As for the articles, I don’t know I’ll ever have a practical use for this, but it’s good to know the giant squid can accidentally eat parts of itself. And it’s a grand thing that there is a real beast swimming the world’s oceans called the Vampire Squid from Hell.

The fact this beastie isn’t anywhere near as fearsome as its name suggests is no disappointment, especially when you consider it’s likely a ‘living fossil’, having first appeared in much the form it is now way back in the Carboniferous.

On the ‘that’s really cool and good news to boot’ front, Go Sun Solutions reports on ‘a [new] manufacturing technique that could boost the efficiency of a… type of solar cell by up to 50%’.

Only problem here is, I want to know more.

The specifics of the technique have been published in the Journal of Applied Physics. The abstract is available for free but the full paper is only available for subscribers. And the University of New South Wales‘ media release on the technique is heavy on how nifty the technique is and light on the specifics of said niftiness.

I’m not suggesting there’s anything dodgy in the claims; just that the basic outline of the technique:

[the] new approach involves depositing a thin film of silver (measuring about 10 nanometers thick) onto a solar cell surface and heating it to 200° Celsius. That breaks the film into flattened spheres, called islands, which are about 100 nanometers in diameter. When struck by light, these islands achieve the same feat as etching by a natural but complex process.
— Go Sun Solutions
— ‘No Silicon Needed’
— Thursday, 26 April 2007

whets my appetite to know more.

Staying on the green front (for want of a better segue), Carol Lloyd’s article, ‘Small houses challenge our notions of need as well as minimum-size standards‘ on SFGate.com introduced me to Jay Shafer and his Tumbleweed Tiny House Company.

Which led to a quick Googling that lead to this small collection of photos of Shafer’s home (and Shafer) on flickr.com. Which, of course, led to a well-spent wasted hour digging into Telstar Logistics, learning what it was, where it had come from, and who was behind it all.

Next on my ‘things I’d rather think about than work’ tour, there’s Rachel Hillmer and Paul Kwiat’s Do-It-Yourself Quantum Eraser in the May 2007 issue of Scientific American. I think they overstate the ‘readily available’ nature of the equipment you need (polarising film isn’t as common as they hint) but it’s a simple experiment to conduct if you do have the equipment. And it’s impressively effective at making quantum effects real and tangible (at least it was for me when I conducted the experiment here at Casa de Forte).

Wandering from physics back to the biological sciences, Kerry Grens has a article in The Scientist on the possibility a single transcription factor (ie a protein that controls whether or not a gene is expressed) might be the key to understanding and perhaps even treating or preventing addiction to a range of drugs of dependence.

Proteins are also discussed in Melissa Lee Phillips’ report on the discovery that sea sponges ‘possess protein components of synapses, even though they don’t have nervous systems‘. The article doesn’t mention it (’coz, let’s face it, why should it) but discoveries like this always give me a small thrill of schadenfreude at the whole ‘irreducible complexity’ nonsense still being schilled by Michael Behe, Michael Denton and co.

Staying with biology, but getting back to humans, Stephen Oppenheimer, in conjunction with the Bradshaw Foundation has produced a spectacular and fascinating interactive look at Humanity’s migrations, starting in East Africa and eventually covering almost the whole world.

I’m not normally a fan of Flash, but Oppenheimer’s journey would be difficult to take using plain-old CSS and HTML. It’s worth noting, however, the use of Flash makes their admonition to turn off your pop-up blocker more than a self-interested statement.

If this isn’t enough to get you into deadline-slippage territory, the folks at the Bradshaw Foundation have lots more high-quality time-suckage to help you understand the epic human journey while away several days learning fascinating stuff that won’t help in any practical way at all.

Which means the following quick e-mail from a friend was the perfect distraction:

This is not just any belly-aching, whining, moaning and/or griping.

No. This is public belly-aching, whining, moaning and/or griping sung in harmony to a musical accompaniment with a rap solo!

The Complaints Choir of Birmingham.

But that’s only 10 minutes or so of non-productive time. So let’s get serious.

It turns out the whole idea of a Complaints Choir comes to us thanks to Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen. They’ve done interesting things apart. And they’ve done interesting things together.

And, walking together one winter’s day in Helsinki, the pair ended up discussing

the possibility of transforming the huge energy people put into complaining into something else.

As it happens, there is a Finnish expression: “Valituskuoro”.

It means “Complaints Choir” and it is used to describe situations where a lot of people are complaining simultaneously. Kalleinen and Kochta-Kalleinen thought: “Wouldn’t it be fantastic to take this expression literally and organise a real Complaints Choir!”

The Springhill Institute in Birmingham, England, took the idea and ran with it. Happily, others have followed their example.

So we’ve now got the Helsinki Complaints Choir; the Hamburg Complaints Choir; the St Petersburg Complaints Choir and several others, all dutifully noted on the Complaints Choir web-site.

FWIW, I’m torn between the Helsinki and St Petersburg choirs as my personal favourite.

Even better, so far as Gilles Roy is concerned, all this apparently pointless effort is more than cranky kvetching:

in the context of a group song, complaining appears to be many things, not just the whining wheedle of the quietly desperate, living their misery out in isolation. Rather we find here a chockfull of insight, small-mindedness, fatigue, expressions of injustice, powerlessness, etc. from the individual voices heard through the multitude, both in solo and unison.

Maybe we should get a few Complaints Choirs going here in Oz? If nothing else, it might make the Federal Election coming before the end of 2007 more interesting (or interesting at all, given the way elections are played out these days).

After all, if it doesn’t get us anywhere, we can always complain to Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen about the whole exercise being a waste of our valuable time.

Much of the reporting on the show has noted the influence of the show with zefrank by Ze Frank.

This isn’t a bad thing, per se, of course. It’s not as if the stand up or piece to camera is a new technique. Anyway originality is over-rated. If I was only going to be distracted by originality, I’d probably never get distracted at all. I’d be getting real work done all the time, and then where would I be?

Oh, and speaking of distraction and not getting work done: another in the ‘acerbic commentary from some guy alone in front of a camera without professional lighting’ genre worth missing a few deadlines for is Nate Burr aka Blunty3000.

Blunty isn’t Australian is as good a place as any to start but the one that set me off on a multi-hour meander away from useful effort was his MeatSpace Pilot. It isn’t in the one-guy-with-a-camera genre. It’s rather nifty stop-motion animation with lego. It’s got the required amount of ascerbic commentary, nonetheless.

Getting back to the point (or the thing vaguely resembling a point). Look Shiny is worth letting at least one important deadline passing you by. And it’s worth missing that life-changing deadline because of his 2007/03/02 show: Not Getting Things Done.

This episode not only outlines a programme for ensuring distraction rules your life but goes one step further than Ze Frank on the same subject. Where Ze Frank offers only practical tips, Douglas has a full-blown system, almost guaranteed to ensure you have both a full time sense of impending doom and an overwhelming sense of having too much else to care about to face said doom effectively.

So much more interesting and distracting than actual attempts to explain procrastination.

Much discussion ensued. I even piped in with a tiny comment: a link to a LiveScience report that suggests The Rich See What They Believe.

A particular comment, from Papapete, however, got me to thinking:

Add the government and see what happens. The giver has no connection to the recipient and receives no emotional or moral “payoff”. The recipient doesn’t feel gratitude for the “gift” or the “giver”, but instead feels entitled to the largesse. Instead of being grateful to the person who actually supplied the welfare, his/her gratitude is reserved for the government, and frequently resents the person(s) that the money is actually coming from. So, from a win-win situation to a lose-lose situation in one easy step.

It’s not lose-lose, it’s just not as good as it could be. And, as for ‘[the recipient] being grateful’ that shouldn’t be a goal of mitzvot anyway.

Of course, I’m not thinking of ‘Christian charity’ at all here. Then again, I’ve never had much time for that notion. I’ve always preferred the RamBam’s Eight Degrees of Tzedakah.

The RamBam’s highest degree of Tzedakah is reserved for enabling someone to become free of the need for charity or help. Not exactly the paradigm example of fuzzy, feel-good ‘liberal’ thinking there.

Next on the list: giving in such a fashion the giver and the recipient do not and cannot know each other. Gratitude — or the perception that gratitude is deserved — is to be avoided if possible since it does neither the giver nor the recipient any good.

In fact, it does both harm. The giver ends up feeling better about themselves than they should. Being able to give isn’t a sign of your moral fitness, it’s a sign of your relative wealth.

Meanwhile, the recipient feels the burden of gratitude, a feeling more likely to engender the resentment Papapete decries above. Better they get help from an un-named or un-knowable source (like, say, a government department, acting as a proxy for the whole society).

Back on down the Tzedakah line, the least worthy form of giving is giving only because you feel obliged to (because of social pressure) or are required to.

But even that’s still a mitzvot, because good comes of it (or bad is averted, like, say, the death of a child for want of US$80.00 for dental care).

Wandering back across the religious traditions, Maimonides’ very practical ethic has always felt — to me at least — like a good fit to John Donne’s Mediation XVII:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee

Single-payer, taxation-funded health care isn’t perfect, and I’m happy to rant about Medicare’s shortcomings here in Oz.

But the underlying basis of a taxation-funded health care system is the acknowledgement of Donne’s point followed by a decision to use the RamBam’s practical ethic as the basis of a public policy that makes state funds the basis of the health care system, rather than a supplement to it.

OK, it’s likely not either of these things at all. At least it’s not what you’ll find if you go looking at the ALP’s 1970s policy documents regarding MediBank. But similar ethical and moral notions are commonly a part of the practical public policy position generally known as a universal health scheme.

Which sounds like the rough beginnings of an argument for working to make universal health care work better, rather than tearing it down or suggesting it’s such a bad idea we shouldn’t be implementing it in the first place.

And, while it was real work for me, I crammed a fair swag of background that’s only really of use for impressing your mates at parties. (Always assuming your mates are impressed by a smattering of knowledge about the Hanoverians and their impact on the English language.)

Anyway, the column goes on and on about Kings, conquerers, invasions and class divides. Oh, and the intricacies of using the indefinite article correctly.

Best of all, there’s already real comments and those comments come with links.

Which means I was able to waste spend quality time this morning discovering yet more avenues of distraction.

Consequently my ‘place to go instead of doing actual work’ for today is Paul Frields Grand Fallacy, an active personal blog with interesting stuff (like this account of the barriers open source tools can impose on non-Anglophones) and pointers to other interesting stuff (like the Mooninites).

Quick side-note: as of 2007/02/27, this particular Paul Frields is the king of Google so far as his name is concerned.

Small problem: Paul’s Next Page and Previous Page links aren’t working as I type this. They have the form:

      http://paul.frields.org/~paul/wordpress/?cat=x&paged=y

Where ‘x’ and ‘y’ are numbers

They need to be of the form

      http://paul.frields.org/?cat=x&paged=y

to work.

I suspect a glitch in Paul’s .htaccess file is the culprit but it’s not that difficult to work around for the moment: just delete the ~paul/wordpress string from any paul.frields.org URLs before heading off to visit a new page.

Unfortunately we can’t have the ones on display, and most of us don’t have the skill to make even dodgy facsimiles.

On the plus side, thanks to the serendipidy that lead me to the Steampunk Workshop I can point to music to listen to and offer a timely reminder for everyone to catch up on reading Girl Genius and other work by Phil and Kaja Foglio.

The Foglio link is especially rich in distraction-inducing goodness.

There’s Buck Godot, What’s New with Phil and Dixie and even Girl Genius, all available for free on-line reading. (I’m probably going to spend way too much money getting the stories on pressed-pulped wood, nonetheless, especially since it’s the only way to get a copy of Darc Tangent).

The Steampunk Workshop also leads to the Datamancer site, with yet more one-of-a-kind industrial crafting. Plus hours of work-avoidance wonder via the Datamancer’s own links page as well.

Finally, and in preparation for future distraction, there’s Steampunk Magazine. Not a huge amount here as I type but the hope of plenty of fun reading ahead, none of which will help anyone meet a work deadline.

Here will do. It’s a mathematically comedic

response to George Vaccaro’s horrifying encounters with the Verizon billing department

George Vaccaro’s ‘horrifying encounters’ are worth letting a deadline or two slide as well, if only to be appalled anew at the level of basic inummeracy abroad in the world.

For those who don’t get Munroe’s joke, there’s more distraction to be had. The Mathematics Department at the University of Toronto has a rather nifty Question Corner.

It’s not being updated any more but it has a fair swag of questions already answered including a question about e^(i?) that makes the middle third of Randall Monroe’s cheque explicable.

As for the last third, it’s a summation expression. One way of expressing the series in English is

for all whole numbers, n, starting at 1 and going on forever, add together all the fractions, one divided by (2 to the power of n).

Another way, which attempts to lay out the steps involved in calculating the value of each item in the series is as follows.

Step A

1. Start with 2 to the power of 1

   ₂¹

2. Calculate this:

   ₂¹ = 1*2 = 2

3. Make this value the denominator of a fraction with 1 as the numerator:

   ¹?₂

4. For convenience’s sake, turn the fraction into a decimal:

   ¹?₂ = 0.5.

5. Set this value as the first item in an addition:

   0.5 + [more values to come]

Step B

1. Now go with 2 to the power of 2:

   ₂²

2. Calculate this:

   ₂² = 2*2 = 4

3. Make this value the denominator of a fraction with 1 as the numerator:

   ¹?₄

4. For convenience’s sake, turn the fraction into a decimal

   ¹?₄ = 0.25

5. Set this value as the second item in an addition:

   0.5 + 0.25 + [more values to come]

Step C

1. Next is 2 to the power of 3:

   ₂³

2. Calculate this:

   ₂³ = 2*2*2 = 8

3. Make this value the denominator of a fraction with 1 as the numerator:

   ¹?₈

4. For convenience’s sake, turn the fraction into a decimal:

   ¹?₄ = 0.125

5. Set this value as the second item in an addition.

   0.5 + 0.25 + 0.125 + [more values to come]

Step D &c

1. Keep repeating the above steps, increasing the power you raise 2 to by one each time.

2. Don’t stop, ever.

Stepping back from this endless task for a moment. Try the steps above for all values of n from 1 to 10. To really see what’s going on, note the intermediate values you get as you increase n.

For example, for n = 2 above, the sum is

• 0.5 + 0.25

For n = 3 above, the sum is

• 0.5 + 0.25 + 0.125

Think for a minute about what happens to the value of this sum as you keep adding together fractions derived from ever larger powers of 2 (hint: it keeps getting closer to a particular number). Now, consider what would happen if you kept going forever.

Now, go back and take another look at Randall Monroe’s cheque.

Funny, yes?

/* Funny, no, probably. Nothing like explaining a joke to suck all the life out of it. */

Amused or not, take at least a moment to check out Monroe’s webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. With any luck I’ll have a few more people missing deadlines as they spend ‘just a few minutes more’ reading through the more than 200 strips Munroe has produced as of this posting.

And, don’t forget to mouse-over the comics. Most of them have an extra tidbit tucked away in the image’s title attribute which will show up only if you hover the pointer over the image for a few seconds.

Referring, once again, to my article on documentation for Red Hat Magazine entitled ‘Four rules and an axiom’

I’ve posted a further comment in reference to thoughts posted by two readers.

And, like my first, self-generated comment, I had links in the comment.

<tone mode=”wearied & pissed off”>

/* It’s hypertext for pity’s sake. In-line links to other material are the entire point of this environment’s existence. If we can’t in-line link, we may as well start using Gopher again. */

/* I hasten to add: this rant isn’t aimed at the folks running Red Hat Magazine. They’ve clearly got both a ‘lots of links probably means comment spam‘ policy and a ’strip links out of posts we let through just in case’ policy. */

/* Given the bane and blight that is comment spam, neither policy is entirely surprising. It’s still annoying enough that I’ve been moved to this little rant against the whole mess. */

</tone>

As you might infer from the above, the comment has appeared sans links. So I’m re-posting the copy below, complete with anchor tags and title attributes.

Comment as Originally Written

Don in Brooklyn wrote:

Speaking of jargon - numbering your five rules 0)-4) is a problem! Especially when it is followed by reference to the “five rules” when you have just finished with Rule 4.

and Tigger23505 wrote:

having a rule 0 smacks of jargonism. What do you do when you have a rule that absolutely must head the list. The common solution is to call it rule 0. The other thing to keep in mind particularly in technical writing, is that many in the target audience are used to things like numbering the bits in a 32 bit word 0-31.

FWIW, although I’m aware of the programmer’s habit of ordering from 0 rather than 1, I wasn’t primarily thinking of that when I decided to call my axiom ‘rule zero’.

I was mostly thinking of the Zeroth law of thermodynamics and, to a lesser extent, Isaac Asimov’s Zeroth law of Robotics.

In both cases, the zeroth law serves as a foundation stone or fundamental beginning point from which further laws can be derived (in the case of thermodynamics) or newly understood (in the case of Asimov’s Robotics Laws).

High falutin’ company I’m aiming to put my laws in, I’ll admit. Never let it be said I lacked ambition, however. Capability? Well that’s a whole ’nother question.

I write a column for Red Hat Magazine. The column’s called How to Write Really Good Documentation, although we won’t know how immodest that title is until a few more columns appear. (FWIW, it isn’t my title. When I proposed the column, I called it word matters (or words matter). I still like that title, and it’s the folder name I use on my own machine for column-related files.)

Obligatory disclosure: I also work for Red Hat as a technical writer. As well, Red Hat Magazine is entirely funded by Red Hat.

My 2nd column for the magazine is called Four rules and an axiom. I, of course, recommend you rush off and read it now, if only because the words below won’t make as much sense otherwise.

When you get to the comments section of the article, you’ll see the first comment is also by me. It was submitted along with the article, to be posted as a comment. So, no surprises for anyone there.

Except, the copy I submitted was bursting with links. Fourteen, to be precise. And that caused Red Hat Magazine’s comment spam filters to throw a fit.

The comment eventually went public, but it did so sans-links. And that’s a bit frustrating for yours truly, because the links are part of the copy.

So, I’m posting the comment here, complete with links (and title tags).

Post Proper

The Computer Book Publishing List, a mailing list run by StudioB, had a thread on the question of technical writing vs book authoring in late-January 2007.

The thread was started by a question from Stuart Mudie: What makes book authors different from tech writers, in your view?

Dee-Ann Le Blanc defined the difference thus:

Most tech writers are not Subject Matter Experts. They interview the SMEs. Book authors have to be the SMEs more often than not.

Judyth Mermelstein got almost adversarial, suggesting

In the computer world, technical writers work for the Company that pays them. They turn information the company provides into documentation that makes the product look good to the customer so it will sell well. That can mean using impenetrable jargon the boss is proud of inventing or omitting to mention known bugs and whatnot.

Ideally, technical authors work for their Readers. They thoroughly examine both the product and its documentation. Then they try to provide all the information the reader really needs, in a better (more accurate, more readable, more logically organized or whatever) [form] than the documentation the manufacturer’s technical writer(s) produced.

In the first case, you’re working for the industry; in the second, for the public good and your own satisfaction.

Margy Levine Young takes a similar, if less polemic, view to Mermelstein:

Computer book authors write from the point of view of the user: what do you want to do, and how do you do it. Manuals usually write from the point of view of the program: here’s what it can do, here are the menus, here are the options. It’s a big difference.

Laura Lemay comes in on the tech writer’s side, noting

There has been a push for “user-centered design” of documentation for at least 25 years. Anyone in corporate technical writing who is still writing program-centered docs is not paying attention to industry practice.

(It’s worth noting some of Lemay’s career history here. According to her FAQ she ‘gave up writing computer books’ and is now a ‘contract technical writer in Silicon Valley [who writes] programmer documentation, mainly.’)

Back to her comments in defence of tech writers, she closes her post to the CBP list with the almost standard refrain regarding companies and the low priority documentation has:

a lot of documentation in companies is still written by whoever the company can scrape up at the last minute to write it, eg, the lowest status engineer, QA, an intern, the receptionist…

In a 2nd, longer, post, Lemay expands on Mermelstein’s point, without getting as adversarial:

[I]n documentation you represent the company and the company’s point of view. Documentation in some ways is a sales tool of the product. You’re expected to ignore or gloss over possible problems in the product you’re writing about, or advantages of the competition. In computer books you can be more honest, more broad, and more critical.

In documentation, you have to document all parts of the product evenly, even the stupid features that no one uses (every product has some). In computer books, you can focus on the real features that people actually use most often.

She also re-states her point regarding the importance, or lack thereof, accorded documentation by many companies as well as explaining why computer books aren’t seen in the same light:

Many corporations consider documentation a necessarily evil but don’t give it much attention or respect. As a tech writer you may be brought onto a product too late to do a good job and then get no access to either the product or to anyone who will explain how the product works because they’re too busy to waste their time with you. This goes a long way toward explaining why a lot of documentation sucks so badly. As a computer book author the book is the product and is thus the center of attention.

All well and good, but what has this to do with the four rules and an axiom column?

Quite a lot. The CBP discussion thread provides an alternative way of expressing the underlying goal of the rules: to the extent it is practical to make documentation more like a computer book, make it so.

There are constraints, of course. Lemay’s point about documenting ‘all parts of the product’ occasionally have legal force behind them.

And the authorial voice several contributors are fond of isn’t especially welcome in formal documentation.

That said, this doesn’t mean there should be no voice in good documentation. Like news reports, documentation is the better for being mostly short, declarative sentences. Using nouns and verbs in preference to adjectives and adverbs makes for clearer instructional prose. And avoiding the passive voice makes for easier to comprehend text.

In short, the so-called ‘transparent voice’ of the good news reporter, praised because they don’t seem to be there at all, is the technical writer’s preferred voice.

But, voice aside, making documentation more like a computer book is still a useful way of working towards the same goal as the four rules, especially in light of Lemay’s last point.

How much better would the average user manual be if it was considered a product in its own right?

I wonder if there isn’t [one] use-case that many of the “slim” phone manufacturers are forgetting when testing their new buttons.

I’m originally from Los Angles, so 90% of my mobile phone usage took place while driving my car. It is almost impossible to “touch-type” a number or even speed dial a number on a Razr, Samsung T519, or HTC Wizard. After watching Steve Jobs use the new iPhone during the presentation, I think it will be just as, if not more, difficult to use the iPhone in a “touch-type” scenario.

Which isn’t an issue in Australia; the United Kingdom; Ireland; Japan; Germany; Spain; Singapore and at least twenty-one other countries which have passed laws making it illegal to use a mobile phone while driving.

Moreover, according to the Governers Highway Safety Association, within the US

Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and the District of Columbia have enacted jurisdiction-wide bans on driving while talking on handheld cell phones

And California will join this group in July 2008.

I don’t know the outcome, but back in July 2006, the Kansas State Legislature was considering a bill to ban all mobile phone use while driving, even hands-free use.

Given how dangerous simultaneously driving and using even a hands-free mobile appear to be, the Kansas Legislature may have been on the right track.

FWIW, I don’t have much of a problem with the laws against it, and I don’t have a problem if it turns out the iPhone’s design makes it ‘almost impossible to “touch-type” a number or even speed dial a number’.

Discouraging such activity seems a positively good idea, in fact.

Heading this back towards user-interface discussion, our desire to use a mobile while driving whilst not being actually competent to do so appears to be a specific case of the more general point: humans have a more limited ability to multitask than we like to admit, even to ourselves.

So, would user interfaces be improved by acknowledging our general unwillingness to accept our multi-tasking limits and catering to it?

‘Save Changes?’ alert boxes — especially ones where the default action is to Save when the Return key is hit — which appear when you try and close a ‘dirty’ document could be seen as early examples of being forgiving in the face of our tendency to try and do too much at once.

OTOH, would we do more to improve interfaces by designing specifically for our strengths and assume people interacting with our tools are primarily concerned with the job at hand?

Or should we be looking to get some of the interactions out of the visual and into other sensory input streams, given that’s apparently a way in which humans do show a capacity to handle multiple inputs?

Finally, does catering to our multi-tasking weaknesses end up, inevitably, causing conflict with the value created by catering to our strengths?

For example, I’ve lately discovered I’m more productive at the keyboard when using WriteRoom in full-screen mode compared to Eudora or even BBEdit, my two main writing tools for the past decade and more. But, to achieve this productivity, I’m giving up all the interactivity and capability of Mac OS X’s unixy goodness, working in an environment not too far removed from WordStar 3.0 for DOS.

Against that, WriteRoom is only a more productive environment for me for certain sorts of writing. This post, for example, was written in BBEdit 8.6, with its new and quite nifty syntax colouring support for John Gruber’s Markdown; checked in BBEdit’s Preview as well as Safari, Firefox and other browsers; and posted here using Brent Simmons’s MarsEdit.

Without being able to bounce from BBEdit to Safari to Firefox to Eudora (to check the original post and see if any replies made this whole exercise redundant) to MarsEdit and elsewhere while putting this together it never would have been started, let alone finished.

(It’s an arguable point if getting this finished is a good thing, of course. If you’ve read this far, however, I’ve at least managed to distract you for a while. Job one, at least, is done.)