price to lend a degree of equilibrium to the entire buying process.” No you didn’t. So none of that sophistry, kid.

Please remember though, we’re just humble indie developers and the more you contribute, the easier it will be for us to make awesome games in the future.

CROSS-PLATFORM. Number two of the reasons that convinced me. All these games are available in Linux, Mac and PC flavours! Oh yeah!

NO DRM. As if you need yet another reason to buy the bundle, there is NO DRM on any of the games.

NO CORPORATE MIDDLE MAN. Every cent you pay goes directly to the developers. Oh, and two other parties….

BUYING THE BUNDLE HELPS CHARITY. You have a choice when paying to have some or all of your proceeds go to two charities: Child’s Play (which donates toys, games, books and cash to sick kids in hospitals in a variety of countries) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the activist organisation for protecting the public at the electronic frontier.

The games are:

• World of Goo: A physics-based puzzle construction game that has won awards for innovation and technical excellence.

• Aquaria: OMG, what utterly beautiful graphics. Go here to see the trailers if you don’t believe me. The Wast and I were mesmerised and so will Little Dinosaur be when she gets her princess paws on this one.

• Gish: Ah, the story of a ball of tar who follows his kidnapped owner, hoping to save her from Teh Ebil. It’s a love story of the ages. We bought this for The Wast a couple of years ago, but I’m overjoyed to see a Linux version so that I can play it and waste even more time not writing. Gish also has user levels (like the other family favourite, Dr Lunatic Supreme with Cheese (over 1,200 levels!) from Hamumu), so you can download dozens of new levels to play.

• Lugaru HD: Killer rabbit with skillz goes head to head with brainwashed bunnies and ravening wolves.

• Penumbra Overture: First-person horror. The Media page shows some pretty creepy (but not violent) stuff.

The Penumbra series’ central character, Philip, is realistically vulnerable, while enemies are fierce and intelligent. Any object can be picked up and thrown in defence, but the end result might only be to buy some time, or more likely, anger enemies further. Avoiding, outwitting and sneaking past enemies entirely provide the best chance of survival.

HAVE I CONVINCED YOU? READY TO BUY? Go here to find out more and buy. And seriously, for five games, you can do better than the average payment which is roughly US$8, right? NOTE: You only have four days to take advantage of this offer!

I was sitting having a coffee with a friend in Singapore recently. Let’s call her Gwen. Gwen is in an enviable position for someone in IT. Her company recently won a large deal and she has the responsibility to ramp up a team of developers, negotiate deliverables and deliver the first phase of a system by the end of the year. I used to live for opportunities like that. Gwen, however, was rather glum.

“I’m going to get a reputation as a complete bitch,” she told me morosely, stirring her coffee.
“Why?”
“I have to build a team, right? Well, I went through about forty resumes last night.”
“And?”
We’re always told how high-tech Singapore is. How much more advanced it is compared to its neighbours, and how it always attracts only the best. Creative. Innovative. Fast. Tech. Dynamic. I was happy to pick Gwen’s brain because I was curious as to whether the facts lived up to the hype.
“Most of them are useless,” she told me.
I raised my eyebrows. “How so?”
“I’m after C++ developers,” she said. “They have to already know their stuff because we have our first deadline in a matter of months. I don’t have time to mollycoddle anyone.”
I nodded.
“Well, out of the forty resumes, seven have Computing degrees.” She frowned. “What’s that work out to? About fifteen percent?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, something like that.” I actually yearn for times when I don’t have to do any thinking and, as far as I was concerned, Gwen was going to be the one doing the heavy lifting in this conversation.
“The rest…,” she shook her head. “All I’m getting from India are civil engineers and all I’m getting from China are chemists and mathematicians. That doesn’t mean they’re not smart, but how would they like it if I tried to build a bridge or come up with a new malaria vaccine? I wouldn’t last a week! Yet, according to them, they’re now software developers.”
She sighed. “So what am I supposed to do now? If I employ a chemist to do programming, sure, they might be able to do some robot stuff but how will they know how to code their way out of a sticky problem? If I say to one of them, ‘okay, I want you to write a web app but what are you going to do to stop an SQL injection?’, they’re not going to know where to start.” She raised her voice. “Why are they even applying for a job which they’ve never trained for?”
“Eighty-five percent, huh?”
“Clueless,” she said. “In desperation, I interviewed several of them. They don’t even know what a left join is. And that’s not all. You should see the salaries they’re expecting.” She paused. “How much does it take to live in Singapore?”
“Well, obviously more than I have which is why we don’t live in Singapore,” I quipped.
But Gwen was impatient and waved away my feeble joke. “Right, right. But how much?”
“For a single professional? Maybe four thousand a month for a start, and that’s only if you can find an HDB flat to rent. For a family, you can’t do much with less than seven or eight. Not if you’re a foreigner.”
“And a good starting salary for an IT developer?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Good results at Uni. Maybe a year’s commercial experience. Six maybe for a junior?”
“That’s what I thought.” Although my confirmation seemed to make her even unhappier.
“Do you know how much they want?” she finally asked.
“Who? The Indians and Chinese?”
“Yeah.”
“Not a clue.”
“Two and a half to three.”
“Thousand a month?”
“Yep.”
“To live in Singapore?” I gaped at her. “Are they nuts?”
“You can see what happens, can’t you?” Gwen told me, sipping her coffee. “Some bridge builder or maths teacher comes along and says they’ll do C++ or Python or Java or whatever coding you want, and they want less than three a month for it. Who’s going to look that kind of gift horse in the mouth? It has a knock-on effect, though. Take me. What happens when it’s time to move on? There’s so much downward pressure on IT salaries that I’ll be earning less money with more experience as time goes on. And what about my project? HR only has to read over the same CVs to complain about how I’m only picking the expensive candidates.”
She stared at her coffee. “No matter which way I look at it, I lose. If I pick only the IT-qualified guys, I’m going to get reamed for running a too-expensive project. If I pick chemists, I’ll get reamed for missing our milestones. Either way, I end up looking like an absolute, incompetent bitch.”
I didn’t know what to say because Gwen was completely correct. All I could do was agree with her, but that would make her feel even worse.
“I’ll get another round of coffee,” I said and temporarily escaped.

I work in IT Support, so you’d think I’d have some pretty funny stories about customers, and I do. Customers are contradictory, capricious, carping, and other words that begin with “c” (yes, sometimes even that). But, you know, I would take a difficult customer any day over a Sales rep.

Sales, sales, sales. They say we can’t do without them but there are times when that’s patently untrue. Recently, I got off the phone with a Sales rep handling a large utilities company. The man had never met me, or spoken to me before, but that didn’t stop a kind of patronising tirade that basically put all the blame for a current issue at the feet of the company (that is, the company both he and I work for) and absolutely none at the feet of the customer. This is despite the fact I had investigated the issue and found issues and missteps on both sides.

Last month, I had the “pleasure” of attending the call with two Sales reps (the account is rather large). When a couple of us from Consulting and Support pointed out that, in fact, the customer had — in public — said A, B and C, directly contradicting our own analyses of what had gone wrong in a particular situation, our esteemed sales-oriented colleagues had the gall to suggest that while those were the words that were said, we were deficient in “not reading the body language correctly”. At several phone conferences??!! You guessed it; it was Our Fault once again.

These two accounts have one thing in common. The Sales teams are putting together substantial proposals for future business from the customers concerned. So, while they have an all-expenses trip to Bora Bora on the cards, everything that goes wrong at the customer’s site is our problem. They just want to swan in, host lunches and expense it and, in the meantime, leave us with the heavy lifting. Next time, I’ll ask if I get a cut of their commission for making their job so much easier.

Sales reps will do anything to make a commission, and that includes selling their peers, and the company that pays them their salary and bonuses, down the river if need be. I remember the rep who sold a customer ten servers, but only charged them for three support licenses. “Just rotate the licenses to whatever box is giving trouble,” he told the customer, “and that way you’re 100% covered.” Or the rep who didn’t sell any Support at all, but still assured the customer that bugs would be fixed. Guess who used to cop the irate overseas phone calls while he was off in Hawaii getting a suntan?

And there’s the whining. “Oh why can’t you give them X and Y free of charge? They have the potential to turn into a Very Important Customer, and you’re being an obstacle by insisting we follow the rules.” And I have a company-paid holiday hanging on this, doncha know?

And then there’s the shifting of blame. Because, of course, it’s never Sales’ fault that they can’t estimate their way out of a paper bag. “We lost the deal because Consulting didn’t come up with a competitive value proposition.” “If Support Services hadn’t demanded pre-conditions from the customer, we would’ve won the deal.” “Legal didn’t vet the agreement within the accepted time-frame.” It’s never, ever the fault of the Sales rep. Listening to them (and I used to have some small lever of control over a regional Sales team at one point), you’d think they were nothing more than dandelion flowers of fate, prey to every capricious whim that dares blow their way. Poor darlings.

Of course, ever since I’ve decided not to take any more bullshit from the Sales reps I’m forced to deal with, not one has contacted me. Typical, isn’t it? You finally work yourself up to scorching the bastards where they stand, and they don’t front up at all.

You may remember that in February of last year, I did a bit of a post on SAP poster-boy, Leo Apotheker. Most notably, besides his name, I honed in on his speech where he essentially bitch-slapped SAP’s partners.

What I unfortunately didn’t know at the time, which would have made the post a little more titteringly delicious, was that this must have been one of Leo’s first speeches as SAP’s Biggest Wiggest. (I know, I know, it’s his name. It’s making me giddy.)

Well, The Register has now reported that Leo has left SAP. Key phrases include “surprise departure”, “leaving the top job, and the company board”, “immediate” resignation, and “contract not extended by mutual agreement”.

Wonder if the partners Leo slighted had anything to do with it? Hmmmmm.

(ADDITIONAL: ZDNet tells me that Leo had poor “internal staff ratings” , and Bloomberg adds that his “market changer” BusinessByDesign offering (a monthly subscription model that he must have pitched before being made CEO, judging by the timeline) will be implemented “three years later than planned”. I’d also like to think that dissing every partner out there in the marketplace didn’t help.)

If you’ve wandered over here on Wednesday morning, US Eastern time, you’ll also find a post from me up at Novel Spaces. I continue to be awed by the range of experience in the crew and can only manage some small, derivative prose in their presence.

And I’m finishing up the edits for Singapore Sizzle, my new short story to be released by Total-E-Bound in May as part of the “Cougars & Cubs” anthology. With any luck, I’ll have an excerpt up at my website soon.

So, last week I tackled the problem of Melbourne Transport as an example of how a lot of government departments take the easy way out of labyrinthine structures that have been patched, broken and re-patched over time. That’s not to say that only government departments face this. I’ve been confronted plenty times by private companies who, instead of using an opportunity to streamline their business, just push it to “the software” to implement.

But, of course, I’m not letting the software companies off the hook either. Going back to Friday’s example, the myki system is “almost three years late and $350 million over budget.”

There aren’t too many industries where you actually get paid MORE if you screw up. Consider a project. You bid for it at, say, $100million for one year’s work. You do the work, you get paid. That’s it, end of story.

BUT….

Consider a project. You bid for it. In the second month, the business decides they need Additional Features A, B and C. You say okay, for an additional $20 million. But, at the end of the year, not only aren’t Features A, B and C in the new system ready, but the new system itself — the core functionality — isn’t ready either. “It’s all your fault,” the software consultancy firm/company tells the customer. “If you didn’t want to shove in extra work (aka “scope creep”), this wouldn’t have happened.”

Now, the company has two choices. It can either tell Software Consulting Company to take a hike … with $120 million down the tube. Or it can grit its teeth and just tell Software Consulting Company to get on with it. And, three years and $350 million later, you still get a half-wonky system.

It’s also a problem of size. There are some very big consultancy companies out there. Are *you* going to tell them to piss off? No. And they know it. So it can actually pay for them to be as inefficient as possible as a way of gouging more money out of the customer. I do believe that’s where all these expensive consultancy “partners” show their true skill — not in technical stuff, but in knowing just how far they can push the customer, how much schmoozing they can do, how many honeyed lies they can tell, so they can squeeze more and more money out of a “fixed-price” contract right up until the moment when it’s about to go sour and — at that point — they deliver The System. Everybody breathes a sigh of relief, the press releases get announced, and the consultancy firm moves into the Maintenance phase of the project to “fix” all the problems they didn’t plan and design properly in the first place (billed on a time & materials’ basis, natch!).

Nice work if you can get it, and about a dozen companies worldwide have it completely sewn up, baby.